Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance (After the Law)

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.Contested States: Law, Hegemony and Resistance (After the Law), 0 was published 1994 under ISBN 9780415907798 and ISBN 0415907799.