Anthropological Perspectives on Legal Pluralism and Governance in a Transnational World

This chapter presents case studies that illuminate how different actors make and maintain law in various settings that represent very diverse constellations of power. They explore the ways in which law constitutes and legitimates power by analyzing different activities through which it is exercised, including its decisional, regulatory, and discursive properties. For law plays an important part in creating, producing, and enforcing meanings of concepts such as ‘justice’, ‘authority’, and ‘rights’; and in instantiating notions of ‘legality’ that may be invoked by different social actors in their construction of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses.