The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (Hardcover)

Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by the international community, which has watched it evolve through a series of violent political upheavals: from colonialism, through socialism, to its current democracy. As Juan Obarrio shows, however, this view neglects a crucial element in Mozambique's transition to the rule of law: the reestablishment of traditional chief-tanship and customs entangled within a history of colonial violence and civil war. Drawing on extensive historical records and ethnographic fieldwork, he examines the role of customary law in Mozambique to ask a larger question: what is the place of law in the neoliberal era, in which the juridical and the economic are deeply intertwined in an ongoing state of structural adjustment? Having made the transition from a people's republic to democratic rule in the 1990s, Mozambique offers a fascinating case of postwar reconstruction, economic opening, and transitional justice, one in which the customary has played a central role. Obarrio shows how its sovereignty has met countless ambiguities within the entanglements of local community, nation-state, and international structures. Ultimately, he looks toward local rituals and relations as producing an emergent kind of citizenship in Africa, which he dubs "customary citizenship," forming not a vestige of the past but a yet ill-defined political future.

General

Imprint:	University of Chicago Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	November 2014
First published:	October 2014
Authors:	Juan Obarrio
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 2mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	280
ISBN-13:	978-0-226-15372-8
Categories:	Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Foundations of law > Common law
LSN:	0-226-15372-X
Barcode:	9780226153728

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