For many people, the word “bureaucracy” conjures a world of unpleasant sense memories: stacks of paperwork. Long lines. Treacly hold music. Arbitrary rules that never seem to apply to the specificities of the matter at hand. Fluorescent lighting. FEES.
It’s hard to imagine that the concept of bureaucracies—formed to represent states, rather than people or political parties–could trigger the development of new friendships. But when Professors Karina Ansolabehere (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and Leticia Barrera (Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) met postdoctoral fellow Javiera Araya-Moreno (Université de Sherbrooke) at LSA’s 2022 Annual Meeting on Law and Society in Lisbon, Portugal, that is exactly what happened.
“We realized that we had the same interests,” Professor Barrera explains. “Then we realized, why don’t we put something together? Because we’ve been working at different moments, on different panels, at different conferences.”
The three scholars share an understanding of bureaucracies as deeply human—created by people, and administered by people, to address the needs of people on a mass collective scale. While preconceived notions of bureaucracies as neutral, hierarchical, highly specialized, rule-obsessed bastions of stability are useful to understand, they also threaten to obscure more complicated realities. Drawing upon their different disciplinary backgrounds, a blend of law, anthropology, sociology, and political science, the scholars had each been separately engaged in figuring out what a state’s daily operations could teach them about the nature of law itself—what law is, in a practical sense, rather than what it does, or what it should do.
Of particular interest to them was bureaucracy in Latin America, where each of them were born. Professor Barrera grew up in Argentina, where she is currently based. Professor Ansolabehere was born in Argentina before moving to her current home in Mexico City, while Dr. Araya-Moreno grew up in Chile before moving to Montreal later in life. A collaborative project was the obvious next step.
“The idea came from having dinner or beers or coffee…after the conference,” Dr. Araya-Moreno reminisced. “We started to develop this friendship—I think that friendship is also an important part of the work—with other colleagues. And at some point, we said, ‘Oh, we should really work on something on the topic of bureaucracies in Latin America.’”
The 2024 LSA Programming Grant application offered the friends an opportunity to formalize their collaboration as a two-year seminar program, “Methodological Challenges for Studying Legal Bureaucracies in Latin America.” The primary goal of the program, which is currently underway, is to develop methodological strategies for studying bureaucracies through two channels—a workshop series for a small, interdisciplinary cohort of researchers, and a virtual lecture series intended to educate a larger international community. Crucially, however, it also provides an excuse for the three researchers to continue fostering their personal and intellectual relationships across geographic and disciplinary borders.
“There’s a very vibrant Latin American scholarly community that attends Law and Society and participates very actively,” explains Professor Barrera. However, there is no equivalent formalized law and society organization in Latin America; rather, scholars rely on an informal network of personal and professional connections.
Perhaps relatedly, much of the currently available research on Latin American bureaucracies adopts a Global North perspective. Latin America’s contemporary history, along with a glut of research focused specifically on criminal bureaucracy, obscures the practical, culturally situated realities of how bureaucracies in Latin America actually function on a daily basis. To address this gap, the collaboration has taken inspiration from similar work done in various Global South regions, particularly in India and South Africa, which focus on ground-level interactions between individuals and bureaucratic agencies.
“We want bureaucracies. It’s not a criticism of bureaucracies in themselves, but a project of getting to know better how they work,” Dr. Araya-Moreno explains. “We want to be against this way of seeing bureaucracies from the North by recognizing the specificities of how they work in practice instead of how they should or should not work.”
“The works of bureaucracy can tell us how people in their countries imagine or come up with ideas of the state,” explains Professor Barrera, referencing the unique social imaginaries that contextualize bureaucracies in different regions. Bureaucratic interactions carry a lot of information about the social norms, values, and priorities of a particular region. Culturally situated approaches to the study of bureaucracy, therefore, can serve to deepen our knowledge by identifying elements that are shaped by culture versus those that transcend culture.
Professor Ansolabehere has already encountered data in her own research that contradicts common misconceptions about bureaucracy, particularly how it operates in the Global North compared to the Global South.
“I’m doing a visiting scholarship in Montreal,” she explains. “I’m conducting a research case study about the missing and murdered women and the national inquiry that Canada organized. And one of my main preliminary findings are that these kinds of interactions that I was mentioning are so much more similar than we thought. For good and for bad.”
Professor Barrera’s research has led to similarly counterintuitive findings, specifically regarding the presence of affect—both emotions and human connections—within bureaucratic interactions that may extend beyond the institution’s formal setting.
“Bureaucracy can be a surprise. The institution has a surprising way of handling some particular issues because they can also be places of resistance and even activism, like agencies or offices of public defense.”
“For example, you work with the prosecutor, and your family has disappeared,” Professor Ansolabehere elaborates, referencing her research on disappearances in Mexico. “So you have a strong relationship where you establish emotions and affections, but from both sides—from the family to the bureaucrat, but also from the bureaucrat to the family.”
These lines of inquiry are further complicated by the ways that different bureaucratic systems within a culture interact with one another—and how such power struggles impact individuals.
“All the time, new bureaucracies are being created,” Professor Ansolabehere explains, “and they live together with other bureaucracies, and there are a lot of clashes and tensions and complexities. So these kinds of power relationships are so much more complex, or more ingrained in daily life.”
Professor Ansolabehere, Professor Barrera, and Dr. Araya-Moreno have invited eleven additional researchers with compatible projects to explore these and related topics through the workshop portion of their program:
Adina Radosh (University of Toronto, Canada)
Loreto Quiroz (Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile)
Esteban Salmón (Stanford University, US)
Erika Bárcena (UNAM, Mexico)
Sergio Latorre (Universidad del Norte, Colombia)
Adriana Romero (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)
Rebecca Lemos (University of Brasilia, Brazil)
Santiago Amietta (Keele University, UK)
Diego Rochow (University of California, Irvine, US)
Lucero Ibarra (CIDE, Mexico)
Ignacio Riquelme (Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile)
All of the scholars primarily conduct qualitative empirical research, and most of them completed their undergraduate studies in Latin America. Despite their personal understanding of various Latin American cultures and realities, however, the participants are still encouraged to identify potential normative assumptions in their proposals, as well as strategies for moving beyond them.
Although everyone will be working on individual papers, the sessions will have a more collaborative spirit, with individuals sharing feedback and ideas based on their own areas of expertise. At the end of the program, each participant will have a manuscript ready for publication; collectively, they will have established the foundation for a potential new LSA Collaborative Research Network on Judicial Bureaucracies.
The virtual public lecture component of the program features noted leading scholars such as Mariana Valverde (University of Toronto), Yael Navarro (University of Cambridge), and Nayanika Mathur (University of Oxford). Future lectures will also include speakers based in Latin America. They have already attracted attendees from Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and various countries in Latin America. Each lecture is formatted slightly differently, with some speakers opting for a more dialectic approach versus a traditional one, but all of them are available in both English and Spanish via simultaneous translations. All students and professionals interested in the relationship between law and sociology, politics, and anthropology are encouraged to attend; indeed, several criminologists have joined, displaying a willingness to challenge their typically normative approach to understanding bureaucracies.
For the three scholars, the excitement of this project is palpable—as is the connection they have formed throughout the process.
“We are using and taking inspiration from other disciplines to create a truly sociolegal way of approaching bureaucracies,” says Dr. Araya-Moreno.
Details for the next “Methodological Challenges for Studying Bureaucracies in Latin America” lecture installment are coming soon. It will be announced in our LSA member newsletter, on our website, and on Twitter and Bluesky.