Legal Consciousness and Vigilantism: Seeking Justice for Witchcraft Harms in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theories of vigilantism frequently locate its cause in the ineffectiveness of the state legal system. The state legal system does not work for some, so they take the law into their own hands. Even in communities where vigilantism is prevalent, however, only certain harms are met with vigilantism. Why are some harms met with violence while others are not? To explore this question, I draw on nine months of fieldwork in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation with a largely ineffective state legal system and the presence of vigilantism. Yet vigilante remedies are largely reserved for harms attributed to witchcraft, and typically only particularly serious witchcraft harms. In this article I draw on the concept of legal consciousness to understand why people might turn to vigilantism in response to witchcraft. I develop two themes of legal consciousness—a disconnect in harm naming and different logics of justice—that help explain dynamics vigilantism. My research thus contributes to the scholarship on both vigilantism and legal consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".