Governing Through Participation: On Permacrises and the Making of the Argentine Juror

Abstract This article relies on the analysis of interviews with legislators and reformers and documentary sources like parliamentary bills to discuss the governance of (perma)crises in context of the recent introduction of lay decision-makers to criminal justice systems in Argentina. The paper proposes a critique of the perennial trust in law as a tool to deal with crises—even in the case of lay people participation in judicial adjudication, which could be thought of as a legal technology that represents a disinvestment in law in as much as it is an investment in ‘common sense’, touted as belonging in the opposite extreme of a continuum of knowledges (especially in the context of a codified civil law system). The paper has a twofold aim: first, it discusses the use of one governmental technology (participation) imagined as a solution to a series of crises. Second, it looks at these reformers as their programmatic work moves from the broader political effects of lay participation to the ethical dimensions of their transformative endeavour, tracing their attempts to devise the proper participant citizen and its conducts, within and beyond the courthouse.