Justice As a Moral Dilemma. Judicial Practice and the Poetic of Compromise in Kabul

Can the work of judges be conceived beyond compromise? How do judges justify the gap between justice and judicial practice? To what extent are judges entitled to embody Justice? Starting from a legal ethnography carried out in the courts of Kabul, the paper aims at investigating the moral dilemma that judges face in the very moment in which judicial practice creates a distance from the ideal of justice. I will show that the work of judges in the actual system consists of looking for a balance between moral ideals, religious beliefs, social relations, economic means and forms of bargaining. This inevitably weighs upon the resolution of controversies and the definition of the verdicts. From this point of view, the culture of negotiation, that resorts to customary practices, and the interaction between forms of authority and strategies of legitimization configure the field of action of judges, which is consumed in a poetic of compromise in which the sacrifice of the ideals of justice is justified by the grammar of survival