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- Convenors:
-
Maxim Bolt
(University of Oxford)
George Karekwaivanane (University of Edinburgh)
Jessica Johnson (University of Birmingham)
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Short Abstract:
The law and the state promise continuity while also precipitating rupture. The concept of legal bureaucracies invites us to consider how people live with and through being governed, and the complex encounters involved beyond the more spectacular and explicitly performative dimensions of officialdom.
Long Abstract:
Across the African continent, the law and the state promise to ensure everyday continuity while also precipitating and justifying a range of ruptures. Crucial to both are administrative infrastructures and bureaucratic processes, which mediate legal arrangements and political forms as well as how they transform. These, in turn, need understanding in light of the limited reach of official authority: the ways people strive for regularity or navigate crisis, beyond or in spite of the presence of state institutions. Yet people are rarely simply 'inside' or 'outside'. What even counts as continuity may depend on a plethora of connections with, and disconnections from, state logics.
This panel's organising concept of legal bureaucracies opens up fresh spaces for considering how people live with and through being governed. More than simply something to avoid, or even something engaged with in a narrowly functional manner, legal administrative process foregrounds complex encounters. These involve people attempting to get things done, the imaginative frameworks and the relationships within which they do so, and the resonances and disjunctures between official and popular conceptions. They therefore also underline expertise and the law itself - not simply power and hierarchy - in the work of practitioners and officials. At the same time, this focus invites us to revisit questions of order and disorder, public and private, continuity and rupture, connection and disruption. It means stepping away from and recasting the more spectacular and explicitly performative dimensions of the law, and attending to the interplay of state and non-state institutions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 June, 2019, -Emma Lochery (University of Liège)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the use and reform of labour law in Zambia. It follows how different sets of experts, including lawyers, company managers and government civil servants invoke statute, lingering norms based on past employment practices, and discourses about proper employment practices.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines labour law in Zambia. From the start of the 1990s, liberalization and privatization profoundly reshaped industrial relations in the country, weakening trade unions and giving rise to a broad increase in precarious employment practices, from outsourcing to short-term contracts. Since the late 2010s, facing a rise in popular anger about precarious employment practices, the Zambian government has tried to reassert its regulatory authority over the labour market through labour law reform, with the declared aims of ending casualization and improving protections for Zambian workers. This paper traces the debates involved this reform as well as the work of other actors involved in interpreting, using, and challenging labour law: lawyers, human resource managers, and civil servants. Each with their own professional expertise, these actors invoke the text of the law, lingering norms based on past employment practices, and discourses about proper employment practices. The paper examines how the law is brought to life on a regular basis, and how it matters both in the court of law and in the court of public opinion.
Simeon Koroma (University of Edinburgh )
Paper short abstract:
Why do we see local dispute processes in cities such as Freetown, where we might expect that ties to traditional authorities are weaker? As the demography of African cities such as Freetown continues to change, it compels a new understanding of law and the role of the state.
Paper long abstract:
The notion that a statutorily prohibited dispute resolution mechanism can exist in parallel with the formal legal structure raises questions about the particularities of the state, such as the perceptions and performances of its institutions, including its primacy to make laws. Following the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, in which the maladministration of justice was cited among its root causes, its capital, Freetown, witnessed a three-fold increase in population, placing pressure on the state in the delivery of services like security and justice. This paper will examine the (re)emergence of chiefs and their barrays - local dispute-management forums - in Freetown, where such courts are legally prohibited. It will explore the social, economic and political networks that support them, and why or in the different ways Freetown's urban population is motivated to engage chiefs and their barrays with, or instead of, the official legal architecture. In particular, it will examine the types of cases brought before the barrays, assessing their malleability and scope, and also providing a lens through which to analyse socio-economic and legal relations with, and beyond the state. Through adjudication of cases, this paper will shed light on how Freetown's residents constantly navigate between the (absence of de facto) state functionaries and the (outlawed) barrays. In so doing, this paper will contribute to broadening conventional understandings of law, including the practice of 'improvising law', informed by not only customary and formal traditions, but also responsive to local and evolving practices, norms and needs.
George Karekwaivanane (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the repeated clashes between the Law Society of Zimbabwe and the Zanu PF government between 2000 and 2012 over questions of the rule of law, judicial independence, and human rights.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the repeated clashes between the Law Society of Zimbabwe and the Zanu PF government between 2000 and 2012 over questions of the rule of law, judicial independence, and human rights. On the face of it, these clashes would seem to confirm a particular scholarly contention that lawyers have an inherent commitment to political liberalism, and that they are influential actors in the process of state making. However, I contend that the actions of the Law Society during this period are best characterized as a form of 'reluctant radicalism'. During this period the society was trying to balance challenging the government's blatant violations of the rule of law, without alienating a significant proportion of its members who were sympathetic to Zanu (PF), while at the same time working within the limits of the regulatory framework that was rooted in a 1980s corporatist bargain with the state. By digging deeper into the considerations that shaped the actions of the law society, I challenge the theorisations of 'political lawyering' that are not sufficiently moored within a specific historical context. In addition, I examine the role of legal professionals in politics and the extent to which they can re-shape the nature of politics and the state in post-colonial Zimbabwe.
Maxim Bolt (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
South Africa's overstretched inheritance system is founded on old laws. Officials expertly suture together workable arrangements for a post-apartheid era. Yet they share the majority's view that the system is marked by its repudiated past - a form of complicity against apartheid's legal legacies.
Paper long abstract:
South Africa's official inheritance system is based on old laws, and it is overstretched. These two features shape the work of Johannesburg officials as they try to make arrangements function for a post-apartheid public. Change came in the form of massive expansion, as the inheritance bureaucracy accommodated the previously excluded black majority. Yet connections to apartheid remain, as a new generation of bureaucrats find themselves enforcing rules crafted by and largely for a white minority. Overloaded and under-resourced, public servants literally make the system by suturing it together. Their work consists of occupying multiple roles in relation to the public - they tack between enforcing the law, using it to facilitate mediation, explaining its oddities, and advising on how to navigate it. But they do all of this while confronting a legal edifice that they acknowledge bears damaging traces of another era. This paper explores the particular practical expertise mobilised by officials in holding together a bureaucratic system, even as they negotiate principles that they see as carried over from a repudiated past. The result is a form of bureaucratic complicity with the historically marginalised in the face of the law's legacies.