Legal pluralism studies of Asian law and society are of three types. Some law and society scholars rely on the concept of legal pluralism to theorize official law in relation to various other legal orders operating in the same space. Legal pluralism provides them with a means to describe each of the multiple systems of law and to consider the ways in which they interact with one another. Other law and society scholars, adopting a more state-centric perspective, have studied how different Asian governments address the plurality of legal orders familiar to different population groups or different sectors of social life—such as the family, land, and property; labor and employment; or religious affairs. They show how Asian states—colonial and postcolonial—use legal pluralism to legitimate and extend their power over Asia’s diverse peoples. For a third group of law and society scholars, legal pluralism provides a framework for their “bottom up” research on law in everyday life. They show how individuals pick and choose among various legal orders as they deal with disputes, family matters, economic and social exchanges, claims to land and water, and other matters.

The conclusion situates the politics of legal pluralism within a comparative perspective by contrasting Chechnya with other Russian regions and other contexts of postcolonial and post-conflict political development. The concluding chapter discusses the broader implications of this study for our understanding of the “dark side” of legal pluralism as an instrument of domination and of state law as a “weapon of the weak.” It outlines a future research agenda on the role of international law in legally pluralist environments and legal pluralism in diasporas. Finally, the chapter reflects on the implications of the findings for post-Soviet Russian politics and asks why the Kremlin allows Kadyrov’s lawfare.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

The introduction opens the book with two puzzles. The first is that the government of the Chechen Republic, which is formally in charge of implementing Russian state law, openly promotes customary law and Sharia. The second is that despite a history of state violence and strong social norms against going to court, state law is nevertheless actively used by some segments of the Chechen population. The chapter argues that state-building in places like Chechnya can be understood as lawfare – the use of state and non-state legal systems to achieve political goals. The chapter discusses how this approach enriches scholarly understanding of state-building. It also outlines the book’s methods of inquiry. It previews the historical analysis that traces transformations of legal pluralism in Chechnya under different incarnations of nested sovereignty: the Russian Empire, the Soviet state, de facto independence, and post-Soviet federation. Then it explains the rationale of comparative analysis that contrasts state-building lawfare in Chechnya with the neighboring Muslim-majority regions of Russia. Finally, it introduces evidence – fieldwork observations, ethnographic interviews, original survey data, official judicial reports, and the corpus of court hearings.

This chapter presents a descriptive account of legal pluralism in contemporary Chechnya. It describes the actors in charge of dispute resolution – the elders and religious authorities, as well as judges, prosecutors, and lawyers – and the most common disputes, and their forms of resolution. This chapter shows that an alternative legal system has evolved into a hybrid legal order, one characterized by judges in state courts sometimes implementing customary and religious norms, while imams and elders participate in state court hearings as witnesses or experts. Relying on original survey evidence, the chapter explores the factors that drive individual preferences for alternative legal systems. This analysis uncovers the role of gender, generational divides, education and social class, and ethnic and religious identities. Finally, the chapter outlines the political topography of Chechnya: uneven patterns of the use of state law across cleavages between urban and rural areas, the Russified northern region and mountainous areas in the south, and finally between the eastern region, which constitutes the core of Kadyrov’s regime, and the less tightly controlled western Chechnya.

Solomon Islands has often been seen as exemplifying wider concerns regarding customary land tenure, economic development and political instability in the southwest Pacific. Locals express concern regarding inequality in land control at multiple scales, while aid donors urge people to register land as a means to increase legal certainty, build peace and render land more ’marketable’. This chapter situates debates about land in Solomon Islands within wider global debates regarding customary tenure, gender inequality and state regulation. It highlights a long-standing divide in feminist debates, between those who perceive land tenure in terms of a hierarchically ordered and gendered ‘bundle of rights’, and those who perceive land as subject to fluid, negotiable claims. Drawing insights from legal geography, political ecology and feminist scholarship on legal pluralism, it suggests that a focus on the ways in which ‘access’ to resources is transformed into state-sanctioned ‘property’ recognises that property is negotiable while also highlighting factors that contribute to inequality. This approach also directs attention to the role of scholars in the formation of property.

The absence and presence of state law was central to the ways in which the colonial project was conceived, enacted and legitimated in the southwest Pacific, and this chapter traces the key ways in which questions of land, property and territory were contested across the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. It demonstrates first, that property disputes formed part of a suite of territorialising projects in which a range of actors competed to delimit and assert control over a geographic area and in so doing, constitute their political authority. Second, territorial struggles generated present legal pluralities in which claims to land are legitimated not only by reference to kastom and the state, but also Christianity. Third, the chapter demonstrates that people were very differently positioned to navigate the new social worlds established by the colonial administration and churches. From the outset of the colonial period, the language of state law and the practices of British administrators tended to consolidate particular idealisations of masculine authority, enabling a small number of men to extend their authority while remaining largely inaccessible to the majority of the population.

Solomon Islanders often refer to the idea that women may not, cannot and do not speak about land matters, and it is clear that the recursive constitution of property and authority not only sediments land control, but state norms and institutions, as (hyper)masculine domains. Yet it is equally clear that women do ‘speak’, and this chapter focuses on collaborative efforts to disrupt dominant understandings of property, territory and political authority and assert more expansive practices. This chapter argues that first, an analytical emphasis on state-sanctioned property reinforces the dominant portrayal of gender relations in the region, according to which women are silenced and victims of their culture and religion, and reproduces material inequalities. Second, the political strategies actually used by women, which appear to resonate elsewhere in the region, suggest that custom and Christianity provide greater scope to contest the terms of property, territory and authority than is generally recognised. This has important implications for understanding the ways in which property might be challenged and re-formed.

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

Chapter 3 describes how profoundly the Ottoman conquest changed Albania. Devastation and flight completely altered the settlement structures, especially in the north. Albanians fled not only to Italy but also into the mountains, where they organized themselves into tribal structures. On the plains and especially in the south, many people came to terms with the new empire. Islamized Albanians became an essential pillar of the Ottoman military and administrative structures. Until around 1600 the southwestern Balkans remained mostly Christian, either Orthodox or Catholic. In the course of the seventeenth century, most Albanians converted to Islam for various reasons making the region even more religiously diverse. In addition to Sunni Islam, the Bektashi dervish order, which had absorbed Shiite and Christian influences, also established itself. In the early modern period, three religious cultures coexisted side by side, Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim, whose adherents maintained cultural contacts not only with each other, but also with their co-religionists outside the area. The southwestern Balkans formed a peripheral zone of the empire. The imperial administration could barely control the mountain regions in a sustainable way. The result was a legal pluralism, with many Albanians, especially in the mountain areas, seeing customary law as a pillar of their identity and their special political position.

Akenroye and Clarke discuss the difficulties of fitting the moral ambiguities of violent conflict into the neat victim/perpetrator binaries of international criminal law. At center stage in this chapter is a discussion of the trial of Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The trial centered on the culpability of a man whose horrific acts of violence in the Ugandan civil war of the early 2000s led the ICC to issue 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity against him. The ambiguities of the case and the reference point of the trial’s arguments center on Ongwen’s recruitment as a child soldier under the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army headman, Joseph Kony. At what point does a child’s transition into adulthood change the conditions of their responsibility for crime? At what point is a child soldier expected to repudiate his or her superiors and escape the scene of atrocity? And if repudiation and escape are called for in this and other cases of this kind, how might this example extend to other forms of aberrant socialization, the “brainwashing,” for example, that can lead an entire nation to accept and act on ideas of the inhumanity and need to eliminate a national minority?

Efforts to reconcile human rights and religions are at risk of foundering because of two category mistakes: The first is assuming human rights, as it has evolved, is primarily about law. As human rights discourse increasingly takes on a quasi-religious structure, it is seen as a competitor to traditional religion. The second category mistake is that Judaism is solely a religion, and not law. Legal traditions invariably contain doctrines that enable an exchange of norms. Creating a rapprochement between human rights and traditional Judaism thus requires a double move: the retrieval of human rights as a limited, lawyer’s project and the turn to legal doctrines within Judaism emphasizing the respect owed to international conventions, including informal law.

The legal structure of the first half century of colonial New South Wales had a military appearance. The first judges had the military title of Judge Advocate and the criminal court’s jury consisted of military officers. The colony’s initial constitution was autocratic, most of its powers being in the hands of the governors. Despite these restrictions, the colony’s courts applied civilian rather than military law. They were also the location for resistance to autocracy. English law arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, but it met new conditions. Most of the population were convicts who should have had limited legal rights, land holding had a different social function in the colony, and the invasion of indigenous interests could not be ignored entirely. After the military coup against Governor Bligh in 1808, the British government strengthened its controls, but only with a small reduction in autocratic government. The early amateur period was replaced by a professional judiciary, and in 1824 a new legislature began to limit the law-making powers of the governors. Despite these changes, English law continued to be altered to meet local circumstances.