Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.

AuthorMehta, Sarah
PositionBook review

Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

Publisher: University of Chicago Press (2006) Price: $28 Reviewed by: Sarah Mehta

On February 8, 2007, 6-year-old Joao Helio Fernandes Vieites was murdered in Rio de Janeiro when armed teenagers carjacked his family's car at a traffic light. As the child struggled to get out of his seatbelt and out the open car door, the assailants drove off, dragging Joao Helio's body for several miles before abandoning the dismembered remains.

In recounting this horrific murder, media accounts--particularly the international reports--fixated on the overwhelming outcry of the city's inhabitants. In a city inured to violence, reporters asked, why the exceptional outrage in this particular case? Stepping back even further, how did collective dispassion become the predicted response to sensational violence and police paralysis?

The collected essays in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony intervene in this conversation, further complicating perceptions of public cynicism towards "law and order" in postcolonial societies. Disorder, as utilized by the authors, denotes endemic lawlessness and is illustrated by violence and extra-legal activities. But this crisis in governance does not signify indifference towards law, its power and institutions. Through case studies conducted in a diverse spectrum of postcolonial states, the authors demonstrate that law and its accoutrements continue to capture popular imaginings, despite repeated failures to reflect or govern the local realities. One of the ironies that the authors attempt to explicate is the fact that mounting criminal violence and illicit economic practices are not a "rejoinder" to the law, nor do they prove popular disillusionment with the normative or ethical power of law. As editors Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff claim in their introduction, "[L]aw has been further fetishized, even as, in most postcolonies, higher and higher walls are built to protect the propertied from lawlessness, even as the language of legality insinuates itself deeper and deeper into the realm of the illicit." (1) "Legality," they claim, is the measure of ethical and legitimate action; but governments no longer have a monopoly on the vocabulary and provision of law and rights. Postcolonial states attempt to establish sovereignty armed with sophisticated jurisprudence and constitutions; extralegal or criminal actors simultaneously foster "the counterfeiting of a culture of legality." The distinction between licit and illicit actors collapses as states increasingly outsource responsibility for government services like security to private actors; responding to the retreat of the state, extralegal actors mimic the state and the market "by providing protection and dispensing justice." (2)

One reading of the persistence of disorder and criminality in postcolonial states blames existing government institutions as faulty or insufficiently democratic, absent a...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT