• Vita

    Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. After earning Master’s degrees in Social Anthropology (LSE) and Linguistics & Literature (University of Hamburg), he completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He subsequently joined the University of Bern as Assistant Professor, where he was also awarded an SNSF Ambizione Research Fellowship and obtained his Habilitation. Zenker has held professorships at the Universities of Cologne, the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Fribourg, and has been Visiting Fellow at institutions including Cambridge, Harvard, the University of the Witwatersrand and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. In spring 2026 he served as Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. His research, based on long-term engagements in Southern Africa and comparative work on Europe, examines political and legal transformations around statehood, the rule of law and normative pluralism. Much of his work has focused on questions of justice, land reform and postcolonial state formation in South Africa, as well as broader debates in legal anthropology concerning modernity, inequality and competing normative orders. In recent years, his research has engaged with critiques of liberal legalism and the changing role of constitutionalism in what he analyses as an emerging postliberal moment.

  • Research Project

    Postliberal Affordances: Liberal Legalism, Normative Pluralism and Populist Critique in South Africa

    This project examines contemporary challenges to liberal legalism through the prism of legal and political debates in South Africa. While liberal constitutionalism and the rule of law were long seen as globally ascendant, recent years have witnessed growing scepticism towards the normative authority of liberalism. The project advances two interrelated theses. First, the present moment reflects less an institutional collapse of liberal democracy than an ideological crisis of hegemonic liberalism, whose normative self-evidence has eroded. Second, the resurgence of populist, decolonial and neo-traditional critiques of liberal legalism not only challenges established constitutional frameworks but also opens new perspectives for reassessing their promises, limits and possible futures.

    Conceptualising such dynamics as postliberal affordances, the project investigates how liberal legalism is contested, defended and reimagined in South Africa, often seen as a paradigmatic site of transformative constitutionalism. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, interviews with legal practitioners and political actors, and analysis of legislation, jurisprudence and public debates, the project shows how struggles over constitutionalism and normative pluralism illuminate broader transformations of law in what may be an emerging postliberal moment.

  • Selected Publications

    Foblets, Marie-Claire/Goodale, Mark/Sapignoli, Maria/Olaf Zenker (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology, Oxford 2022.

    Goodale, Mark/Zenker, Olaf (Eds.), Reckoning with Law in Excess: Mobilization, Confrontation, Refusal, Cambridge 2025.

    Zenker, Olaf/Walker, Cherryl/Boggenpoel, Zsa-Zsa (Eds.), Beyond Expropriation without Compensation. Law, Land Reform and Redistributive Justice in South Africa, Cambridge 2024.

    Zenker, Olaf/Wolf, Anna-Lena (Eds.): Special Issue: Justice in the Anthropocene, in: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie | Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 149/2 (2024).

    Zenker, Olaf/Vonderau, Asta (Eds.), Special Issue: Collaborations and Contestations in Publicly Engaged Anthropologies, in: Public Anthropologist 5/2 (2023).

    Zenker, Olaf/Höhne, Markus V. (Eds.), The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa, London 2018.