The work on this book took many years. The thoughts and ideas emerged and developed in conversations with colleagues who became friends. The research was made possible by marvellous people who stood by my side and gave me the space and freedom to write. It was accompanied and stabilised by the fascination of my son, who used the time to develop from a primary school child into a young man. The following lines can only provide a glimpse of the gratitude I feel for these people.
This book was written as a continuation of my dissertation, which I submitted to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in November of 2019. I would like to thank my first supervisor Thomas Scheffer, who not only brought me into contact with ethnomethodology and ethnomethodological legal research, but also invited me into a community in which scientific work became truly appealing to me. Thomas has a remarkable way of re-configuring academic spaces and, first in Berlin, and then at Goethe University in Frankfurt, he created an exceptional environment to think, work, and grow, which I believe is quite unique – academically, I owe a lot to these spaces and the people connected to them.
Michael Mair, who became my second supervisor, created and opened up further crucial spaces of conversation for me. Michael and his colleagues were amongst the very few ethnomethodologists in the world working with military transcripts at the time, and I owe a tremendous amount to our collaboration. I thank Michael for his inspiration and support, for his hospitality in Liverpool and his friendship beyond, for the incredible speed of his thinking and speaking as well as for the accuracy with which he listened and responded to me. The rich conversations with him have carried me a long way.
A number of people have enabled my fieldwork by granting me access into their professional activities. I would like to thank the staff of the ecchr in Berlin and especially Andreas Schüller, who spared no time or effort. The same holds true for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, the late Professor Peter Derleder, and Karim Popal. For reasons of confidentiality, I cannot name but wish also to thank the employees of the parliamentary inquiry whose experiences made silent documents speak.
Chris Elsey’s detailed feedback, his thoughtfulness, his humour, our intense discussions, and the creative energy he summoned to special-welcome me to Manchester every week are all efforts I appreciate greatly. I am deeply grateful to Anna Sauerwein, my idol and fan, my teacher and pupil, my friend. Special thanks also go to Endre Danyi, another expert for the creation of
Research for this project was integrated into various working groups that continuously supported me. While I am grateful to all of the members of the working group Political Ethnography in Berlin and Frankfurt for their substantial and extensive support, some in particular need to be mentioned by name: Annett Bochmann, Yannik Porsché, Carla Küffner, Clara Terjung, Ronja Trischler, Marlen Löffler, Tim Seitz, Christiane Howe, Göde Both, Mirco Liefke, Markus Rudolfi and Stefan Laube.
I was very lucky to meet Wes Sharrock and attend the weekly reading group in Manchester. I thank Wes for his valuable comments and questions, and equally Neil Jenkings, for the repeated reading of my manuscript and his productive feedback, as well as Alex Holder, Alex Dennis, and Phil Brooker. Another important group of people to whom I am extremely grateful is the New Development in Ethnomethodology Network, particularly the participants of its 2019 meeting in Frankfurt.
To be rewarded and recognised for my work at a very early stage of my academic writing by the asa Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section was a great honour. The paper singled out was my first publication in an international journal and it was extremely reassuring and comforting to have it received so well by scholars whose work I admire so much. Thanks to Michael Lynch and J. Meehan for their personal reference and honest encouragement in Montreal, and to Patrick Watson and David R. Gibson. I am grateful to Ken Liberman as well, especially for accompanying me and my students to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
My research on Kunduz began as part of a German-Israeli collaboration on war discourse between 2011 and 2013. I wish to thank Dalia Gavriely-Nuri and her students from Hassadah College, Jerusalem, and the participants of the CuWaDis-workshop, “Accounting for combat-related killings” in Frankfurt, including David Adler, Jörg Bergmann, Jennifer Hyndman, Oren Livio, Christian Meyer, Elizabeth Minor and Ulrich von Wedelstaedt.
Goethe University’s Freunde & Förderer have repeatedly supported the organisation of workshops at the university, travel to international conferences, and my student excursions to the International Criminal Court (which was co-funded by the Hessian Ministry of Justice). The daad i would like to thank, too, for funding my fellowship at the University of Liverpool.
I am deeply grateful to Florian Mönks and Sanni Dittmar, without whom I could not have written a single line, and to my parents Maria Engell and
Finally, I would like to thank the series editors of Brill, Timothy L.H. McCormack, for his incredibly appreciative feedback, and Lindy Melman, for guiding me through the publication process; Dany Charlesworth for all practical and organisational matters throughout the years, Brigitte Held from the Goethe Language Service, Courtney A. Brittan and Rebecca Hill, for the sensible and accurate editing, and Bea Stach for her helping me with the illustrations.