Ethnography and International Courts

Analysing Transnational, Networked Objects of Study

This discussion will focus on methods for studying socially situated processes, within and across international legal institutions. Drawing on the case study of the European Court of Human Rights, we address strategies for ethnographic and social scientific methods in the analysis of vast, international legal networks. Answering any normative question about the ECHR system—Is its case law consistent? Is its doctrine well developed? Are member states adequately complying with its decisions?— depends on with whom you are talking and what is at stake. As with other transnational legal and governance networks the answer depends on someone’s political and social location. An ethnographic approach embraces the analytic purchase of that messiness. Multiple, conflicting perspectives are not an obstacle to understanding the Court and ECHR system. They are central to understanding how international legal institutions operate and why people increasingly engage with them.

Jessica Greenberg is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a 2025-2026 LAS Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar. A legal and political anthropologist, her work focuses on revolution, social change, democracy, justice and human rights in the Balkans and Europe more broadly. She is the author of Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights (2025, Stanford University Press) and After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (2014, Stanford University Press). She is the recipient of multiple grants, including two Fulbright Fellowships, and an NSF in Law and Science. In 2017 she earned a Master of Studies in Law at UIUC as an LAS Fellow for Study in a Second Discipline.