58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution
Panel Discussion – 8 October 2025, 5pm-7pm AEST
When: Deakin Downtown, Collins Street
Join us for a panel discussion of Dr Marika Sosnowski’s book, 58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution, which will be hosted by Deakin’s Centre for Law as Protection and Melbourne Law School’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.
Marika Sosnowski will be in conversation with Shiri Krebs from the Centre for Law as Protection and Radha Govil from the Statelessness Centre.
58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution
A poetic and precise meditation on resistance and revolution, and how we create a story we can live with in their aftermath.
When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened … stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook.
58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance.
Part memoir, part exposé, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. They are stories of passing through a checkpoint minute ahead of Nazi occupiers, of being interned in a Japanese camp in Java and of life in a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane.
Reflections on 58 Facets
“Ambitious, expansive and infused with deep wisdom, 58 Facets is a moving testament to our common humanity.”
– Kylie Moore-Gilbert, author of The Uncaged Sky
“This book poses a multi-disciplinary challenge to its readers – if laws are not challenged they remain lifeless and static. Progress is neither linear nor inevitable. It happens because people make it happen – when inspired by books like this.”
– Jon Faine
58 Facets challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
Please sign up here if you would like to join us for this event.
Dr Marika Sosnowski:
Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School and a Research Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. Her research is in the fields of critical security studies, such as ceasefires, local/rebel governance and legal systems with a focus on Syria.
From June 2023 until May 2026 she is based in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. She is working on a postdoctoral project on the legal after-life of war and revolution. The project aims to better understand how people internalise and experience the law at an everyday level after mass violence or world-shaping events.
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