A snippet from John and Jean Comaroff’s — as always, gripping — opening essay of their edited collection, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago 2006):

…there has certainly been an explosion of law-oriented nongovernmental organizations in the postcolonial world: lawyers for human rights, both within and without frontiers; legal resourcecenters and aid clinics; voluntary associations dedicated to litigating against historical injury, for social and jural recognition, for human dignity, and for material entitlements of one kind or another. Situated at the intersection of the public and the private, nongovernmental organizations of this sort are now commonly regarded as the civilizing missions of the twenty-first century. They are asserting their presence over ever wider horizons, encouraging citizens to deal with their problems by legal means. The upshot, it seems, is that people, even those who break the law, appear to be ever more litigious, sometimes with unforeseen consequences for states and ruling regimes. In South Africa, as we write, a plumber convicted of drunk driving is demanding $167,000 in damages from three cabinet ministers and the commissioner of Correctional Services for holding him in custody when, he says, by rights they should have had him in rehabilitation. And two well-known alumni of the liberation struggle, the national chair and the secretary of the Umkhonto weSizwe Military Veterans Association (MKMVA), announced in 2005 that they would seek a high-court interdict against two others who had claimed to be elected officials of the organization and had entered financial deals, fraudulently, in its name. In times past, this kind of conflict among the African National Congress elect would have been fought out by more conventional political means, less by using the law and its breach as their weapons of combat. But then, in times past, the MKMVA would not have been a thoroughly neoliberal organization, as much an investment holding company for its members as a commons for ex-guerilla heroes.

The global impact of legal nongovermental organizations on postcolonial consciousness is such that it is not uncommon nowadays to hear the language of jurisprudence in the Amazon or Aboriginal Australia, in the Kalahari or the New Guinea highlands, or among the homeless of Mumbai, Mexico City, Cape Town, and Trench Town. […] Postcolonies, in sum, are saturated with selfimaginings and identities grounded in the jural, even in places in which trafficking outside it is as common as trafficking within it—presuming, of course, that the distinction can be made at all.

[…]

It is not just the politics of the present that is being judicialized. The past, too, is increasingly caught up in the dialectic of law and disorder: hence the mobilization of legalities to fight anti-imperialist battles anew, which has compelled the British government to answer under oath for having committed acts of unspeakable atrocity in its African “possessions”, for having killed local leaders at whim, and for having unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another. By these means is colonialism, tout court, rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to break its silences, to speak in tongues hitherto unheard and untranslated, to submit itself to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it, of its most abject subjects— and to be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. In the process, too, it becomes clear that what imperialism is being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare: its use of its own rules—of its duly enacted penal codes, its administrative law, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, its norms of engagement—to impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word. And also to commit its own ever-socivilized, patronizing, high-minded forms of kleptocracy.

pp. 25-6, 28-9.

Flicking back through this book today, I was particularly struck by this comment.