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Author: Pnina Werbner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032149462
Category : Customary law
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the 'customary' is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country's past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule, to the postcolony's present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision-making.
Author: Pnina Werbner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032149462
Category : Customary law
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the 'customary' is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country's past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule, to the postcolony's present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision-making.
Author: Jeanmarie Fenrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497820
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 563
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Book Description
This book promotes discussion and understanding of customary law and explores its continued relevance in sub-Saharan Africa. It considers the characteristics of customary law and efforts to ascertain and codify customary law, and how this body of law differs in content, form and status from legislation and common law.
Author:
Publisher: UN
ISBN: 9789211542165
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 79
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Book Description
This publication defines the nature and characteristics of traditional justice systems, including issues related to jurisdiction, community involvement, composition, and a primary focus on restorative justice.
Author: Taslim Olawale Elias
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719002212
Category : Customary law
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Author: Max Gluckman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429946333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
The 18 papers in this volume, originally published in 1969 in English and French, with summaries in the other language, define and analyze in their wider social contexts the fundamental ideas and procedures to be found in African traditional systems of law. They assess the needs and problems of adaptation to changing conditions. The comprehensive introduction by Allott, Epsteina nd Gluckman provides a framework of analysis. It deals with the search for a common terminology in which to analyse and compare the different systems of customary law proceedings and evidence, codification and recording, reason and the occult, the conception of legal personality, succcession and inheritance, land rights, marriage and affiliation, injuries, liability and responsibility.
Author: Lucien Huyse
Publisher: International IDEA
ISBN: 9789185724284
Category : Burundi
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book presents the findings of a major comparative study examining the role played by traditional justice mechanisms in dealing with the legacy of violent conflict in Africa. It focuses on case studies of five countries -- Rwanda, Mozambique, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Burundi - that are used as the basis for outlining conclusions and options for future policy development in the related areas of post-conflict reconstruction, democracy building and development. "Traditional Justice & Reconciliation After Violent Conflict" suggests that in some circumstances traditional mechanisms can effectively complement conventional judicial systems and represent a real potential for promoting justice, reconciliation and a culture of democracy. At the same time it cautions against unrealistic expectations of traditional structures and offers a sober, evidence-based assessment of both the strengths and the weaknesses of traditional conflict management mechanisms within the broader framework of post-conflict social reconstruction efforts. The book is intended to serve both as a general knowledge resource and as a practitioner's guide for national bodies seeking to employ traditional justice mechanisms, as well as external agencies aiming to support such processes.
Author: Anne M. O. Griffiths
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226308739
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Anne Griffiths originally went to Botswana to establish a university course in family law. But independent fieldwork in Botswana convinced her of the central role of the traditional customary legal system that stands alongside the colonial common law of courts and magistrates she was examining in her course. In the first comparative work on these two systems, Griffiths shows how the structure of both legal institutions is based on power and gender relations that heavily favor males. Griffiths's analysis is based on careful observation of how people actually experience the law as well as the more standard tools of statutes and cases familiar to Western legal scholars. She explains how women's access to law is determined by social relations over which they have little control. In this powerful feminist critique of law and anthropology, Griffiths shows how law and custom are inseparable for Kwena women. Both colonial common law and customary law pose comparable and constant challenges to Kwena women's attempts to improve their positions in society.
Author: T. W. Bennett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780680590
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This volume aims to produce a better understanding of the relationship between tradition and justice in Africa. It presents six contributions of African scholars related to current international discourses on access to justice and human rights and on the localisation of transitional justice. The contributions suggest that access to justice and appropriate, context-specific transitional justice strategies need to consider diversity and legal pluralism. In this sense, they all stress that dialogical approaches are the way forward. Whether it is in the context of legal reforms, transitional processes in post-war societies or the promotion of human rights in general, all contributors accentuate that it is by means of cooperation, conversation and cross-fertilization between different legal realities that positive achievements can be realized. The contributions in this book illustrate the perspectives on this dialectical process from those operating on the ground, and more specifically from Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda. Obviously, the contributions in this volume do not provide the final outcome of the debate. Rather, they are a part of it. Book jacket.
Author: Olaf Zenker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317014790
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Customary law and traditional authorities continue to play highly complex and contested roles in contemporary African states. Reversing the common preoccupation with studying the impact of the post/colonial state on customary regimes, this volume analyses how the interactions between state and non-state normative orders have shaped the everyday practices of the state. It argues that, in their daily work, local officials are confronted with a paradox of customary law: operating under politico-legal pluralism and limited state capacity, bureaucrats must often, paradoxically, deal with custom – even though the form and logic of customary rule is not easily compatible and frequently incommensurable with the form and logic of the state – in order to do their work as a state. Given the self-contradictory nature of this endeavour, officials end up processing, rather than solving, this paradox in multiple, inconsistent and piecemeal ways. Assembling inventive case studies on state-driven land reforms in South Africa and Tanzania, the police in Mozambique, witchcraft in southern Sudan, constitutional reform in South Sudan, Guinea’s long durée of changing state engagements with custom, and hybrid political orders in Somaliland, this volume offers important insights into the divergent strategies used by African officials in handling this paradox of customary law and, somehow, getting their work done.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789176710524
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
This book compares the constitutional justice institutions in 16 West African states and analyses the diverse ways in which these institutions render justice and promote democratic development. There is no single best approach: different legal traditions tend to produce different design options. It also seeks to facilitate mutual learning and understanding among countries in the region, especially those with different legal systems, in efforts to frame a common West African system. The authors analyse a broad spectrum of issues related to constitutional justice institutions in West Africa. While navigating technical issues such as competence, composition, access, the status of judges, the authoritative power of these institutions and their relationship with other institutions, they also take a novel look at analogous institutions in pre-colonial Africa with similar functions, as well as the often-taboo subject of the control and accountability of these institutions.
