Affective Possibility: Identity Documents, Checkpoints, Violence and the Law

ABSTRACT This article seeks to highlight the unstable relationship between identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law. To do this the piece uses stories from three Syrians concerning their everyday interactions with the law, primarily at checkpoints but also in other administrative settings. Building on anthropological and socio‐legal scholarship on documents and state encounters, as well as literature from integration and memory studies, I argue that checkpoints are key sites where the latent violence underpinning legal authority becomes visible. At such sites, the inherently unstable way identity (most obvious in identity documentation), violence and the law interrelate has affective possibility. Through deepening our understanding of these particular legal encounters, I highlight commonalities in the way identity documents, checkpoints, violence and the law functions not just in authoritarian settings but also in so‐called liberal democracies.