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.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is head of the Project Group Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. She also is an honorary professor in Leipzig and Halle. Her research in Indonesia and the Netherlands focuses on legal pluralism, social security, governance and on the role of religion in disputing processes.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Power of Law
Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths

POWER OF LAW AS DISCOURSE: CLAIMS TO LEGITIMACY AND HIGHER MORALITY

Chapter 1. The Military Order of 13 November 2001: An Ethnographic Reading
Carol J. Greenhouse

Chapter 2. Law and the Frontiers of Illegalities
Laura Nader

Chapter 3. Selective Scrutiny: Supranational Engagement with Minority Protection and Rights in Europe
Jane K. Cowan

Chapter 4. The Globalization of Fatwas amidst the Terror Wars against Pluralism
Upendra Baxi

Chapter 5. Human Rights, Cultural Relativism and Legal Pluralism: Towards a Two-dimensional Debate
Franz von Benda-Beckmann

AT THE INTERSECTION OF LEGALITIES

Chapter 6. Learning Communities and Legal Spaces: Community based Fisheries Management in a Globalizing World
Melanie G. Wiber and John F. Kearney

Chapter 7. Project Law - a Power Instrument of Development Agencies: A Case Study from Burundi
Markus Weilenmann

Chapter 8. Half-Told Truths and Partial Silence: Managing Communication in Scottish Children's Hearings
Anne Griffiths and Randy F. Kandel

RELIGION AS A RESOURCE IN LEGAL PLURALISM

Chapter 9. Keeping the Stream of Justice Clear and Pure: The Buddhicization of Bhutanese Law
Richard W. Whitecross

Chapter 10. Balancing Islam, Adat and the State: Comparing Islamic and Civil Courts in Indonesia
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Chapter 11. Kings, Monks, Bureaucrats and the Police: Tibetan Responses to Law and Authority
Fernanda Pirie

Notes on Contributors
Index