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1 Mobile People, Mobile Law:An IntroductionFranz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von

Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths

Themes and Perspectives

This volume is a contribution, from an anthropological perspective, to theunderstanding of law in globalization processes under conditions ofaccelerating mobility of people, capital, technology, communication and

knowledge. The contributors explore the varying forms this mobility takes andthe ensuing consequences with regard to the resulting interactions withnational and local institutions, agencies and populations. The book adopts anorientation that is focused on social actors, networks and multiple legalconstellations that operate not only in a global, international and nationalarena, but also at a local level. The end of the Cold War and the ever-expandingfinancial and economic market, as well as the emergence of theoretical debatesover globalization, have all sharpened the general recognition that social,political and economic activities are stretching out across the globe. The result

is that events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can come to haveimmediate significance for individuals and communities in other more distantlocations. At the same time, globalization implies intensification, andincreasing density, in the flows and patterns of interaction or inter-connectedness between states and societies that constitute the modern worldcommunity. In other words, alongside the stretching goes a deepening ofconnections and activities (McGrew, 1998, p. 325). Acquiring anunderstanding of what these processes entail is important, for they give rise toglobal and regional networks of activity, institutions and regimes of

governance, social movements, global legal interactions, and other kinds oftransnational association.1 They also create the potential for new kinds ofpolitical and legal space to emerge, which elude the boundaries of theterritorial state and the remit of traditional legal scholarship.

Law forms an important part of these processes. It operates at a global levelwhile at the same time responding to processes of globalization. Trans-national and international law embody a set of processes which generate a

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multiplicity of linkages and interconnections transcending the regions andsocieties that make up the modern world. But law by no means globalizesthrough transnational and international law only. For example, laws may betransplanted in state-to-state collaboration, and transnational networks ofindigenous groups have stimulated the borrowing of modes of disputeresolution from one indigenous group to another. Yet, in much of the literatureon globalization, the legal dimension of social, political, economic, religiousand cultural organization receives little specific interest.2 This has resulted ina dearth of empirical research in the globalization debate on how lawfunctions (Gessner and Budak, 1998, p. 1). Law is usually subsumed underthe categories of culture, governance/politics, ideology or economics.But these categories are not mutually exclusive, and trying to subsume law toany one of them creates problems. For example, one cannot exclusivelyassign human rights, regulations of the World Trade Organization (WTO),free market models or the like to one particular category to the exclusion of allothers. Human rights are part of governance structures and are thereforepolitical, but they are also cultural and legal constructs. Similarly, WTOregulations are governance structures, but obviously they are economic andlegal constructs as well. Reducing the legal dimension to the economic orpolitical would negate the important legitimizing function of law in social,

economic and political organization. Doing so ignores the fact that law is apowerful form of cultural expression that operates as a potential source forsocial, economic or political power, constraining and enabling socialpractices, with both their intended and unintended consequences. It alsodisregards the fact that law plays an important role in the formation of socialcategories and in processes of inclusion and exclusion. While exploring allthese dimensions and the legitimation of power through political andeconomic processes, the authors acknowledge the significance of law in itsown right and not simply as an aspect of political or economic life.

As the title indicates, the focus of the volume is twofold. The first focus ison the mobility of law, looking at the agency and chains of interaction thatmake law mobile. It looks at what happens when globalizing law encountersnational and local laws and is appropriated in specific situations. The bookexplores how law (for example, in the field of human rights) and legal notionsof governance and democracy, or resource tenure, are configured in theseprocesses. It further explores the multiple ways in which law intersectswith social, political and economic domains across time and space. Theauthors inquire how law works under conditions of globalization and what

its effects are in the contexts in which law becomes available and is rejectedor appropriated. They show that the reception and sedentarization ofglobalizing law takes place not only at the national level but in different socio-political spaces and contexts. Based on empirical data, including a large,diverse, and rich ethnography that has developed out of fieldwork, theauthors contributions also highlight the plurality of law in its manydimensions.

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A second focus is on the mobility of people and organizations as actorsinvolved in the process of making law mobile. Among them are the high-profile transnationally operating organizations that dominate so much of thedebates. Also included are migrants moving across national borders andbringing their law to new countries of residence. Other actors have a foot inmore than one country: state officials and others who, through modern meansof communication, are connected with and operate in many localities withinand beyond a specific state; also companies and non-governmentalorganizations (NGO)s, and law merchants (Dezalay and Garth, 1995) whowork for organizations of development cooperation, for internationalorganizations, or for NGOs. Some of these actors are highly mobile anddevote most of their time to making law mobile. But the field of actorsinvolved includes those who, while not moving around a great deal them-selves, are recipients and sometimes victims of mobile law.

This double focus on mobile people and mobile law has a number ofadvantages over the more common approaches. An exclusive focus oninternational and transnational mobility of law, as we find it in most literature,eclipses equally important aspects of mobility across other social boundaries,such as those encompassing regional, ethnic or religious entities. These oftenhave their own legal orders, which do not necessarily cross-cut or transcend

state boundaries, and may have important implications for the personsconcerned. While, for instance, the social and political consequences of statecitizenship as defined by national law are obviously important, peoples local,village or ethnic citizenship as defined in local laws sometimes may be moreimportant than their state law citizenship rights, as many internal migrants inAfrican states or in Indonesia have experienced (see Hart, 1982; Benda-Beckmann, F. von and Taale, 1992). Similarly, internal migration maygenerate a mobility of law other than that of the nation state. For example,internal migrants take along their customary law to urban areas, where this

law may be applied under quite new conditions. Such migrants in turn appearto be important actors in changing the local law of their place of origin aswell. This type of movement within the borders of a national state may notalways be considered part of globalization, but it does occur under theconditions of globalization of law. Moreover, moving from one nation state toanother usually involves crossing more legally relevant boundaries ethnicand religious than that of the state. An anthropological perspective that triesto understand the broad spectre of processes of mobility and globalization oflaw and that takes plurality of law seriously thus has to include also people

moving within states but not necessarily across national boundaries. It forcesone to consider ordinary citizens who are not very mobile themselves but whoare faced with new sets of norms and regulations, operating at the far end ofthe chains of interaction that make up these globalizing processes.

A pre-occupation with the national state and its boundaries also tends toignore the existence of plural legal orders and thus misses out on theseprocesses of differentiation. While the notion of legal pluralism has been at

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the core of the anthropology of law, political scientists and lawyers have onlyrecently discovered the idea. They apply it only to the relationship betweenthe legal systems of national states and international and transnational law.Understanding the implications of the concept requires de-centring the stateand allowing for the possible existence of normative orders with quite distinctfoundations of legitimation, beyond the state as well as within national states.The contributions to this volume provide analyses of such plural legal ordersinvolved in globalizing processes.

While this perspective on mobile law and mobile people provides insightsinto some of the dynamics of globalizing processes, it also presents acounterpoint to the notion that globalization is a completely new phenomenonthat has gripped the world. Though not denying that its current form hasunique features in terms of intensity, scale and density, the phenomenon ofglobalization itself has a long history. Several chapters in this volume discussprocesses of mobility of law in their historic context, processes usually arisingfrom local responses to earlier waves of law reaching out across the globe.Such an approach allows an analysis of the extent to which current globalizinglaw is shaped by local responses that are taking place in historically specificconditions of a particular state, region or locality.

Conceptions of Law: Sovereignty in Plural Legal Orders

These considerations raise questions about the mobility of law that call fornew ways of conceiving law and its location within transnational processes.Approaches to these issues are quite different for scholars of law andinternational relations on the one hand and for (legal) anthropologists on theother.

The small but growing body of literature on law and globalization displays

the same kind of contradictory tendencies displayed in the generalglobalization literature. On the one hand there seems to be a convergence ofthe laws of national states, increasingly made compatible, or transnationallyassimilated (Wiener, 1999), mainly through the fast-growing body of inter-national law and emerging transnational law. On the other hand, observers arebaffled because this seemingly uniform law is not so uniformly interpretedand put into practice. As in the general literature on globalization, the analysisof the effects of globalization of law is usually situated at the nexus ofnational, international and transnational levels. This idea of a single site of

legal sovereignty embodied in the state is undermined by patterns of globallegal interaction which erode the boundaries between domestic andinternational law, foreign and domestic legal systems and practices, as well asinternal and external juridical authorities (McGrew, 1998, p. 336). Dezalay(1990, p. 281) observes that in the legal domain, globalization throws newlight onto the old questions of autonomy, or if one prefers, the singularity of,national juridical cultures.



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The new patterns of legal interaction have altered the character ofinternational law as well. Koh (2002, p. 328) notes that, given the rise ofgenuinely global problems and the emergence of non-state actors, internationallaw can no longer simply coordinate state interests, but rather must facilitatestate and non-state cooperation in such areas as humanitarian intervention,promotion of democracy and the rule of law, and transnational accountability.Thus transnational law becomes a subject in its own right as in time thedomestic and the international will become so integrated that we will no longerknow whether to characterize certain concepts as quintessentially local orglobal in nature. The positive aspects of this development are marked, forexample, by attempts to develop a transnational private law catering toordinary persons that would transcend the obstacles posed by current tort lawwhich led to inadequate compensation being awarded to the victims of theBhopal disaster (Galanter, 2002, pp. 172185). The negative aspects derivefrom concerns about the legitimacy of what ensues. As Banakar (1998) pointsout, in modern legal theory the concept of law has been predicated on theconcept of legitimacy, which in turn implies the acceptance of legal rules bycitizens of states. Notions of citizenshipand national state do not have theirparallels at a global level, with the result that the legitimacy of internationallaw making and law enforcement established by state actors or by the

support structures created by business actors becomes problematic.

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Teubner(1997) puts it even more strongly and concludes that the emergence of globallaw that has no legislation, no political constitution and no politically orderedhierarchy of norms has made it necessary to rethink the traditional doctrine ofsources of law.

These are issues of particular concern to normatively oriented legalscholars and political scientists who emphasize the relevance of these newphenomena for conventional legal theory of state and international law.However, their theoretical discourse and the empirical phenomena it selects,

important as they are, are far too selective and normatively oriented from theperspective of legal anthropology. An anthropological perspective, with itsfocus on law as presented in this volume, calls into question the generaloverriding preoccupation with the position of the national state.

First, as McGrew has pointed out for the example of sovereignty, one mustsee the difference between the notion of sovereignty as a legal construct, andthe actual extent of political autonomy state organizations can exercise. Suchconstructions do not correspond to actual degrees of political autonomy andnever have. The consequences of globalization for any state are mediated by

its localization in the hierarchy of power, domestic institutional structures andthe mobilization of countervailing political and economic strategies(McGrew, 1998, pp. 337338). From early post-colonial times on,transnational pressures on Third World governments were strong, initiallymainly from the side of former colonial mother states, later frominternational organizations as well, and there was often little congruencebetween the notion of sovereignty and the actual political autonomy of states.

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The notion of the equality of states, just as the notion of equal citizens,masked significant political and economic inequalities. The currentweakening of sovereignty also works out quite differentially. The verticalslice, as Nader says (Chapter 10), cuts through the ideology of sovereignty.

Second, instead of asking whether and to what extent states have lostsovereignty and whether national boundaries are dissolving, this volume drawson anthropological studies that have pointed at processes of hybridizationand vernacularization that take place alongside homogenizing processes. Thatis, the contributions look at locally specific responses to globalization,showing that states in some respects and for some actors may dissolve, whilethey have become more dominant in other respects and for other actors.The contributions thus suggest that the effects of globalizing law and itsappropriation in specific contexts are highly differential and constitute socialinequality in new ways within states, across national borders, and amongregions.

Third, from a legal anthropological perspective which does not conceptuallyor theoretically privilege state or international law, the constructions ofsovereignty and legitimacy are not necessarily exclusively tied to the nationstate, and the diagnosed weakening of sovereignty under globalization is notas dramatic as is sometimes assumed. Legal anthropologists have looked at

the state and state law as representing one political organization only besideother local, territorial or tribal, political or religious organizations with theirown laws (Merry, 1988; Benda-Beckmann, F. von, 2002). Since they neverprivileged the European dogma of sources of law as defined through thenation state, there is no need to rethink the traditional doctrine of the sourcesof law felt by lawyers (Teubner, 1997), because they never thought in itsterms anyway (Griffiths, 2002). For them, the ever-expanding amount ofinternational and transnational law and organizations means an increase inthe empirical complexities of plural legal constellation that are difficult to

research, but do not present a different perspective of law.4

With their empirical and theoretical attention to constellations of plurallegal orders, anthropologists of law bring in an important perspective on lawand globalization. For while legal pluralism has become an accepted term insome legal and political science studies, it is mainly understood as thecoexistences of state, international and transnational law; and analysesremain limited to the question of whether such transnational connectionsinfluence state law at the national level.5 There are as yet very few studies ofthe globalization of law in social fields or levels of state administration below

the national level. While global legal pluralism remains dissociated from theconsequences of transnationalization of law in existing configurations oflegal pluralism within states, these consequences stand at the core of thepresent volume.6 Our orientation thus provides another focus for debates ontransnational legal processes. In contrast to most studies of law andglobalization, this volume engages with local perspectives and theirintegration with or resistance to these broader arenas. The contributions show



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that transnationalized law can affect other legal orders within the state, forinstance religious, customary or traditional law, and that these orders stand incomplex interrelationships within which they affect each other. They alsoshow that neither the fate of transnational law nor its impact on local legalconstellations can be understood without giving attention to the plural legalcharacter of such local situations.7

The Historical Contextualization of Law

These approaches call attention to the importance of understandingglobalization in its historical contexts. As noted earlier, globalization of law isnot a new phenomenon and several chapters in this volume take a historicalstance to consider to what extent present globalization shows newcharacteristics.8 Throughout history, law has always been mobile. It has beentransported through trading relations and during hegemonic expansions ofstates. Single legal forms, specific sets of legal institutions and entire legalsystems have found their way across national borders in all periods of history.Such legal flows predate the establishment of colonial states in the nineteenthcentury and go back to ancient times. These processes in history have been

studied by anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars and historians,in particular for the periods of European colonialism and thereafter,especially the dynamic law and modernization phase of the 1960s and 1970s,until the present time. But early examples of globalizing law cannot be foundin expanding European national legal systems only, as has been shown by theproliferation of Islamic law to regions in Africa and Asia before and since theadvent of the European colonial powers.9 Besides, international law andtreaties have a long history and have been an important factor in theglobalization of law, though they have not received a great deal of attention in

anthropological studies. Indeed, they may not have had an immediatelyvisible impact on small-scale local organizations and plural legalconfigurations in the European colonies. Yet they certainly were part of theconstraining and enabling context in which governments operated in thecolonial metropole countries as well as in their colonies.

A closer look at the historical processes from the recipient perspectiveshows that there is no one-directional development leading towards ever-expanding globalization. Series of waves of imported law have led tocomplex and variable configurations of various types of law, in changing

mutual relationships. Periods of high influx and intense connectedness arefollowed by periods of slower mobility of law, while periods of intenseconnections are often followed by disengagement. With decolonization theclose legal and political ties with the colonizing country were often loosened,if not severed outright. The collapse of the Soviet Empire is but one of thelatest examples of the dissolution of strong legal ties and a dramatic reductionof the spatial spreading of law, that is, of de-globalization.

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Several papers in this volume show how earlier flows of law and the waysin which they have become part of local settings continue to shapecontemporary political processes in which scarce resources and newgovernance structures are being negotiated. In their paper the von Benda-Beckmanns (Chapter 6) highlight the important differences between coloniallegal transplantations and the waves of law and development exports in thepost-colonial period in Indonesia. They trace the long and discontinuoushistorical processes in which constitutional concepts of democracy developedin Europe and in the Arab world have been introduced and appropriated inIndonesia, in opposition to local notions of consensual democracy. Each ofthese forms of democracy creates its own power structure. Several categoriesof mobile people (migrant labourers, traders, civil servants, as well asdonor agencies and international NGOs) have been important conduits inthis glocalizing process. The chapter shows how historically earlierinterpretations of democracy leave traces in later periods, resulting infragmented fields of notions of democracy that are mobilized in politicalstruggles for governance and access to resources.

On another continent Oomen (Chapter 5) explores the intimate relationshipbetween globalization, retraditionalization and the law in post-apartheidSouth Africa, especially in the locality of Sekhukhune. She demonstrates how

decentralization policies propagated by international and bilateral donors asthe way to increase popular participation have often had exactly the oppositeeffect: strengthening local elites, reimposing chieftaincies and revivingcustomary law. The aim of such leaders is to retain as much politicalautonomy as possible and to shield the communities concerned from all theinsecurities associated with the global economy. In examining the resurgenceof traditional leadership and customary law she discusses the role of migrantsin the formulation, propagation and mobilization of flexible categories ofculture, custom, and tradition and analyses the shifts in power relations

that occur in processes of renegotiating traditional leadership and governinginstitutions.McCarthy (Chapter 8) and Hellum and Derman (Chapter 9) discuss the

overlapping notions of resource management that have been introduced inIndonesia and Zimbabwe in different historical periods. Pfaff-Czarnecka(Chapter 13) points at the different path dependencies when comparing theresponses to claims of religious minorities for special treatment in theeducational system in several European countries and Zips (Chapter 4)discusses the development of African law that has been carried to the

Caribbean and back to Africa by Rastafari, where it met with local legal formsthat have undergone quite different developments under the African colonialexperience.

Overall, the studies suggest that historically older processes of global-ization leave traces that are only partly superseded by newer waves ofglobalization of law. They further suggest that each new wave of legal influxoccurs in specific local and wider power constellations, which affect the way



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of incorporation and the relative importance of that newly imported law. Inaddition, the specific conditions in which new law finds its way into a politicalspace in turn has a strong influence on the way this law is perceived andtreated in later periods.

The Multi-Spatial Contextualization of Law

The contributions of this volume deal with these flows and their localizationsat different levels of socio-political and legal organization. They show theimportance of looking at the chains of interaction connecting transnational,national and local actors in multi-sited arenas of negotiation along with thepower relations that structure these interactions and are reproduced orchanged by them. This highlights the ways in which anthropologicalmethodology and theory has benefited from engaging with studies inglobalization. The earlier parameters of an ethnography based on local micro-studies, often centred on village life that is bounded by geographical andterritorial limits, have been called into question by the challenges posed byglobalization and the place of the local or locals within it, so that knowledgeof society can no longer be restricted to a knowledge of face-to-face social

relations but must encompass the effect of technology, global consumptionpatterns and changing geopolitical configurations (Moore, H. L., 1996,synopsis).10 Expanding the scope of ethnography to become multi-sited(Marcus, 1995) or deterritorialized has opened up new horizons for study.Even where the local remains circumscribed in terms of a territorial orgeographically bounded site it can no longer be divorced from globalprocesses that have varying effects on the everyday life of individuals,institutions and social groups.11 Of course, in development anthropology andmost legal anthropology since the 1970s, the analysis of external influences

on local socio-political and legal configurations has been part and parcel ofthis research. However, while research in the past focused on fairly confinedregions, the kind of multi-sited research that is called for today involves abroader landscape, one that encompasses not only diverse spaces unconfinedby territorial or geographic markers but also such arenas as informationflows, the Internet and global conferences (Merry, 2000, p. 131) in itsdiaspora.

The volume discusses spatial and temporal dimensions of globalization oflaw and traces the emergence, flow and influence of transnational legal forms

into small-scale social fields. These may be lower levels of stateadministration, or villages, or social fields and arenas interconnecting actorsat different levels of political organization. Once mobile law enters a newsocio-political field, it is confronted with the fields legal structures. S. F.Moores (1973) observation on the semi-autonomous social field is asrelevant for law coming from the neighbouring village or an NGO, as for lawemanating from state or transnational agencies. Transnational law becomes

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part of social settings in which it not only competes with and shapes existingstate law, it also competes with self-regulatory mechanisms, customary andsometimes religious law. It does so at different levels within and beyond anational state with the result that its fate at local levels is shaped by a varietyof social processes that may have very different outcomes. The incominglaw may be locally reproduced as a recognizably distinct and foreign bodyof law; it may remain somewhat distinct but may also become hybridized,creolized with local legal forms or vernacularized, or it may be absorbed andbecome an inseparable part of the existing legal structures.12 Confrontationwith such foreign legal ideas may lead to a revitalization of customary law(however (re)invented) by local actors, well adapted to contemporarycircumstances and economic strategies.

Some papers discuss the emergence and absorption of transnational law inwider inter- or transnational arenas and discuss its effects at various levels,including the national. While Nader points at the central leading role ofAmerican law in globalizing national legal systems throughout the world,Merry (Chapter 11) and Griffiths and Kandel (Chapter 14) discuss inter-national human rights law that is primarily developed in UN organizationsand the ways this is used in national legal contexts. On another level, Wiber(Chapter 7) discusses the arenas of epistemic communities as the locus of law

making for marine fisheries. Several contributions demonstrate theimportance of combining various scales in which law is important. The vonBenda-Beckmanns show that debates and political struggles aboutdemocracy find place at different localities and different scales (local,national, international), showing different paces and constellations ofactors.13 Zips (Chapter 4) discusses how Rastafari legal notions carried fromthe West Indies to Ghana come to coexist in various ways with Ghanaian statelaw, customary laws and notions of international law.

Merry (Chapter 11) explores how global law is produced by national

actors, how it is appropriated by national and local organizations and howtensions emerge as this transnational law is applied to the particularities ofnational states. Her paper, which is based on three years of ethnographicresearch on the global human rights system and its approach to violenceagainst women, first describes the process of human rights documents,showing how global law incorporates local and national issues and concernsand then examines how local social movements appropriate global humanrights law. In this process she underlines the critical role that NGOs play indefining social problems while noting that many of the donors on whom they

rely come from Europe or America. However, the appropriation of humanrights creates the discourse and political space for local actors engaged insocial reform who can frame their work in these terms, improving their accessto funding and to national and international elites, although there are alsotensions between the global discourse of human rights and the complexity oflocal situations. For as human rights are implemented their effects may differfrom those envisaged by their advocates. Thus, there is a tension between



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global understandings of law and its implementation and local activists ideasof how to achieve the goals articulated in the human rights system.

At another level, Griffiths and Kandel (Chapter 14) examine theglocalization of participation, in terms of Article 12 of the United NationsConvention on the Rights of the Child, in the context of the childrenshearings system in Glasgow. They focus on the perspectives of children frominner-city neighbourhoods, as they manoeuvre their way (in the light of localfacts and knowledge) through the legal landscape of the childrens hearingssystem in Glasgow, contrasting their views and experiences with those of theinstitutions and personnel who exercise authority over them (especially panelmembers who run the hearings). The young peoples strategies reveal thatthey have neither conceptually incorporated nor actually benefited fromglobal discourses on welfare and due process rights that sweep across thelegal landscape and become absorbed into national law. This is because theyoungsters conception of participation is informed by local concepts offamily, autonomy, loyalty, safety and their own understandings of the possibleresources and risks of the hearings system. Their rationales for participation,which centre on strategies of silence, compliance and autonomy or defiance,become versions of local law that often stand in marked contrast to theperception of participation envisaged by local panel members, that involves

transparency and openness, essential attributes of a process geared toreaching decisions through consensus.

Actors and Power

In describing and analysing these processes, the contributions not only focuson the agency of persons and organizations but also give attention to theconstraining and enabling contexts in which they operate. One of the values

of adopting such an actor-oriented perspective is that it presents a study of theconcrete ways in which social actors use law to negotiate their universe, andhow the ability to do so is influenced by power relationships. How power isconfigured within processes of globalizing law and increasing mobility ofpeople is crucial to comprehending the differing effects of globalization.Many of the contributors to this volume address the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes involved in the latest waves of transnational mobility oflaw that affect power positions of actors differentially situated at national andlocal levels.

Nader (Chapter 10) considers this with respect to the Americanization ofinternational and transnational law. She traces the origins of the hegemonicand expansionist character of American law, stressing its European roots andits philosophical underpinnings, along with the American inheritance ofEuropean doctrine and British common law. She documents how Americanlaw lays claim to priority over other legal systems through its characterizationof those systems as lacking its attributes. For what has buttressed the

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hegemonic scope of American law is an internal logic based on lack oremptiness that has had lasting power over centuries of Euro-Americandominance, even though perceptions of lack may change. So, for example, inthe context of the rise of law and economics strategies, this lack theory hasbeen fully rationalized as a lack of efficiency. The power of American law liesin a Euro-American configuration of institutions and belief systems thatnormalize technological progress over social progress, efficiency over justice,while at the same time pointing to the possibilities inherent in politicaldemocracies so that it continues to convince the world of the superiority of itseconomic law, intellectual property, and alternative dispute resolutionAmerican-style. Due to its political and economic power the United States isable to Americanizelarge parts of international law. Where international lawis not in its interest, as in the invasion of Iraq or the conclusion of the Kyotoconvention, its power seems strong enough to neutralize it. Similarly, Merry(Chapter 11) describes how delegates from the international community ofstates at the Beijing Plus Five Meeting negotiate consensual conclusions.Although this appears to be the outcome of egalitarian decision-makingprocesses, the consensual mode allows a small group of powerful countriesto exert their wishes in a way that they could not under majority voting.

On an institutional level, Weilenmann (Chapter 12) explores the law-

making capacities of development projects and of international and nationaldevelopment agencies, such as the German Agency for Technical Aid, GTZ.14

He does this through a case study of a project in Ghana aimed at promotingwomen through reforms dealing with law, state and civil society. He showshow organizations of development cooperation develop project law duringthe early stages of project design that is largely structured by the legalrequirements of the donor country. Based on practical experiences acting asadviser for bilateral GTZ projects, he traces how those legal concepts whichdetermine the conceptualization of development projects influence social

change and how they can guide a project to its clearly defined developmentgoal, such as poverty alleviation. In examining the interactive dynamicsbetween project plan, project implementation and social context he exploreshow emerging project ideas are turned into feasible development plans(institutional procedures of project design). He then goes on to describe howthe socio-political contexts, in which development cooperation agenciesbecome active, are represented in respective development plans (proceduresof socio-political perception) and how these agencies normative ordersinfluence the social structure that they have set out to change. He describes

which interactive dynamics (procedures of socio-political design power) willcome into force, desired or not.

In Chapter 7, Wiber draws attention to the arenas in which powerful actorsor epistemic communities set the agenda for legal blueprints that are (to be)imposed on national governments and other societal organizations andpeople. She explores the concept of mobile law, the centrality of propertytheory in global fisheries management and the role of epistemic communities



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in furthering the transfer of one management regime across global fisheries.In her discussion of two case studies she demonstrates how different fishers inthe inshore sector of the Scotia Fundy region in Canada have attempted toreconfigure this property-based management approach and how the federalbureaucrats have in turn responded. What is clear is that recent fisheriesmanagement is an important contribution to a growing number of case studiesof globalizing law and that the concept of the epistemic community can berefined by careful attention both to the conditions under which some suchcommunities succeed or fail and the consequences of their success. Thusepistemic communities, assembled in international organizations anddevelopment organizations or otherwise, prove themselves to be importantconduits in globalization processes through which law is transported fromWestern to developing countries. Not only do they transport law across theglobe but they also establish themselves as important sources of lawmaking.Many contributions discuss the role of such organizations as importantpolitical actors in restructuring local government and the management ofnatural resources, and in furthering human rights.15

Law is an important potential source of power and many of thecontributions discuss the implications for the power constellations aroundnatural resource management when a state decides to recognize customary

law. McCarthy (Chapter 8) considers how a transnationally inspired butnationally specific decentralization process helps generate particular socio-legal configurations in the districts of Kapuas and South Barito within theIndonesian province of Central Kalimantan. He examines how theinternational decentralization policy narratives interpenetrating withnational and district legal processes affect administrative practices and localsocial fields governing patterns of access and use of forest resources. Hediscusses the emerging socio-legal configurations in which violent inter-ethnic conflicts over power and over scarce natural resources are carried out

in the light of policies of decentralization, as actors interact in a dynamicsituation where increasingly a heterogeneous state and district legal regimescombine with volatile district social fields and re-assertive customarynormative orders. He shows that legislative processes at the national, theprovincial, the district and even at the international level lead to coexistenceof different, fragmented, forms of legality. In the conflict, people draw on awide range of legal, social and economic resources to enhance their position.The paper is a cogent critique of what appears to be one of the most importantdogmas of the international world of donor agencies, that is, that

decentralization improves effectiveness and responsive government andprovides solutions to inter-ethnic conflict.

From another perspective Hellum and Derman (Chapter 9) focus on themultiplicity of laws and policies that come into play in the water reformprocess in Zimbabwe. Their paper begins by describing this process andplacing it in its historical context. They then turn to the changing nature ofland reform and how this intersects with water reform, examining how these

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processes interact in two areas, Chegutu District and Mhondoro communalland. Finally, they underline the continued importance of national states inblocking or facilitating international norms, policies and human rightsinstruments. In providing a vivid account of the complex socio-legal fields inwhich rights to water are being renegotiated in contemporary Zimbabwe, theauthors show that internationalization of law, especially of human rights, canhave the effect of increasing national concerns over loss of political andcultural autonomy and identity. However, it can also provide the basis foropposition leaders and movements to contest existing power relations andprotest the lack of basic freedoms by invoking customary rights at a centrallevel. This resonates at a local level in a re-articulation by new settlers ofcustomary norms and principles which view water as God-given, while oldcommercial growers favour the system based upon the user paysprinciple.

However, the contributions also highlight that state law is not the only legalsource of power. Each body of law has its own way of defining power positionsand therefore are sources of power by themselves. Oomen and the von Benda-Beckmanns show how important the legitimation of power through revitalizedcustomary law (however reinvented) becomes in processes where, under thecall for democracy and decentralization, local governance structures arerearranged. The authors record that recognition of customary law by no means

implies that a government can control the processes it sets in motion. Theydiscuss some of the main unintended consequences of these state policies.While some of the subordinate groups have gained negotiating power, therebystrengthening their economic position which had been severely underminedby state policies, at the same time some disturbing processes of exclusionare taking place as well under recognition policies, as McCarthy andWiber indicate. Both address the role and position of large companies inthese processes. McCarthy discusses the attempts of logging companies toposition themselves in the new configuration and make alliances with local

administrative officers. Wiber shows that large and well-endowed fishingcompanies, in cooperation with the powerful epistemic community of fisheriesmanagement, and not indigenous groups win out in the reconfiguration offishing rights. From another perspective, that of vulnerable young people whofind themselves in an unequal power relationship as subordinated actors in astate legal system, Griffiths and Kandel highlight how legal discourses onparticipation, involving welfare and rights, that characterize national andtransnational approaches to dealing with children have little impact at the locallevel when it comes to young peoples participation in childrens hearings in

Glasgow.

Migration and Multi-Sited Lives

Multi-sited ethnography is especially pertinent when addressing research onmigration and following the trajectories of migrants multi-sited lives.



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Transnationalizing law across national boundaries is not the exclusivedomain of powerful international and transnational actors. The von Benda-Beckmanns show how a few influential members of the Indonesian eliteimported constitutional ideas of democracy from The Netherlands andnotions of democracy circulating in the Near East into the colonial DutchIndies, to legitimate their struggle for freedom, equality and independence.This small political and intellectual elite who travelled to The Netherlandsand to the near East has been very influential in spreading these notions ofdemocracy that, in many respects, went against local notions of consensualdemocracy.

However, ordinary migrants, businessmen and traders who do not belongto the political and intellectual elite are also important actors in theglobalization of law. The literature on migration usually describes one aspectof these processes. Migrants take their law to the new country of domicile.That is, the customary or religious law of their place of origin, but to someextent their national law as well, does not lose its relevance for migrants afterthey have arrived in their new domicile. This law is usually seen as opposingthe law of the receiving national state, creating a host of problems forpoliticians, lawyers and for the migrants. In her paper, Nuijten (Chapter 3)focuses on the experience of migrants who move back and forth between La

Canoa, a rural village in Western Mexico, and the US. She explorescontrasting normative values that migrants are confronted with in theirtransnational existence and which, in the process of confrontation andreflection, transform their identities. The effects of transnational migration in terms of economic gains and identity formation are extremely variable.Some Mexican families do very well in the US. However, many others areless successful on the US labour market. Based on a detailed study of onefamily in La Canoa with children on both sides of the USMexico border,Nuijten details how migrants perceive normative differences concerning

gender relations, the relation with state authority and labour standards andhow they deal with this in their transnationalized lives. Special attention ispaid to two children who did not make it in the US and who, after beinginvolved in illegal and criminal activities, returned to the village. Bydiscussing the case of these marginal migrants, attention is paid to the darkside and the liminal features of transnational migration and the way inwhich this can affect lifestyles and identity formation of transmigrants. Thus,it is argued that MexicoUS migration contributes to the development ofdifferent categories of transborder citizens who display a variety of normative

standards based on their specific transnational experiences.Glick Schiller (Chapter 2) also explores the concept of transborder

citizenship in the context of migrants who live multi-sited lives acrossnational borders. She outlines three different contexts in which transbordercitizenship is experienced and exercised. These include transnational socialfields that migrants establish to connect their homeland and the new land,transborder networks of social relationship and communications that connect

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migrants to multiple states, and local citizenship with its transborderramifications. In observing that an impressive number of states have adoptedsome form of dual citizenship or dual nationality in recent years, nonethelessa proper understanding of the development of transborder citizenship musttake us beyond legal citizenship into the subject of governmentality and socialcitizenship. Based on ethnographic research carried out in the US, Haiti andGermany, the author demonstrates how migrants make claims on more thanone state, using concepts of rights, culture and citizenship that theyexperience and shape within an unbounded transnational social field. In thisway they become incorporated into more than one state, while constructingforms of legal pluralism that differ from the predominant legal system in alltheir locations and that are shaped by the constraints and possibilities of eachgovernmental system into which their transnational social field extends.

Zips example, however, shows how the Rastafari refuse to be intimidatedby dominant discourses concerning law and culture. In examining theRastafari claim of the Bobo Ashanti for repatriation to their originalhomeland (Africa), his study captures a globalization of law that is neitherconnected to globally powerful economic actors, nor dominated by the law ofnational states. In this process the Rastafari church plays a central role inestablishing a multi-legal and multi-sited field of governance, reaching from

Jamaica to Ghana: legislation made in Jamaica is transformed when it is putto effect in the new social field of a Rastafari community in Ghana. TheRastafari interpretation of documents such as the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights and their rhetorical politics offer highly critical reflections ofhegemony, legal hierarchies and international power relations in general intheir attempts to deconstruct the dominant discourses in the public arenaabout transnational law, national legislation and unofficial law. For theirclaim to repatriation is not framed within the legal concept as it stands ininternational law. Rather, transnational law and the struggle for its trans-

formation and implementation according to their precepts forms thebackground of the Rastafari/Reggae calls for global fire. Zips researchprovides a unique description and discussion of the combined role ofunrecognized Rastafari governing structures, of new churches and of artists inthe emergence and reformulation of transnational law that largely defies theofficial governments of the states in which they operate.

Such a perspective, however, poses difficult questions for lawyers andpoliticians who have to deal with such a diversity of legal forms and practices.Foblets (Chapter 15) and Pfaff-Czarnecka (Chapter 13) both discuss ways in

which West European countries have attempted to cope with religiousminorities in the face of European human rights requirements. Foblets focuseson dual citizenship in the realm of (international) private law and discusses theclassical techniques that Western national legal systems have designed to dealwith migrant populations. She observes that the phenomenon of ever moremobile people around the world raises especially intricate questions in thedomain of personal law when it comes to regulating the family lives of



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individual Muslims residing in Europe. She highlights the problems that cross-border migration in combination with double citizenship raise for lawyerspractising in the realm of international family law; namely, distance(migration), diversity (mixed relations, dual citizenship, etc.) and dislocation(double bounds). For the legal categories with which they have to work aretypically rigid and allow for relatively little flexibility. Anthropologicalanalyses, by contrast, document the inherently flexible ways of incorporationand adjustment in a West European environment, while maintaining closerelations with the country of origin. Her paper thus reveals a basiccontradiction between legal categories of migrants, based on the assumption ofclear and fixed identities, and social reality that shows fluent identity formationin response to lived experiences, differing according to gender and generation.The paper is particularly relevant for its discussion of the problems thiscontradiction poses for judicial decision making and for bilateral negotiationsbetween Belgium and Morocco to regulate the legal position of migrants.

In contrast, Pfaff-Czarnecka compares the different ways in which schoolsystems in European countries have accommodated migrants claims formore freedom to express and practise their religion. Focusing on Switzerland,her paper examines the current position with regard to the accommodation ofimmigrant religions and analyses it in comparison with that adopted by

Germany and France. Despite similarities there are differences that indicatethat the particular solutions each country develops for similar problems are toa high degree dependent on the specific history of how previous religiousminorities were incorporated in the various European countries. Pfaff-Czarnecka argues that these are results of negotiations between migrants andhost societies, in which legislators, lawyers and courts are confronted withpublic opinions formed by mass media. Thus different countries have madedifferent choices regarding public and private modes of accommodation,which in large measure reflect the path dependency of earlier political

struggles among religious groups in each of the countries. The authordiscusses to what extent these options might enhance integration or contributeto segregation and calls for more research in this area, looking at factors suchas temporal differences, circumstances and pace of immigration, in order toassess the importance of migration patterns for bringing about institutionalchanges.

The role of migrants in the process of globalization extends far beyondpolicies and responses by them to these processes in the country of domicile.Only a minority of migrants have severed all relationships with their country

of origin; this minority may be in a political situation that has made it simplyimpossible to sustain relationships. This is especially the case if the countryof origin is under a severe dictatorial regime. Another reason may be that themigrant does not have the resources to keep up relationships with people backhome. Or he may feel ashamed because he has not been successful. Mostmigrants, however, remain more or less closely connected with people in theircountry of origin. Modern communication techniques and low costs of

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transport have made lifestyles possible that were unthinkable a few decadesago. Today, large numbers of migrants live, as Glick Schiller (Chapter 2) callsit, multi-sited or transnational lives. They have meaningful social andeconomic relationships in more than one country and design their life andrelationship to authorities in different countries accordingly; hence hersuggestion to analyse the social processes in terms of transnational socialcitizenship, as distinguished from legal or political citizenship. Such migrantslive in complex situations of legal pluralism, in which the national law ofmore than one state, as well as customary law and religious laws, may play arole.

As Oomen (Chapter 5) and the von Benda-Beckmanns (Chapter 6) show,such multi-sited lives also take place within a single national state. Migrantsusually come to live in a different social setting with different lifestyles,especially if they migrate from rural to urban settings. Their new legalsituation is often also characterized by a different constellation of legalpluralism from that in the place of origin. Though these internal migrants donot have to deal with different national legal systems as transnationalmigrants, they often come to live in situations where they have to deal withother customary legal systems and often with different religions and religiouslaws as well. As in the case of transnational migration, they also have to adapt

to their new surroundings. The interpretations of the customary and religiouslaw that they have brought along may change considerably and becomecontested over time in the region or country of domicile (Benda-Beckmann,K. von, 1991; Anders, 2005). This has important repercussions for thosestaying behind. Migrants seem to be important actors in changing the(neo-)traditional law and religious law in the country or region of origin,whether it concerns neo-traditional governance structures or issues of socialsecurity. This is especially the case for high-level, highly educated andfinancially and politically well-endowed migrants, as in the cases described

by Oomen and the von Benda-Beckmanns, but it is by no means restricted tothem. Nuijten (Chapter 3) considers the implications of migration and livingmulti-sited lives for unsuccessful Mexican migrants, who are forced to returnfrom the US because they have failed to find work or lost their job. Thesemigrants find themselves faced with the difficult task of readjusting to alifestyle and normative order with social sanctions that they had tried toescape and which they find uncomfortable. Showing that men more readilyreadjust to the patriarchic lifestyle of rural Mexico, Nuijten draws ourattention to the gender issues involved and the implications it has for partner

relationships. To what extent these unsuccessful returned migrants mightcontribute to changes in the local normative structure in the long run is aquestion that would require further research.

This volume thus deals with some of the wider implications that looking atmigration as a multi-sited phenomenon may have for law in plural settings.The contributions show that migrants operate in networks of people who actin specific localities, each with their own specific legal configuration.



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Migrants are important actors in the dynamic reconfigurations of law at thedifferent localities, with which they are involved. What happens in one of thelocalities may have important implications for the way law develops in theother localities. However, the changes may occur at different paces and havedifferent results depending on the specifics of the various localities involved.

Homogenization and Fragmentation: Concluding Remarks

In tracing the varying forms that the mobility of people and law adopt, thecontributors to this volume highlight the dynamic processes that underpin theuneven and diverse effects of globalization. By adopting an anthropologicalperspective that is actor-oriented they help to refine the notion of impact, bytracing how transnational legal forms or principles are taken up, appropriatedand mobilized by differentially situated local actors in socio-political spaces.They also show how political and economic struggles, and struggles over law,become transnationally inspired. Looking carefully at the working of law indifferent local situations, as the papers in this volume do, reveals that bothincreased homogenization and differential glocalizations of law can takeplace at the same time, in different contexts and socio-political spaces.

Legislators, foreign experts, World Bank consultants, epistemic communitieswho forge legal blueprints all over the globe are important homogenizers.Homogenization by transnational epistemic communities is not entirely newbut has radically gained influence over the past few decades so that the formof law so forcefully pushed by powerful Western states becomes increasinglyhomogenous. While in colonial settings each colonizing power forced its owndistinct national law on its colonies, the law that is forced on weaker statestoday is increasingly homogenous, with a leading role claimed by the US.However, the specific historical developments and resulting structures of

individual states make adoption of uniform regulations, such as the Europeancatalogue of human rights, a process with highly differential consequences indifferent states. Moreover, several studies in this volume demonstrate that atlevels below the central state district, village or urban neighbourhood thishomogenized law often works out very differently from that envisioned bythe homogenizers. Thus transnationalization of law appears to create bothhomogeneity and fragmentation and ambiguity, creating space fornegotiation for some while barring others from legitimate claims.

The authors also dissect a variety of pathways which may lead to further

system integration or fragmentation, or both simultaneously. This perspectiveis not only important for an anthropological understanding of globalization; itmay enhance legal scholarship on transnational law which has tended toignore the standpoint of strategic actors and (except in the US) to focusexclusively on institutions (Snyder, 2002, p. 92). This focus, that seeks toreconstruct the system in which institutions are embedded, may be useful intracing the elaboration of legal doctrine, but it fails to account for how legal

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institutions and other institutional, normative and processual sites are createdand how they develop and operate in practice.

An actor-oriented approach, in contrast, not only allows for local agencybut provides insights into local agents strategies for dealing with suchphenomena, involving their manipulation, appropriation or, even, subversionof such phenomena, in particular contexts. This in turn promotes anunderstanding of how these external interventions become endowed withdiverse and localized sets of meanings and practices. Consequently there is arecognition of a reciprocal interaction between global and local forces whichdoes not essentialize either in terms of the other but rather acknowledgesthat these initiatives may constrain local initiatives, while at the same timeacknowledging that these initiatives may appropriate and transform theglobal for its own needs. Thus a number of the contributors to this volumeaddress the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes involved in thelatest waves of transnational mobility of law that affect power positions ofactors differentially situated at national and local levels. What are highlightedare the complex ways in which local forms of knowledge and organization areconstantly being reworked in interaction with changing external conditions,and how power operates in different places and is transformed to provide forthe emergence of new identities and alliances within specific populations.

Such data provide valuable information on processes of social transformationthat would otherwise remain hidden from view, or be only partially accountedfor, in analyses that focus on the relationship between national, internationaland transnational actors, institutions and law, as is the case with most studieson globalization to date.

This type of analysis undermines any view of globalization as a monolithicentity producing uniform results, by highlighting global ordering in terms ofthe complex changing patterns of homogenization and diversity outlinedabove. By placing actor-oriented perspectives at the core of analysis it

becomes clear that the localcannot be viewed as a sphere that is simply actedupon through the imposition of external institutions, interests, or market forcesderived from national, regional or international agencies that are brought tobear on its domain. Instead, these perspectives provide for an analysis that notonly examines how the global shapes the local but also how the local responds.Thus they promote a more finely tuned account of the effects of globalizationand its interventions, one that acknowledges that these phenomena representsocially constructed and continually negotiated processes. As several of thepapers in this volume demonstrate, law has been mobile throughout history.

Attention to the historical contextualization of law highlights the fact that thereis no uni-directional, linear progression of law towards an ever-expandingglobalization, but rather a series of movements in time and space that may leadto imported law being accommodated in local settings in a whole variety ofways, or to its rejection in periods of disengagement.

The plurality of law is not a new concept. As was mentioned earlier,analyses by lawyers and political scientists are mainly confined to the



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question whether such transnational connections influence state law at thenational level and of how different forms of transnationalization of law affectthe sovereignty of nation states, and thus dissociate global legal pluralismfrom existing configurations of legal pluralism within states. Anthropologists,however, have explored legal pluralism from the perspective of normativeorders that have distinct forms of legitimation not reliant upon the nation statefor their recognition, and that exist both within and beyond nation states. Inadopting an anthropological perspective the contributors to this volume makethe vital point that has hitherto been overlooked, that neither the fate oftransnational law nor its impact on local legal constellations can beunderstood without giving attention to the plural legal character of such localsituations. In drawing out these connections an anthropologically informedapproach is better suited than conventional legal discourse to unravelling theconstellations of legal complexity that have always existed in specific localesand that have been brought about by current forms of globalization. Forethnographically detailed micro-studies not only capture what occurs at alocal level but also elucidate the inequalities of power that give rise tohierarchies of privilege, control, marginalization and exclusion.

As new frameworks for governance emerge it becomes clear that the legalrepertoire embracing multiple legal orders is not necessarily governed by a

hierarchical structure with clearly defined boundaries forming a linearprogression up the chain of command from local to regional, to national, andinternational and global arenas. Rather a more porous form of legal pluralismemanates from the conjunction of an interrelated range of domains andassociations. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, an anthropologicallyinformed analysis with its focus on social actors in their communitynetworks and legal constellations is well equipped for identifying anddisentangling overlapping economic, political and legal domains enmeshedwithin larger encompassing systems. For these reasons we see our volume

also as a corrective to that legal and political science mainstream thinking onlaw and globalization that cannot distance itself from the ideological notionof the state as the only relevant unit of political organization.

Notes

1 For a useful overview of the different interpretations of globalization, see Held et al.(1999).

2 Held et al. (1999). Similarly, Appadurais (1990) scheme of scapes, comprising ethno-,media-, techno-, ideo- and finanscapes does not explicitly address law. Parsons (1978)criticized the same reductionism of the dominant streams in social science 35 years agowhen writing about law as intellectual stepchild. See also Gnther and Randeria (2001).

3 McBarnet (2002) demonstrates the dangers that may arise where professionals drawselectively on the laws of multiple jurisdictions to create transnational legal constructs tomeet their business clients needs in ways that may subvert national regulations designedto serve the public interest.

4 See Merry (1997); F. and K. von Benda-Beckmann (forthcoming).

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5 See for instance Teubner (1997); Rob (1997); Callies (2002); Gnther and Randeria(2001).

6 Only very few authors have discussed the question of how different forms of

transnationalization lead to new variants of legal pluralism. See de Sousa Santos (1995);K. von Benda-Beckmann (2001); Gnther and Randeria (2001). See also Merry (1997);Gessner (2002); Randeria (2003).

7 Most social scientific studies of the impact of colonial law transplantations have not paida great deal of attention to the role of international law and treaties, and indeed these maynot have an immediately visible impact on small-scale local organizations andconfigurations of legal pluralism in the colonies. See Fisch (1984, 1992); Anghie (1999);K. von Benda-Beckmann (2001). For early attention to international law in anthropology,see Bohannan (1967).

8 On the question of what is new, see McGrew (1998); Tsing (2000).9 Held et al. discuss the spread of world religions, especially Islam and Christianity, as one

of the most powerful and significant forms of the globalization of culture in thepremodern era, indeed of all time (1999, p. 333). This not only concerns the learned lawof the four main schools of Islamic law. Hannemann (2002, p. 47) has shown that Islamiclaw can also be seen as a carrier of customary legal practices over large geographicalspaces. See also F. and K. von Benda-Beckmann (forthcoming).

10 In such a world the classic focus on a local place is no longer adequate for theethnographic study of social life in the twenty-first century (Merry, 2000, p. 127).

11 Anthropologists who did research in court and village settings and examined theinterrelations between social processes going on in these different places, were in factdoing multi-sited research. See K. von Benda-Beckmann (1984); Nader and Todd (1978);Griffiths (1997). For an example of development anthropology, see Hobart (1993).

12 Forms of combined or hybrid law have an old history in the former colonies. For theDutch East Indies, see K. von Benda-Beckmann (1984). For Africa, see Holleman (1978);Chanock (1985). In the recent globalization literature, authors speak of creolization(Hannerz, 1992), hybridization (Nederveen Pieterse, 1995), or of vernacularized law(Merry, 1997).

13 Randeria (2003) combines what is happening at a transnational scale in the World Bankwith what takes place at a local scale in the various localities affected by the Narmadadam in India.

14 (Deutsche) Gesellschaft fr Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH.15 Randeria (2003) provides an analysis of the various levels (local, national, international)

at which popular opposition against large infrastructure projects in India financed by theWorld Bank was mobilized, forcing the Banks Inspection Panel to deal with the issuesraised. The Panel has had to deal with the structural schizophrenia of the Bank itself andthe way in which a cunning state draws on various bodies of law to fend off unpopulardecisions while taking the decisions that are to the advantage of political elites.

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