58 Facets

On Law, Violence and Revolution

Marika Sosnowski

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English

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
16 September 2025

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; History; Archaeology; Society & Social Sciences; Law

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, having passed through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, via a Japanese internment camp in Java and a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. 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. It 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.

By: Marika Sosnowski
Imprint: MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
Weight: 203g
ISBN: 9780522881738
ISBN 10: 0522881734
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 16 September 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist at Melbourne Law School and the granddaughter of Polish and Dutch Holocaust survivors. She went to Syria in 2007, primarily to eat makdous, hummus and ghazl al banat, and has worked on Syria – its revolution, war, governance and legal systems – ever since.

Reviews for 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution

""Ambitious, expansive and infused with deep wisdom, 58 Facets is a moving testament to our common humanity."" - Kylie Moore-Gilbert ""58 Facets captures our time, with its multiplicity of articulations. It is an articulation of genres, mixing an autobiographical and a legal gaze. It is an articulation of geographies, oscillating between Australia, Europe and the Middle East. And it is an articulation of multiple personal, professional and political attachments across time and space."" - Ghassan Hage ""58 Facets 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