Full Description
Customary law and traditional authorities continue to play highly complex and contested roles in contemporary African states. Reversing the common preoccupation with studying the impact of the post/colonial state on customary regimes, this volume analyses how the interactions between state and non-state normative orders have shaped the everyday practices of the state. It argues that, in their daily work, local officials are confronted with a paradox of customary law: operating under politico-legal pluralism and limited state capacity, bureaucrats must often, paradoxically, deal with custom - even though the form and logic of customary rule is not easily compatible and frequently incommensurable with the form and logic of the state - in order to do their work as a state. Given the self-contradictory nature of this endeavour, officials end up processing, rather than solving, this paradox in multiple, inconsistent and piecemeal ways. Assembling inventive case studies on state-driven land reforms in South Africa and Tanzania, the police in Mozambique, witchcraft in southern Sudan, constitutional reform in South Sudan, Guinea's long durée of changing state engagements with custom, and hybrid political orders in Somaliland, this volume offers important insights into the divergent strategies used by African officials in handling this paradox of customary law and, somehow, getting their work done.
Contents
Chapter 1: Processing the paradox: when the state has to deal with customary law - Olaf Zenker & Markus Virgil Hoehne
Chapter 2: Bush-level bureaucrats in South African land restitution: implementing state law under chiefly rule - Olaf Zenker
Chapter 3: State police and tradition in post-war Mozambique: the dilemmas of claiming sovereignty in legal pluralistic contexts - Helene Maria Kyed
Chapter 4: Mixing oil and water? Colonial state justice and the challenge of witchcraft accusations in central Equatoria, southern Sudan - Cherry Leonardi
Chapter 5: When the state is forced to deal with local law: approaches of and challenges for state actors in emerging South Sudan - Katrin Seidel
Chapter 6: Co-opted, abolished, democratized: The Guinean state's strategies towards elders - Anita Schroven
Chapter 7: State-orchestrated access to land dispute settlement in Africa: land conflicts and new-wave land reform in Tanzania - Rasmus H. Pedersen
Chapter 8: One country, two systems: hybrid political orders (HPOs) and legal and political friction in Somaliland - Markus Virgil Hoehne
Chapter 9: The complexity of legal pluralist settings: an afterword - Janine Ubink
