Wiebke Wiesigel

Wiebke Wiesigel is a guest researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden University, and a PhD candidate at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland where she works as teaching assistant. Wiebke is a legal anthropologist with a focus on dispute resolution and justice making, especially in local or community justice institutions in Southern Africa and Switzerland. In her PhD, Wiebke analyses the justice-making process in Zambian local courts, hybrid institutions that combine customary with state justice. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Lusaka Province, she asks how local court workers navigate this hybridity to make justice and what it says about their understanding of customary institutions and the state in postcolonial Zambia.

Wiebke studied sociocultural anthropology and German in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and Göttingen (Germany). During her Bachelor and Master studies, she was a Fellow of the Swiss Study Foundation. Wiebke is also interested in academic and research politics and is currently co-president of the Ethical and Deontological Think Tank of the Swiss Anthropological Association.