The State of Custom: Gerd Spittler’s “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) today

In our article, we engage with the anthropologist Gerd Spittler’s pathbreaking article “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) in which he strives to integrate the existence of state courts (the eponymous Leviathan’s shadow) in (post-)colonial Africa into the analysis on non-state court legal practices. According to Spittler, it is because of undesirable characteristics inherent in state courts that the disputing parties tended to rather involve mediators than pursue a state court judgment. The less people liked state courts, the more likely they were to (re-)turn to dispute settlement procedures. Now how has this situation changed in the last four decades since its publication date? We relate his findings to contemporary debates in legal anthropology that investigate the relationship between disputing, law and the state. We also show through our own work in Africa and Asia, particularly in Southern Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan, in what ways Spittler’s by now classical contribution to the field of legal anthropology in 1980 can be made fruitful for a contemporary anthropology of the state at a time when not only (legal) anthropology has changed, but especially the way states deal with putatively “customary” forms of dispute settlement.

Napoleonic Legacies, Postcolonial State Legitimation, and the Perpetual Myth of Non-Intervention: Family Code Reform and Gender Equality in Mali

In May 2018, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights held that Mali’s 2011 Family Code violated women’s and children’s rights. Widespread protests halted the adoption of a more progressive draft Code passed by the Malian National Assembly in 2009. In Francophone Africa, family codes are legacies of the patriarchal 1804 Napoleonic Code whose reform has been contentious. Drawing from the work of Frances Olsen and Roland Barthes, anthropology of the state, African feminist thought, and critical comparative family law, I argue that by emphasising that the Code ‘reflect[s] socio-cultural realities’, Mali mobilises a myth of non-intervention of the state in the family. This myth serves to legitimate the postcolonial state which faces challenges concerning diversity, democracy, development, and secularism. Tracing the myth back to the Napoleonic Code and through French colonialism, I conclude that it helps to bolster the state while distorting the possibilities for more egalitarian reform.

Land, development and the political class: In a translocal ‘Londoni’ village

This article expands Akhil Gupta’s (1995, American Ethnologist, 22(2), 375–402) thesis of ‘blurred boundaries’ between ‘the state’ and ‘society’ in South Asia to incorporate the impact of historic labour migrations, which complicate established conceptions of the state in Bangladesh. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an area of high migration to the UK, the article draws attention to a class of transnational politicians, and their intra-class conflicts of interest, in shaping local-level politics. The article supports Faguet’s (2017, Modern Asian Studies 51(6), 1668–94) contention that the decentralisation of local government has led to the emergence of vernacularised political economies that operate in the shadow of the state, which are also intrinsically facilitated by it. It suggests that state actors appropriate symbols, offices and resources, together with traditional authority and kinship dynamics, to create an idiosyncratic polity. Aspiration towards power that might lead to the occupation of state offices are determined by either the aspirant’s status as a British citizen (Londoni) or through intimate social and economic connections to Britain through kinship (gushti) networks. The article thus makes a broader contribution to the existing literature on the anthropology of the state, transnational politics and the nexus of power, money and migration in postcolonial contexts.

Consistent inconsistency

Tobias G. Eule, Lisa Marie Borrelli, Annika Lindberg and Anny Wyss (2019), Migrants Before the Law: Contested Migration Control in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan)Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters and Keebet von Benda-Beckman (eds) (2018), Stategraphy: Towards a Relational Anthropology of the State (Oxford: Berghahn Books)

Predatory politics and personalization of power: The abuses and misuses of the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) in Somalia

This article investigates the security sector in Somalia, with a focus on the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), a government security unit, involved in the fight against the Al-Shabaab insurgency. This article argues that the historically traumatic legacy of autocratic oppression of the former military regime gives the Somali intelligence agency an infamous reputation that survives today and plays a significant role in the operations of the intelligence agency. Intelligence agents employ tactics from the late Cold War era military regime’s intelligence services, suggesting striking historical continuities of the military regime in practice and performance. The empirical data also shows that NISA is enmeshed in the ‘dirty war’ between the federal government and Al-Shabaab. Not only does the intelligence agency normalize extrajudicial activities to serve the agenda of political authorities and to suppress their critics, but it also financially benefits from arrests without trials. NISA agents harass the public and political opposition groups daily and brutally suppress mass media and freedom of speech, especially in the government-controlled areas in Mogadishu. As the first empirical academic investigation into NISA, the article contributes to broader debates on intelligence, the anthropology of the state, security studies, and institution- and state-building in violent environments.