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Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance
Author(s): Mindie Lazarus-Black (Editor), Susan F. Hirsch
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 18 July 1994
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 332 pages
- ISBN-10: 0415907799
- ISBN-13: 9780415907798
Book Description
Contested States examines how hegemony is created and facilitated through law as well as how people use legal arenas to resist oppression. The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, offer rich historical and ethnographic detail as they engage these themes in such contexts as: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the historical and contemporary United States.
Contested States contributes to the new focus on power and social process in legal studies and argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability. The book demonstrates that theoretical insights learned in legal arenas can deepen one’s overall understanding of sociocultural order and the processes of historical and legal change.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“By focusing on resistance, this volume opens a space to consider the complex processes through which laws shape social life. … [It] expands the scope of socio-legal studies of law by analyzing people’s efforts to get included in legal processes from which they had been excluded by those in power.” — Jane F. Collier, Stanford University
“Contested States is a signal and suggestive contribution to ongoing debates on the uses and implications of law in state societies. Truly cross-disciplinary and wide-ranging, this volume links large-scale systems with local practice and experience, performance with formal institutions, and domination with resistance in subtle, innovative and convincing ways. This is bound to be a classic collection, representative of current work at its best and significant for generations of future readers.” — Don Brenneis, Pitzer College
About the Author
Mindie Lazarus-Black is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Susan F. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.
