1990s
A01=Juan Obarrio
africa
Author_Juan Obarrio
Category=LAFC
change
chieftain
chieftainship
colonial
colonialism
community
countries
customs
democracy
democratic
economics
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global
government
historical
history
international
justice
leaders
leadership
legal issues
litigation
nation state
neoliberal
philosophical
philosophy
political
politics
postcolonial
postwar
reconstruction
social studies
socialism
sovereignty
transition
transnational
upheaval
violent
Product details
- ISBN 9780226153728
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 15 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Juan Obarrio is assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
