The Power of Law in a Transnational World: Anthropological Enquiries

By Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths

How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: May 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781845459161

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Introduction

The Power of Law

Franz von Benda-Beckmann

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Anne Griffiths

Law is a source for constituting and legitimating power. It defines and validates positions and relations of power of persons or organizations over other persons, organizations and resources. It lays down in general terms which exercises of power are permissible or prohibited. It can be actualized in social interaction when the exercise of power is rationalized and justified with reference to law.¹ Of course, other means for constituting and legitimating power and exercising social control coexist and compete with legal ones. These include moral and ethical standards as well as naked, unabashed power based on the command and exercise of physical force. Yet even autocrats exercising power on the basis of ‘might is right’ often feel the need to legitimate their position through reference to a higher and more noble source. The ‘legal certification of power’ (F. von Benda-Beckmann 2005: 3) is therefore a resource much sought after in local, national and transnational arenas.

Earlier discussions on the relationship between law and power and the function of law for preventive and reactive social control situated law primarily in a national context.² Over the last decades law has become an important factor in transnational relationships and is far less exclusively tied to a particular national state than before. National law is often made in response to transnational developments urging homogenization and assimilation. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that the degree to which transnational developments reach out to local levels and how they are dealt with locally varies greatly. Moreover, the idea of legal pluralism drawing attention to the possibility that there may be sources of law other than the nation state has become far more widely accepted than it was only a few decades ago. Besides state-internal constellations, ‘global’ legal pluralism is a subject of intensive debate.³ In an earlier publication, we have explored some of these transnational dimensions of ‘mobile law and mobile people’ (F. von Benda-Beckmann, K. von Benda-Beckmann and A. Griffiths 2005). The present volume explores some of the connections between law and power, taking account of these new configurations.

The volume is organized around three sets of issues. The essays in the first section, on the Power of Law as Discourse: Claims to Legitimacy and Higher Morality, focus on power differentials entailed in the strategic use of legal discourses. Law plays an important part in creating, producing and enforcing meanings of concepts such as ‘justice’, ‘authority’ and ‘rights’; and in instantiating notions of ‘legality’ that may be invoked by different social actors in their construction of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. Such discourses not only operate on a rhetorical or ideological level but may also serve to underpin the actual use of force or violence to achieve their ends. The second section – At the Intersection of Legalities – focuses on how different actors make and maintain law in a whole variety of settings that represent very diverse constellations of power as they navigate their way through the plural legal orders they encounter. Finally, the chapters in the third section – Religion as a Resource in Legal Pluralism – explore the impact that religion may have on law, especially under conditions of legal pluralism where it may be employed to extend state control, or alternatively, to create a space for autonomy from such control. Rather than pitting religion against the state, the authors highlight the need for a more concrete understanding of the specific contexts in which religion is invoked, displaying the complex relationship that exists between it and other intrastate regulatory frameworks, such as customary law, that make up the sources of legal authority on which people and institutions may draw.

Exploring these interconnections demands an understanding of the analytical complexities that inhere in the relationship between law and power. We will, therefore, briefly address this relationship and the challenges that it poses for a study of the power of law before we turn to a more detailed discussion of the issues that the contributors raise.

Understanding Law and Power

In our understanding, ‘law’ is a cover term that encompasses a wide range of legal phenomena. Legal orders or single rules may be rooted in different sources of legitimacy, such as age-old tradition, religion, the will of the people, or agreements between states. The coexistence of such legal forms in the same social field (however defined) is generally called ‘legal pluralism’.⁴ The kinds of law discussed in this volume include the formal laws of states and international laws and conventions (Greenhouse, Nader, Baxi, Griffiths and Kandel), human rights (F. von Benda-Beckmann), regulatory regimes that include bureaucratic forms of governance such as executive orders (Greenhouse) or the project law of development organizations (Weilenmann), as well as civil servants’ and NGOs’ supervision of diplomatically determined international agreements (Cowan) and fisheries quotas in Canada (Wiber and Kearney). They also include traditional or neotraditional ethnic and religious legal orders (Whitecross, K. von Benda-Beckmann, Pirie).

What emerges from this perspective are the different actors who are engaged in contestations over who has the power and authority to generate law and construct its meaning. This is especially pertinent in plural legal constellations where there may be contestation over what is the ‘correct’ law in particular contexts. The actors engaged in these processes not only include national states acting as sovereign law makers or in concert with other states in the construction of international law, but also national or transnational nongovernmental organizations, ‘law merchants’,⁵ epistemic communities,⁶ self-regulatory networks, traditional and religious authorities and local communities. The power struggles in which they are engaged often reflect asymmetrical power relations among parties and among legal orders. This affects the ways in which law’s legitimacy is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time.

The contributions to this volume thus endorse a view of legal pluralism that rejects any idea of a single site of legal sovereignty embodied in the state. Such a legal anthropological perspective challenges conventional, doctrinal approaches to law that present it as a concept, universal across time and space, that can only derive its legitimacy and validity from the state and that represents a system of law that is coherent and uniform. It also challenges anthropological and sociological conceptions of law that directly tie law to the state and thus reproduce within their own conceptual approach the normative hierarchy between legal orders as defined by lawyers and state law. In so doing, the authors undermine stereotypical depictions of the global, the state and the local, and their relationships with one another that are founded on a bounded, hierarchical and stratified notion of law. Such a depiction of law obscures our understanding of the significance of legal orders and the power that they exercise as a form of social control. Today, it is commonly accepted that states are far from homogeneous and must be viewed as heterogeneous entities that are not only enmeshed in international domains but are also engaged in negotiating their relationship with, and control over, citizens and others who fall within their jurisdictions.

This creates a considerable amount of legal pluralism within state legal structures, namely state legal pluralism, an aspect of legal pluralism that has been relatively under-researched (Merry 1988; Woodman 1998). Taking account of this phenomenon therefore requires a re-examination of the role of the state in the context of intersections between transnational capital, civil society, nongovernmental actors, other states and international organizations (Benda-Beckmann et al. 2005). Several contributions demonstrate the various ways in which states may become destabilized by patterns of global legal interaction that erode the boundaries between domestic and international law, and between internal and external juridical authorities (McGrew 1998). Some contributors focus on states’ attempts to extend their power both at home (Whitecross) and abroad (Nader, Baxi) through ideological assertions about the rule of law, or even through war. Others explore the complexities that arise within states where different, coexisting forms of law are selectively prioritized and implemented by local communities in different ways, in order to marginalize control by central government (Pirie) or when disputing parties seek redress before a court (K. von Benda-Beckmann).

This perspective also challenges conventional notions of the relations between law and power. With many authors following Weber (1956), we find it useful to characterize power as a potentiality or probability. In Giddens’s words it is a ‘sub-category of transformative capacity, where transformative capacity is harnessed to actors’ attempts to get others to comply with their wants’ (1979: 93). Power thus understood is relational, relative and always embedded in social relationships. Any field of social relations and networks is (amongst others) a power field.⁷ Power and power differentials thus concern not only the relations between government and governance agents and their subjects or citizens, but also family relationships and relationships within organizations, as well as property relations. What power ‘is’, how its potential is mobilized and with what consequences, varies depending on the layer of social organization we look at, that is, whether we examine power as inscribed into general legal rules and institutions, or as an element in ideologies, or in social relationships, or in the actual social interactions that are structured by them, which reproduce and change them.⁸

At the legal-institutional level law defines relations and positions of power of persons or organizations over persons, organizations and other resources in terms of general rights and obligations. These often encode power asymmetries, as Starr and Collier (1989: 6f.) pointed out, but they may also prescribe formal equality, for instance between women and men, or commercial entities and states. In plural legal orders, more than one set of interpretive legal constructions define power and its relationship with positions of authority, often in contradictory ways. Thus one legal order may locate supreme authority in the state’s sovereignty, while religious legal orders may assign supreme authority to religious leaders. Yet another form of ordering may allocate such power to customary or traditional authorities. However, legal rules and institutionalized frameworks are not the only means for ascertaining power relations. In a more general, less structured way most societies have one or more ideologies about power. While ideological notions of power often become inscribed in legal frameworks, they are never completely captured or transformed by them. As a result, the way in which power is deployed in terms of these general ideologies may vary considerably from the way in which it operates in more legally institutionalized frameworks.

At another level it is also necessary to acknowledge that power features in actual social relationships and networks. Ideological or legal constructions of power relations are not necessarily mirrored in actual power relationships. The actual power relationships between states, for instance, do not represent the notion of equality embedded in the concept of sovereignty and international law. Gender equality prescribed in law often does not correspond to the distribution of power in actual social relationships between men and women. In fact, as Balbus (1977) observed decades ago, the formal legal equality that exists often obscures social, economic and political inequalities between citizens. The potential of power becomes manifest in social interaction. By tracing interactions and their intended and unintended consequences we can see how power works and the dynamics it may engender. Arts (2003) and others have shown that given its multifaceted nature it is useful to distinguish different types of power, that is, sets of activities through which power is exercised that include decisional power, discursive power and regulatory power.⁹

As Foucault (1980) has emphasized, techniques of exercising power and exercising control should not simply be looked for in the unequal relations between state and citizens in some kind of command-obey-sanction model, but also in the increasingly important realms of disciplinary power and techniques of power through the management of the population, often referred to as ‘governmentality’.¹⁰ In different types and techniques of social interaction, the relations of power become instantiated in social practice, are reproduced, maintained or changed and become the context for further interactions. Historically grown and sedimented patterns of power relationships affect interactions, creating waves of interdependence in turn. Any interaction occurs in a context of which actual power relations, legally institutionalized legitimate power positions and ideological conceptions of power are part (see Holy 1999). They form power potentials that can be actualized in social practices of exercising power. The power encoded in general legal regulations and inscribed into actual social relations and into the rights and obligations to command, urge, follow, obey and submit entailed in these constructions, is just one among many sources of potential power.¹¹ In order to mobilize the power positions encoded in legal regulations or in existing social relationships, actors must therefore be able to draw on other sources of power.

The increasing opening up of the national state due to global connections on the one hand, and internal differentiating factors on the other, has forced both analysts and actors involved in power struggles to shift from a too-exclusive focus on the national state and its law towards alternative legal orders and other actors engaged in lawmaking. Within a world that is increasingly characterized by legal pluralism, each of the component legal orders has lost its self-evident pre-eminence. As a consequence it is harder to establish which legal order acquires precedence over another. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, for it required considerable efforts on the part of scholars and activists to convince states of the validity of traditional legal orders.¹² Prioritizing legal orders today continues to create dilemmas and opportunities for contestation, given the lack of consensus on how relationships between competing legal orders are to be determined, a problem that has become more pronounced in recent years given the far greater range of actors involved in creating and remodelling constellations of legal pluralism.¹³

Power of Law as a Discourse: Claims to Legitimacy and Higher Morality

The chapters in this first part focus on the power of law as a system of representation and meaning through the study of discourse and its claims to legitimacy and a higher morality. They examine how law is used to create, produce and enforce meanings and relationships pertaining to civilization, rationality, equality, justice and due process. They stress the cultural significance of law through examining discourses concerned, for example, with development, democratization and the rule of law. The essays show that such legal discourses and the claims for higher morality entailed in them are used in order to establish the superiority of a particular kind of law over others. By focusing on the power differentials entailed in the strategic use of legal discourses, these chapters analyse some of the contradictions entailed in hegemonic discourses of law. Hegemonic states seek to enforce central Western legal concepts and values upon states that seem to lack these, while at the same time legitimating the unilateral and often illegal use of violence by reference to a higher moral order, thereby undermining the same legal values they seek to impose upon others. In doing so, they pitch an idealistic view of Western law and democracy against a stereotyped negative view of states that are seen as a source of threat and instability.

Much discursive energy is used to define the dominant law as the ‘normal’ legality. Religious and traditional ‘ethnic’ laws are usually presented as alternative or counterhegemonic legalities (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito 2005). Which legal order then is considered to be the ‘normal’ legality, and which one the ‘alternative’ legality, will largely depend on the historical moment in time and on the eyes through which one beholds the normative and empirical power differential between legal orders and their constructions of power. Islam in particular is demonized as epitomizing violence and terror. The reference to the higher morality is then used to legitimize violence. Narratives of violence and terror themselves have become central epistemic concepts in legitimating violence by hegemonic states that is often beyond the law. They underline the extent to which powerful actors, such as states or international organizations, feel compelled to legitimate their actions by reference to a higher morality in order to strengthen their position, while also drawing attention to the ways in which less powerful actors appeal to those same higher values in order to question or subvert the very legitimacy that is imposed on them. In this process rhetorical claims may be employed to support the expansion of state control through discourses of democracy that have been used to disenfranchise and de-legitimate other forms of legal ordering and political organization. The essays thus try to understand how discourses that refer to higher morality and claims to legitimacy are powerful resources in political struggles for hegemony, the effect of which undermines the very premises upon which hegemony is claimed.

By spotlighting the implementation of the Military Order in the U.S., Greenhouse examines the implications for the way in which ethnographers may theorize the neoliberal state and ‘rethink the ethnography of power from a standpoint of executive power’. In her chapter she illustrates the uncoupling of the American state from democratic engagement in its bypassing of judicial and legislative guarantees through its recourse to executive orders, for the Military Order that was issued did not require the consent or cooperation of other branches of government to establish its existence. In analysing this development Greenhouse adopts a novel ethnographic approach that focuses on the debate that the order itself generated in the U.S. Thus her emphasis is not on the traditional domains of anthropology of law as it developed in the twentieth century, namely dispute processes, courts and ‘trouble cases’. Instead she explores the terms of the order ‘in larger terrains of discursive circulation and opposition’ that are not accessible from the text itself.

This involves employing a new methodology that is based on two main interpretative resources that she terms ‘discursive trails’ and ‘career pathways’. The first picks up on commentaries in the media, especially those that promote the Military Order; the second follows the career pathways of the commentators themselves in order to elucidate the broader context of values in which the Military Order should be understood. The commentaries provide valuable supplements to official documents by providing evidence of the wider meanings at play in policy documents. They bridge public and private sectors and illustrate how ‘contemporary hegemonic discourse circulates – not just topdown but also, strategically, from disparate political communities of the private sector into the state’. This is important in a context where executive power is dominant and where representation occurs ‘at the level of competition over signs of authority and legitimacy, rather than in actual deliberative arenas like legislatures and courts’.

What becomes clear is that, read from its advocates’ perspective, the Military Order links terrorism to urban violence as related sites of tension among competing agents of federal, local, military and civilian control. In discussing the ways in which international law is seen as ‘constituting a real and immediate threat to U.S. national interests’ that will eliminate the unilateral use of military force, Greenhouse highlights the transnational production of domestic politics. She makes an important contribution to our understanding of how transnationalism selectively empowers the executive in relation to other branches of government and other levels of government within a country’s jurisdiction. In addressing this somewhat ignored aspect of law in the context of debates on transnationalism and globalization, Greenhouse demonstrates how states do not wither away but rather shows ‘the extent to which neoliberal states, through their executive branches, retain their option on strong forms of power even in the case of transnational alliances’.

In analysing how law forms part of discourse, Nader focuses on ‘law as a terrain of political struggle’ and pushes scholars to consider ‘how law really works in the service of power and empire’ and how the rule of law and of democracy discourse ‘works in the service of political, military and economic power in Iraq’. She explores the continuity of such discourse, from the past as part of an imperial and colonial project, to the present where ‘the rule of law’ continues to underpin the ‘Euro-American civilizing project’. Her analysis shows the way in which culture is mobilized to lay the foundation for an ideological vision of the world in which an idealized version of Western law is juxtaposed against other legal systems, such as Islamic law, and accorded moral superiority over them. In her discussion Nader is critical of the role that legal scholars have played in this process and of ‘how scholarship is implicated in contemporary U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic World’. Reviewing Weber’s typologies of law, and the work of scholars such as Rosen and Schacht, she argues that the continuing stereotyping of Islamic law forms part of an essentialist, orientalist perspective depicting ‘the anarchy of the Arab way of life’. Such stereotyping of Islamic law goes hand in hand with a most idealized representation of Western law. Such representations are of interest to ethnographers ‘because of their use in shaping hegemonies or counter-hegemonies’.

Understanding the contexts that underpin these representations of law is important, for as Nader notes, ‘law practice today is constructed internationally within the inequalities of the contemporary international economic system’. For Nader, this raises questions about how illegalities associated with ‘lawlessness and plunder’ (demonstrated by the war in Iraq) become changed into legalities. She points to the way in which military force has ‘allowed for the disorganization of competing legal controls in Iraq’. Another example is provided by the interim constitution, which according to ordinary legal principles cannot be termed a ‘constitution’ due to the undemocratic process through which it was established. Nader also refers to Executive Orders in the U.S. ‘passing for law’, unless challenged, although their creation has bypassed the other two branches of government. Finally, she draws attention to the ‘state of exception’ that represents an extension of executive power that ‘has potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states’.

What her chapter highlights is the ways in which law and legitimacy, legalities and illegalities ‘are all intertwined in a transparent study of law practices set in the grand scheme of geopolitics’. Under these conditions Euro-American law, which is so dominant in geopolitics, can, through its ‘positional superiority’, give rise to the legalization of illegal acts that not only subvert local law but also deny the very existence of legal pluralism. Such a state of affairs not only opens up the possibility of law ‘as a system of discontrol’, but also raises issues about how far the frontiers of illegality can be pushed ‘before we understand the threat of such ruptures to the very definition of legality and the rule of law’.

For Cowan, who examines supranational engagement with minority protection and rights in Europe, linkages between national and international domains are significant. They raise questions about how practices and relations beyond the state ‘are also implicated in the creation of populations’ and ‘the reformulation of relations between states, subjects and the international in certain key moments’. These key moments include the decade following the First World War and the role of the League of Nations, and the post-1989 situation involving states applying for membership of the European Union as part of the enlargement process. What emerges is an asymmetry of power relations, reflecting a double standard of selective supervision with regard to selective enforcement of these rights among states. In her analysis Cowan stresses ‘two unequally structured interactions involving a supranational body and minority state on the one hand, and between minority states and their own minorities on the other’. These conjunctions, which are concurrent and interlocking, create a situation where the state is ‘simultaneously subordinate and superordinate’, raising questions about the nature and scope of state sovereignty and its limits.

From an anthropological perspective, what is important is to acknowledge the array of actors involved in this supranational or international supervision and to analyse ‘their varying positions, interests, identifications and indeed, fantasies’. Cowan highlights how powerful states in the EU use the concept of minority, group and human rights to ‘supervise’ other, less powerful states on the European periphery that seek international recognition and membership in the EU. Her paper shows how minority rights and the governance of difference are used to provide the rationale and focus for the supranational supervision of states in way that represents ‘the indirect rule of a new liberal imperialism’. Her chapter traces how such political/legal categories as ‘minorities’, ‘states’, ‘nations’ and nationalities became ‘reified, actualized, negotiated, differentiated and consolidated in the process, including the encounter between the various kinds of actors at this institutional site’. Looking behind the scenes, Cowan draws specific attention to the important role played by NGOs in the supervision process and highlights the need to unravel ‘the institutional practices of accountability’ that are a feature of the ‘ever-proliferating audit process’ integral to the harmonization of laws and institutions of the European Union. In conclusion, Cowan argues that it is not enough merely to retheorize ‘the state’ and its relation to ‘the local’, ‘the global’ and the international; rather, ‘we need to consider its multiple forms and degrees of sovereignty, legitimacy and autonomy, as well as the ways that the meaning of intra-state difference is being reconceptualized and contested in the contemporary moment’.

Working at the level of global discourse, Baxi interrogates the use of terms such as ‘war on terror’ and ‘war of terror’ and the implications of the rhetoric they embrace, which has spawned a ‘globalization of fatwas’. In stressing the need to understand that terrorism is not ‘a single casually coherent phenomenon’ and the need to understand ‘terror’ outside a state-centred perspective, he questions how we may ‘achieve understandings of reasonable pluralism in a world made infinitely violent by pre- and post-histories of 9/11’. Like Greenhouse and Nader, he acknowledges ‘the destruction of substantive international law as a source of pluralism’. While recognizing the need for pluralist perspectives that generate discussion above the level of ‘Manichaean discourse’ associated with the ‘clash of civilizations’, he questions how legal pluralist traditions of learning and research may ‘begin to ethnographically engage the consequentialist claims that justify feats of state terrorism as jurisgenerative’, for, as he notes, behind every system of violence ‘lie congeries of unsanctioned violence’. Just as Nader points to legalities and illegalities being antagonistic yet functionally connected elements, so Baxi observes that the distinction between violence sanctioned by the law and violence beyond the law is often illusory. For example, the White House and Whitehall may unilaterally determine the meanings of international law. Thus pre-emptive war may be justified under an innovative doctrine of regime change. The notion of an ‘unreasonable veto’ may be introduced into the Security Council of the UN and the normative regimes of military occupation and international humanitarian law may be rewritten.

Baxi is critical of anthropologists and studies in legal pluralism for having ‘insufficiently addressed ethnographies of terror’. Indeed, he challenges them ‘to more reflexively address their location in the new moments of terror already constituted’. This would require an investigation into, and an understanding of the presentation of, many histories of terror. This is necessary because the languages of terrorism determine both the ‘subjects’ and ‘their supporting predicates’ that determine ‘the sequence of response’. Given the propagandist use of terms such as ‘terror’, ‘anthropology as intervention ought to put into question the epistemic violence of terror narratives’ in order to deconstruct their mythic power. This would, in his opinion, create ‘a first step towards curbing such violence in future’. This is necessary because the central question in his view is not so much ‘our preferred ways of understanding legal pluralism but rather how these leave intact the structures of global violence and the carriers of costs of legal pluralism’. Thus he highlights the discrepancy in discourse ‘that celebrates in the very first years of this century the Golden Jubilee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the same time that it ushers in an era of its recessional futures’.

All these contributions raise questions about how discourses of legitimation are constructed and the powerful role that law plays in upholding or negating the authority of those who act, at whatever level they operate, from a transnational domain to a local enclave. The polarization that ensues from an essentializing rhetoric that is used to create categories of difference (e.g. to separate out Euro-American law from Islamic law) forms the subject matter of Franz von Benda-Beckmann’s chapter, where he examines the limitations placed on human rights discourse when it is reduced to debates upholding universalist or cultural relativist perspectives. He argues that such a focus has resulted in a conflation of empirical and ideological assertions as to whether human rights exist universally or should exist universally. The former and the latter have become rolled into one so that the tensions between ethnographic research on the one hand, and political and moral evaluation on the other, continue to have an impact upon the debate.

Franz von Benda-Beckmann argues that the tensions between universalism and relativism are often presented as an international or intercultural problem between ‘our’ Western rights and ‘their’ Third World culture, or ‘our culture’ and ‘their rights’. As a consequence little attention has been given to the fact that both human rights and culture in most parts of the world coexist with a variety of legal forms, and that the major contemporary struggles that really concern people are not so much between ‘Western human rights’ and ‘Third World cultures’ but between different laws and cultures within states. In his view the rights versus/as/to culture paradigm has remained pervasive even after the deconstruction of culture as a homogeneous whole and the development of more refined analytical understandings of the concept (as in Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001). This translates the political assertion of the superiority of human rights law as law over culture into a corresponding conceptual inequality, denying the analytical status of (nonstate, nonhegemonic) law to the alternative legalities.

The proposed analytical understanding of culture therefore must be accompanied by an analytical understanding of law and legal pluralism. This will show that the main conflicts may be between human rights and a plurality of law in states, including state law, and a population’s ‘culture’ or cultures, however homogenous or heterogeneous these may be. Thus the anthropologist’s role is to make a clear distinction between empirical and normative assertions about the universality/relativism of human rights ‘as a precondition for systematic and comparative research’. Such an approach, with its close attention to specification and analysis of the variability of social and cultural organization, will provide ‘more nuanced attitudes towards the tensions between analytical description and moral evaluation’ that will provide for more informed debate on the issue.

At the Intersection of Legalities

Given the relational aspects of power that are highlighted in the volume, the contributors underline the asymmetries that exist between parties not just in terms of their unequal social relations but also in terms of the legal orders to which they lay claim, thereby documenting who has the power to construct and reconfigure law’s legitimacy in particular contexts. In these processes, despite the increasing dominance of the law of states in many regions of the world and the increased proliferation of inter- and transnational law, nonstate legal orders not only continue to exist but are revitalized, or reinvented, or simply gain importance as actors seize the opportunity to reshape the legal landscape in which they operate by reconfiguring the legal spaces to which they have access.¹⁴ Paradoxically, state law itself may strengthen its legitimacy by drawing on other normative orders.

Plural legal situations provide different repertoires of legitimate power relations and their political and economic relations of dependence, opening up