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SUMMARY:Overlapping Sovereignties and the Politics of Legal  Pluralism in 
 Mozambique - Helen-Maria Kyed\, Danish Institute of International Studies
DTSTART:20131125T170000Z
DTEND:20131125T180000Z
UID:TALK48367@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Judith Weik
DESCRIPTION:The concept of legal pluralism has ceased to be the purview of
  anthropologists and socio-legal scholars in describing the plurality of n
 ormative orders and laws within a political organization. It is today an e
 xplicit ‘policy concept’ used by international development agencies an
 d by some governments. Mozambique is a strong example of this: the country
 ’s 2004 Constitution has as one of its principle articles the ‘state r
 ecognition of legal pluralism’. This is supported by a patchwork of laws
 \, decrees and projects that confer authority upon an increasing number of
  community-based and traditional structures to police and resolve disputes
  in society.  In practice there is nothing peculiar about this pluralism. 
 In fact historically it has been the norm. Not the exception. What is new 
 is an official acknowledgement that state law and its institutions do not 
 – and ought not necessarily to have – a monopoly on ordering society. 
 A normative as well as a pragmatic move away from legal centralism and a f
 ixation on the exclusivity of state institutions seems to characterize leg
 al pluralism as an emerging ‘policy field’. Yet the question remains: 
 how is the concept of legal pluralism actually applied in national policie
 s and\, importantly\, how is it appropriated in practice? This lecture wil
 l draw on two empirical examples – one urban and one rural – to addres
 s these questions. One focuses on the state-initiated community policing p
 rogram as it unfolds in a low-income suburb of the capital city of Maputo.
  The other looks at the state recognition of traditional authorities and c
 ommunity leaders in a rural former war zone of Manica Province. Based on t
 hese cases\, I argue\, that the ideal-typical notions of pluralism as harm
 oniously co-existing ‘legal orders’ clash with an empirical reality of
  overlapping sovereignties. State officials apply legal pluralism policies
  as a means to assert exclusive state sovereignty by trying to redefine an
 d control the jurisdictions and violence of the ‘informal sovereigns’.
  Yet because the state never really succeeds\, its authority remains conte
 sted and ambiguous. In the process new forms of violence and legal meaning
 s are produced\, which defy any neat classification into any one specific 
 ‘legal order’ or ‘system’. The politics of legal pluralism lends i
 tself to comparison with colonial forms of indirect rule\, yet this co-exi
 sts with new forms of party political contestations and human rights disco
 urses\, which influence the (re)positioning of actors. Current conceptual 
 developments in the policing and justice fields highlighting ‘hybridity
 ’\, ‘nodes’\, ‘networks’ and ‘assemblages’ rather than disti
 nct systems\, capture some of these dynamics. However\, they fail to adequ
 ately explain the political contestations and forms of violence that overl
 apping sovereignties give way to.
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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