Neither rebels, nor ‘good boys'. Anticipation games, professional ethics, and prosecutorial discretion in West Africa's special courts

Over the last few years, West African countries have been consistently falling down democratic indexes. Questioning the place of legal professionals in ‘authoritarian turns’, this chapter explores the daily practices and the discourses of special courts prosecutors. The ethnographic data show how they anticipate the consequences of their action on both their professional careers and on litigants’ lives, weighing the severity of the charges, the evidence, the potential sentence against the wider social consequences of taking a case to trial. At the theoretical level, this contribution combines insights from sociolegal studies and from the anthropology of the state. It reflects on the practices, and the agency of public servants faced with ‘repressive turns’ and shows how they sometimes fight for humanitarian values from within, using the legal tools at their disposal. Reflecting on discretion in the prosecutorial office will also help unpack the professional ethos of magistrates, in a context where both ordinary citizens and legal professionals are often describing them as biased and ‘under orders’.