Paul Rollier
Paul Rollier
Back to ContentsPaul Rollier is a CNRS researcher at the CéSor-EHESS. His main research interests are in the anthropology of religion (Islam and Christianity) and the cultural logic of justice and political representation in South Asian Muslim societies. His work draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in working-class neighbourhoods in Pakistan's Punjab province. He is the co-author of Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Outrage: the rise of religious offence in contemporary South Asia (University College London Press, 2019). His current research circles around questions of religious offence and Muslim-Christian relations in Pakistan.
My field setting
I have conducted annual fieldwork in Pakistan from 2008 to 2024, mostly in the working-class neighbourhoods of Lahore and surrounding villages in Punjab.
My key research questions
My research examines the entrenchment of extortive mechanisms embedded in law and legal institutions. In Pakistan, the Islamic homicide law empowers the relatives of murder victims to pardon the perpetrator, compound the case for blood money, or demand death in retribution. Most murder cases are discharged through compromise, sometimes under overtly coercive conditions. In this context, how do wealthy and powerful offenders secure 'forgiveness' and avoid punishment? And how do people make sense of the discrepancy between the restorative intent of Islamic homicide law and the unequal distribution of punishment exacted in its name?
My research findings
My research shows that paradoxically, it is the dispositive power granted to the relatives of murder victims that renders them vulnerable to extortion. In practice, the Islamic homicide law in Pakistan makes punishment contingent less on the gravity of the offence than on the resources of the families involved. Neither deterrent nor rehabilitative, the judicial treatment of murder consolidates existing social hierarchies. What renders the application of sharia so unequal is its articulation within a social and legal space where compromise is the norm: a space in which poor and vulnerable litigants have little chance of holding powerful parties accountable, and where few can afford to disregard social conventions, including the shame of accepting compensation for a life taken and the moral valorisation of forgiveness. Above all, the low probability of conviction, and its correlation with socio-economic status, stem from structural flaws in Pakistan's judicial and law enforcement institutions, which incentivize litigants to bend the law in pursuit of favourable settlements. This form of extortion rests on an ethical aporia, wherein what is extracted is regarded as an eminently noble and inalienable act: the freedom to forgive.
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