Theatres of the Proto-Juridical

The paper examines privately organized peoples’ tribunals on ethnocide against the Indigenous people of the Americas sitting over cases of land-grabbing related to infrastructural projects and extractivism. It refers to the tradition of legal criticism that scrutinizes the concepts of conviviality based on the notion of human rights as a right to private property. The paper starts with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between anthropophagic – Amazonian – and “anthropoemic” – Western – societies and then provides a short history of the Russell Tribunals with a focus on the Tribunal “on the Rights of the Indians of the Americas”, held in Rotterdam in 1980. In an examination of Milo Rau’s Congo Tribunal from 2015, it analyses the epistemic aporias the Tribunal format faces when it is supposed to judge the dispossession of communities in former colonies. The paper is a revised version of a book chapter; the book is planned to appear in 2025 with Routledge.