This project is run by Dr Marika Sosnowski, a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
Since beginning her Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellowship in June 2023, Marika has been organising and leading a group of 10 interdisciplinary scholars working on the theme of the legal afterlife of war and revolution in an innovative slow-scholarship model.
The work seeks to better understand how people experience the law at an everyday level after world-shaping events in a range of contexts including Myanmar, Colombia, Cyprus, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Germany and Australia; and how these afterlives map onto first-hand encounters at checkpoints, with sexual and gender-based violence, with access to documents and citizenship rights, in frozen conflicts, with movements for peace, transitional, youth and criminal justice.
Project participants
Featured content
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Podcast: The Legal Afterlife of ...
The world might often seem like it’s ordered and classified in fixed and stable ways. So things are, so they ought to be. Things like war and revolution, citizenship, peace agreements and criminal law, are pinned down by legal definitions, by common understandings, by textbooks… aren’t they?
This 4-episode podcast raises questions about how fixed and stable things really are. -
58 Facets: on law, violence and revolution
Praise for 58 Facets:
‘Ambitious, expansive and infused with deep wisdom… A moving testament to our common humanity’ - Dr Kylie Moore Gilbert, author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 days in an Iranian Prison
‘Exhilarating’ - Christos Tsiolkas, bestselling author of The Slap and Barracuda
The first chapter of this book was shortlisted for the Melbourne Writers Prize in 2024.
In 2026, the book has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize, celebrating Australian women and non-binary writing, and the NSW Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.
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Allegra Lab One-Shots Essays
Online articles about this project are gradually released as part of Allegra Lab's One-Shots Essay series. The following essays have been published to date:
Marika Sosnowski - 'Practicing slow scholarship in a hard world'
Birgitte Holst - 'At the state’s gate: The uncomplicated coexistence of ideas about rights and hospitality among Syrian refugee youths in Jordan'
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What is a revolution?
What is a revolution, exactly? Where and how does it begin, and, perhaps more importantly, how does it end? In popular consciousness, the idea of revolution is usually infused with masculine images of protests and violence; burning flags and military fatigues; Che Guevara, or more recently Ahmad al-Sharaa types, and the storming of the capital. But there are less studied aspects to revolution that are also important to examine and understand.
Read Marika’s essay in the Winter 25 edition of Meanjin.