Rule and Rupture E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Development and Change Special Issues
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 599

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Rule and Rupture - State Formation Through the Production of Property and Citizenship examines the ways in which political authority is defined and created by the rights of community membership and access to resources. * Combines the latest theory on property rights and citizenship with extensive fieldwork to provide a more complex, nuanced assessment of political states commonly viewed as "weak," "fragile," and "failed" * Contains ten case studies taken from post-colonial settings around the world, including Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, and Bolivia * Characterizes the results of societal ruptures into three types of outcomes for political power: reconstituted and consolidated, challenged, and fragmented * Brings together exciting insights from a global group of scholars in the fields of political science, development studies, and geography

Leseprobe

Development and Change Book Series

As a journal, Development and Change distinguishes itself by its multidisciplinary approach and its breadth of coverage, publishing articles on a wide spectrum of development issues. Accommodating a deeper analysis and a more concentrated focus, it also publishes regular special issues on selected themes. Development and Change and Wiley Blackwell collaborate to produce these themed issues as a series of books, with the aim of bringing these pertinent resources to a wider audience.

Titles in the series include:

Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Edited by Christian Lund and Michael Eilenberg

Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa

Edited by Gerhard Anders and Olaf Zenker

Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

Edited by Wendy Wolford, Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Ben White

Seen, Heard and Counted: Rethinking Care in a Development Context

Edited by Shahra Razavi

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

Edited by Tobias Hagmann and Didier Péclard

The Politics of Possession: Property, Authority, and Access to Natural Resources

Edited by Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund

Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

Edited by Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead

Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa

Edited by Christian Lund

China's Limits to Growth: Greening State and Society

Edited by Peter Ho and Eduard B. Vermeer

Catalysing Development? A Debate on Aid

Jan Pronk et al.

State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction

Edited by Jennifer Milliken

Forests: Nature, People, Power

Edited by Martin Doornbos, Ashwani Saith and Ben White

Gendered Poverty and Well-being

Edited by Shahra Razavi

Globalization and Identity

Edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere

Social Futures, Global Visions

Edited by Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara

Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Edited by

Christian Lund and Michael Eilenberg

This edition first published 2017

Originally published as Volume 47, Issue 6 of Development and Change

Chapters © 2017 by International Institute of Social Studies

Book Compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The rights of Christian Lund and Michael Eilenberg to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for.

9781119384731 (Paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Front cover image: Dirt road through oil palm plantation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia © Michael Eilenberg

Cover design by Wiley

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781119384793; Wiley Online Library 9781119384816; ePub 9781119384809.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

1: Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

INTRODUCTION

THE ARGUMENT

CONCEPTS: PROPERTY, CITIZENSHIP AND RECOGNITION

DYNAMICS OF RECOGNITION

TWO CASES: GHANA AND INDONESIA

STATE FORMATION THROUGH THE PRODUCTION OF PROPERTY AND CITIZENSHIP

Acknowledgements

Notes

REFERENCES

2: Repatriation,

Refoulement

, Repair

REFOULEMENT

NATIONAL BODIES

INTERNATIONAL BODIES

BODIES AS TERRITORIES

THE WATER JAR IS FOR CATCHING WATER

(RE)REFOULEMENT

Notes

REFERENCES

3: The Exemplary Citizen on the Exemplary Hill: The Production of Political Subjects in Contemporary Rural Rwanda

INTRODUCTION

THE MAKING OF POLITICAL SUBJECTS

STATE-ORCHESTRATED REORGANIZATION OF SPACE AND PRODUCTION

NEGOTIATING

AGASOZI NDATWA

SMUGGLING CASSAVA

SUBJECT MAKING AND EVERYDAY POLITICS

Notes

REFERENCES

4: Making Territory: War, Post-war and the Entangled Scales of Contested Forest Governance in Mid-Western Nepal

INTRODUCTION

MAKING TERRITORY: CONCEPTUAL PROPOSITIONS

MAKING TERRITORY: THE EMPIRICAL CASE

MAKING TERRITORY

Notes

REFERENCES

5: Violence Entrepreneurs, Law and Authority in Colombia

INTRODUCTION

RUPTURE AND RECONFIGURATION OF THE LOCAL ORDER

TOWARDS A NEW ORDER?

CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

6: Occupied! Property, Citizenship and Peasant Movements in Rural Java

INTRODUCTION

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF PROPERTY, CITIZENSHIP AND AUTHORITY

RECENT HISTORY OF PROPERTY AND CITIZENSHIP IN JAVA

TWO OCCUPATIONS

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

7: A State of Fragmentation: Enacting Sovereignty and Citizenship at the Edge of the Indonesian State

INTRODUCTION

THE CASE OF KAPUAS HULU

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

8: The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Conflicts around Land in Contemporary Tarabuco (Bolivia)

INTRODUCTION

THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF TARABUCO, FROM THE

HACIENDA

TO THE RURAL WORKERS’ SYNDICATE

THE ‘ECONOMIC LIFE’

9

OF THE LAND IN TARABUCO MUNICIPALITY

THE INHERENTLY CONFLICTUAL NATURE OF THE PROCESS OF LAND-BASED POLITICAL SUBJECTIVATION IN TARABUCO

CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

9: The Rupture of Territoriality and the Diminishing Relevance of Cross-cutting Ties in Somalia after 1990

INTRODUCTION

‘TRADITIONAL’ SOMALI MODES OF POLITICS AND BELONGING

CHANGING NOTIONS OF TERRITORIALITY AND RELEVANCE OF CLAN BOUNDARIES

NEW STATE FORMATIONS WITHIN COLLAPSED SOMALIA

THE STATE LOGIC AT WORK: DEFENDING LAND AND RESOURCES, AND FORGING EXCLUSIVE IDENTITIES

CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

10: Legal Rule and Tribal Politics: The US Army and the Taliban in Afghanistan (2001–13)

INTRODUCTION

THE DECLINE AND REINVENTION OF TRIBAL POLITICS

LEGAL RULE AND THE STATE

CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

11: Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo

INTRODUCTION

COLONIALISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ECONOMIC AND POWER RELATIONS

TAXATION, COERCION AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ETHNO-TERRITORIAL CITIZENSHIP

SCARCITY, EXTORTION AND THE RUPTURE OF THE FISCAL BARGAIN

WAR, TAXATION AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF PUBLIC AUTHORITY

ARMED GROUPS AND TAXATION IN THE POST-SETTLEMENT ERA

CONCLUSION

Notes

REFERENCES

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Chapter 3

Figure 1.

A Continuum of Resistance

Figure 2.

The Continuum of Resistance in Negotiating Agasozi Ndatwa

Figure 3.

The Continuum of Political Action in Smuggling Cassava

Chapter 4

Figure 1.

The Districts of Salyan and Rolpa in Mid-Western Nepal

Chapter 7

Figure 1.

Map of Borneo

Chapter 9

Map 1.

The Somali Peninsula: Pan-Somali Vision

Map 2.

Political Divisions within Somalia (2012)

Map 3.

(Envisioned) Federal States and Contested areas (2016)

Map 4.

Area of SSC Operations 2010–11, including Kalshaale

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

1

Pages

vii

viii

ix

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

189

190

191

192

193

194

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

235

236

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

247

248

249

250

251

252

253

254

255

256

257

258

259

260

261

262

263

Notes on Contributors

An Ansoms (e-mail: [email protected]) is assistant professor in Development Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She is involved in research on rural development in land-scarce (post-)conflict environments, and particularly focuses on the Great Lakes Region in Africa. She has co-edited two books, Natural Resources and Local Livelihoods in the Great Lakes Region: A Political Economy Perspective (Palgrave, 2011) and Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings (Palgrave, 2013).

Adam Baczko (e-mail: [email protected]) is a PhD student in political science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and a Junior Research Fellow at the ERC-funded programme ‘Social Dynamics of Civil War’ at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris, France. His research focuses on the Taliban system of justice since 2001. With Arthur Quesnay and Gilles Dorronsoro, he co-authored Syrie, Anatomie d'une guerre civile (CNRS Editions, 2016).

Sarah Byrne (corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]) is Associate Researcher in Political Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This article stems from her recently completed PhD thesis entitled ‘Becoming a Contender: Legitimacy, Authority and the Power of Making Do in Nepal's Permanent Transition’. She is currently working as a Governance Advisor with Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation.

Verónica Calvo (e-mail: [email protected]) is a PhD candidate in political science at CERI, Paris, France. Her areas of specialization are comparative political sociology and political anthropology. Her research field concerns forms of subjectivation related to the adoption of new indigenous rights in contemporary Bolivia.

Giuseppe Cioffo (corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]) is a PhD candidate at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where he studies processes of agrarian modernization in Rwanda. He is interested in the social and environmental dynamics linked to Green Revolution models, as well as small family farming and agrarian change in developing countries.

Erin Collins (e-mail: [email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Global Urban Studies in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC, USA. Her research interests include the political economy and cultural politics of Southeast Asian cities and their manifold transformations.

Michael Eilenberg (e-mail: [email protected]) is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His work on state formation, sovereignty, autonomy and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of Southeast Asia has appeared in various book chapters and journals such as Journal of Peasant Studies, Modern Asian Studies and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Society. His book At the Edges of States (KITLV Press and Brill Academic Publishers, 2012) deals with the dynamics of state formation in the borderlands of Indonesia and Malaysia.

Jacobo Grajales (e-mail: [email protected]) is Associate Professor of political science at the Centre for European Research on Administration, Politics and Society, University of Lille, France. He is the author of Gouverner dans la violence: le paramilitarisme en Colombie [Governing in the Midst of Violence: Paramilitary Politics in Colombia] (Karthala, 2016), as well as several articles on the agrarian dimension of the Colombian conflict published by Development and Change and The Journal of Peasant Studies. His current research, focused on the link between post-conflict situations and the political economy of rural land, has led him to undertake comparative field research in Colombia and Côte d'Ivoire.

Markus Virgil Hoehne (e-mail: [email protected]) is Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He works on conflict, identity, state formation, borderlands, transitional justice and forensic anthropology in Somalia. Currently he is preparing for new research in Peru.

Kasper Hoffmann (corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO) at Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is also affiliated with the Conflict Research Group (CRG) at Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on the constitution of political and legal identities, rebel governance, the production of political space, and land conflicts and governance, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Benedikt Korf is Associate Professor in Political Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His most recent book is Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: A Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace, co-authored with Jonathan Spencer, Jonathan Goodhand, Shahul Hasbullah, Bart Klem and Tudor Silva (Polity, 2015).

Christian Lund is Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen ([email protected]). He is the author of Law, Power and Politics in Niger. Land Struggles and the Rural Code (Lit Verlag/Transaction Publishers) and Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (Cambridge University Press). He currently works on local politics, property and citizenship in Indonesia.

Gauthier Marchais is a Research Fellow in the Conflict and Violence Research Cluster at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. He recently completed a PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science on the dynamics of participation in armed groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and has been involved in several research projects focused on the region.

Andrea J. Nightingale is Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Her research looks at political violence in climate change adaptation programmes. Her forthcoming textbook is entitled Environment and Sustainability in a Globalizing World (Routledge, 2017).

Noer Fauzi Rachman (e-mail: [email protected]) is Senior Researcher at Sajogyo Institute, the Indonesian Center for Agrarian and Rural Studies, Bogor, Indonesia. His latest book in Bahasa Indonesia is Land Reform dan Gerakan Agraria Indonesia (Insist Press, 2016), which is a translation of his dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia’. He currently works on agrarian reform policy processes at the national level in Indonesia.

Koen Vlassenroot is Professor of Political Sciences and the director of the Conflict Research Group (CRG) at Ghent University, Belgium. He conducts research on armed groups, conflict and governance in Central Africa, with a particular focus on eastern Congo. He is currently one of the research directors of the DfID-funded Justice and Security Research Programme.

1Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship

Christian Lund

INTRODUCTION

Weak, fragile and failed. Mainstream work on states in post-colonial societies has often used these adjectives to describe dysfunctional public administrations. Kaplan's seminal article, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, which sketched out imminent lawlessn ess and state disintegration, was the forerunner of huge scholarly interest in state formation in poor countries (Kaplan, 1994). The first generation of the fragile states literature, with its somewhat skewed focus on how real government structures fall short of an ideal Weberian index of a rational state was essentialist, ahistorical and teleological. In a recent literature review on failed states, Hoffmann and Kirk (2013) map out how subsequent research has emerged. While this newer body of scholarship is varied, a few features seem generally shared. These include an interest in how public authority actually works, a focus on competition, contestation and conflict as enduring parts of public authority, and, not least, the acknowledgement that public authority is always in the making. Some particularly interesting contributions have analysed how a broad range of institutions compete over territorial governance, over different forms of rent from resources, and over the grand narrative of history.1 These perspectives are shared in this Introductory essay, as well as the special issue which follows. However, the present ambition is to elaborate an approach that does not only take the competing institutions as given entities exercising governance with greater, or lesser, effect, ceremony and gusto: by reorienting the enquiry a little, I want to also capture how governance of vital resources creates statehood, or state quality, in these institutions.

In what follows, I therefore present a series of propositions about the inter-connectedness of authority and rights. I suggest that property and citizenship, on the one hand, and authority, on the other, are mutually constitutive and represent social contracts of recognition. I then discuss various dynamics of recognition, such as how state quality emerges out of contracts of recognition, and how this ought to be the centre of analysis of the formation of political authority. Finally, I provide two concise examples from Ghana and Indonesia.

THE ARGUMENT

Dynamics of State Formation and Institutional Pluralism

Treating the ‘state’ as a finished product gets in the way of understanding it. The state is always in the making. Political authority is (re-)produced through its successful exercise over an important issue in relation to the social actors concerned.2 To move beyond the mere incantation of this claim, this Introduction investigates and specifies contracts of recognition as the key dynamic of the constitution of authority, and the chapters which follow describe and demonstrate it.

The argument I pursue is that the ability to entitle and disenfranchise people with regard to property, to establish the conditions under which they hold that property — together with the ability to define who belongs and who does not, and to establish and uphold rank, privilege and social servitude in its many forms — is constitutive of state power. Claims to rights prompt the exercise of authority. Struggles over property and citizenship are therefore as much about the scope and constitution of political authority as they are about access to resources and membership of polities. Hence, investigating the social production of property and citizenship enables concrete understanding of the dynamics of authority or state formation.

Granted, there are many problematics of government (Rose and Miller, 1992), and not all questions of state formation can be reduced to property and citizenship. Government — or authority — forms around the control over central resources, and in some historical periods, and in some places, key resources may be trading points and routes; they may be ‘knowledge’ or ‘security’, or even more abstract sources of wealth. It seems prudent to remain open to different kinds of combinations at all times. Yet, property (especially in land) and citizenship are increasingly such central resources in most societies, and engaging with these two fundamental and substantive questions in terms of their production allows us to traverse a broad series of dynamic questions of how property and citizenship are made.3 This takes us through questions of how notions of ownership are conceptualized, how political identities are constructed, how taxes are recovered, how conflicts are adjudicated, how violence and other sanctions are exercised and legitimated, and so on. There are therefore good reasons to investigate the rights–authority relations from a process perspective.

The mutual constitution of rights and authority takes place in many institutional settings. Thus, no single institution defines and enforces rights and exercises public authority as such. Governance is not reserved for statutory institutions alone. The ability to govern can reside in institutions other than formal government. Statutory institutions (legislative, judiciary and executive) may effectively govern, but it is more appropriate to treat this as an empirical question than a pre-established fact, and more productive to identify the actual authorities in semi-autonomous social fields of property and citizenship (S.F. Moore, 1978). In other words, government institutions are not the only source of state effects. Claims to rights are therefore ways to invoke public authority and governing capacity in different institutions, be they statutory or not. And, conversely, a claim to authority through the categorization of property and citizenship is a way to acquire and exercise state quality. In a nutshell, it is a claim to ‘state’.

To grasp the dialectics of rights and authority, we need to dispense with simple assumptions that political authority exists prior to rights of property and citizenship. Rights and political authority are contemporaneous, and the control exercised by institutions over resources and political subjectivities does not represent a pre-existing authority. It produces authority. Conversely, effective rights do not represent pre-existing natural rights. They are political constructions and achievements. Yet, the idea of the ‘state’ as something established is very powerful and can easily divert our attention from its constant reproductive and relational character. Hence, if we investigate societies with relative stability, there is a risk that we will see ‘rights’ (changing and new) as flowing from a set of governing institutions. To avoid that, the present collection investigates processes of state formation through the production of property and citizenship from the particular angle of ‘rupture’.

Rupture and the Example of Colonialism

Ruptures are ‘open moments’ when opportunities and risks multiply, when the scope of outcomes widens, and when new structural scaffolding is erected. These are particularly propitious moments for observing and analysing how authority is as much at stake and as much under construction as the very rights produced through its exercise. This perspective draws inspiration from different quarters. A ‘revelatory crisis’ as developed by Sahlins (1972) and further elaborated by Solway (1994) makes central contradictions visible. Structures, interests and powers are mobilized and activated for the observer to see. ‘Trouble cases’, ‘situational analyses’, or ‘diagnostic events’ emanating from the Manchester School also take their point of departure in particular events in order to say something more general about structural features in society (Holleman, 1973; Lund, 2014; J.C. Mitchell, 1983; S.F. Moore, 1987; van Velsen, 1967). By looking at ruptures, however, we do more than simply account for the structural pre-conditions; we can inspect the very construction of new contracts of recognition. When we focus on moments of rupture in this issue, it is therefore not because they are inherently more important forms of change than any incremental transformations. Both forms of change can give rise to profound reconfigurations of polities, institutions, norms and the prevailing social contract. Above all, the choice of rupture is epistemological.4

‘Colonization’ describes the most dramatic and violent rupture and reordering of property and political subjectivity in human history. Colonial agents — governments and private companies in various combinations — dispossessed colonial subjects and established new property regimes. By the same token, they established new subject categories and various degrees of (dis-)enfranchisement of people in their new dominions. New identities and new categories of property were produced through the colonial administration's everyday power to categorize, regulate and exclude. The capacity to form and reproduce categorical distinctions as principles for recognizing or dismissing claims — for granting or denying rights to property and political participation for entire groups — was key in the colonial enterprise, as it is in state formation more generally.5 To take an old example, the Norman conquest of England in 1066, and the compilation of the Domesday Book in 1086, was a dramatic rupture and reordering of the state of England. The Book recorded the new situation after the conquest, listing the new propertied classes in England and what they owned (Clanchy, 2013; Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). But recording identity and property did more than that; it also established, with bureaucratic and regal ceremony, that the propertied classes were beholden to the new king, William the Conqueror, for their rights. The Domesday Book established the sovereign as much as it established rights.

Colonial power worked through ‘difference’ and the reproduction of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ (Mamdani, 2012; T. Mitchell, 1988; Said, 1978). Yet, processes of ‘othering’ continue to be fundamental to modern society (Chari and Verdery, 2009: 25). The ends of conflicts, of colonialism, of socialism, of liberalism and of authoritarianism have marked ruptures and ‘new beginnings’ in many places — just as their advents had marked earlier ruptures. Property structures that had been reworked as colonial possessions were challenged, socialized property was undone in different ways, and land concentrations amassed during authoritarian rule were called into question. Likewise, racialized categories of colonial citizenship and different categories of ‘patriots’ and ‘enemies of the state’ have been reshuffled in moments of rupture (like the fall of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda, the end of authoritarian rule in Indonesia, the war in Afghanistan and so on, as the following chapters demonstrate). However, while property and political subjectivities have been seriously upset, old interests, categorical inequalities, and discourses die hard; and the emerging, recombinant configurations of property and citizenship tell complex stories of how states form through their production. Hence, when we use words like post-colonial, post-liberal, post-socialist, or post-authoritarian, it is to suggest a dramatic break from a previous social organization, without implying that all colonial features have disappeared, all liberal freedoms have been curbed, all socialist property forms are extinct, or all authoritarian edicts have been superseded. Likewise, post-conflict is hardly the definitive end of violence. ‘Post’ is not necessarily ‘past’ (Salemink and Rasmussen, 2016). Although such changes are dramatic, most new orders combine with the institutional debris of the past. Thus, while independence — like other ruptures — held promise of fundamental change, the production of categorical distinctions for inclusion and exclusion often continued. Indeed, post-colonial governments have in many instances preserved — sometimes even furthered — colonial patterns of exclusionary property and subject formation.

CONCEPTS: PROPERTY, CITIZENSHIP AND RECOGNITION

Before I develop an analytical approach for engaging social dynamics of the production of authority through property and citizenship, it is necessary to specify more precisely what is meant by these concepts, and by their shared characteristic: recognition.

Property and Citizenship

By property we have to understand more than ‘private property’. Property is often — quite perfunctorily — equated with absolute, unfettered ownership. However, the idea of ownership as ‘total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the Universe’ is indeed an idea (Rose, 1998: 601). Ownership is always circumscribed by others’ rights, which limit the exercise of an abstract total right to property. I therefore understand property as a legitimized claim to something of value sanctioned by some form of political authority (Godelier, 1986; Le Roy et al., 1996; MacPherson, 1978; Rose, 1994; Sikor and Lund, 2009). Struggles over property — very often in the form of land — can therefore be seen as struggles for the recognition of a wide variety of rights to access resources in various ways. These range from rights to reside and settle, through rights to use and extract, and extend to the right to transact those rights. Land conflicts are sometimes about more than property, however. Conflicts over spatial control have different dimensions that intertwine. What belongs to whom, and who belongs where, connect the legal control over spatial property and the political control over territory. Whether space is seen as property or territory engages a particularly productive tension between spatial control as ownership or rule (Lund, 2013). Territorialization and the spatial ordering of people combine different political and legal techniques of classification, registration and mapping. The processes do not merely structure physical space; they also organize the social and political perception of it (Rasmussen and Lund, forthcoming; Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995). Territorializing strategies allow and disallow certain forms of land use and access; they regulate certain forms of mobility and transactions; and, by differentiating rights to natural resources, territorialization contributes to the structuring of citizenship.

Citizenship can be defined as meaningful membership of an organized political body. Struggles for citizenship are, generally, struggles for the recognition of the very right to have rights in a body politic (Arendt, 1948/1979; Lund, 2011; Somers, 2008). Formal national citizenship is just one of several configurations of socially constructed collective subjectivities. For most people, several political bodies are relevant for different aspects of life (von Benda-Beckmann, 1997). Citizenship is therefore shorthand for people's agency and recognized political subjectivity. It makes up their political ‘visibility’ and denotes the political institution through which a person derives rights of membership to a community. In many places, land is a resource to which access is ensured not merely through the market or by membership of a national community: local citizenship and status are often just as important.

Projects of rule, taxation, conscription, confiscation, eviction and so on have made people very suspicious of public authority, with good reason (Scott, 2009). However, for many people, the grim reality is — to paraphrase Oscar Wilde — that there is only one thing worse than being seen by political authority, and that is not being seen. To be recognized — and reckoned with — by society and its institutions of authority renders citizenship, at its most basic, a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion, and signifies the right to have rights (Arendt, 1948/1979: 296; Somers, 2008: 21). Not to be seen as a rights-bearing subject delegitimizes all claims.

Property and citizenship are thus intimately related in their constitution. The core element of both rights is recognition. The processes of recognition of claims to land and other resources as property, and of political identity as citizenship with entitlements, simultaneously invest the institution that provides such recognition with recognition of its authority to do so. That is to say, the act of authorizing recursively authorizes the authorizer.

Recognition

Recognition has been the subject of much sophisticated theorization. A broad Hegelian tradition takes recognition as a fundamental human expression of acknowledgement of the ‘other’ (Fraser, 2001; Taylor, 1989, 1994). Honneth's work on the grammar of recognition is evocative.6 For our purposes, so-called ’simple legal recognition’ is central (Honneth, 1995: 109). It may be recognition of rights to property, and it may be rights to belonging and political subjectivity. It is important not to employ a legalistic understanding of ‘legal’ in this connection. Rather, I am looking for an effective recognition of rights by an institution and a reciprocal recognition of its authority by their subjects. By ‘effective’, I mean sufficient to define and enforce the claims as rights. This connects to the key element in this understanding of recognition, namely that it is reciprocal. The effective recognition of claims as rights produces state quality in recognizing institutions.

The mutual recognition constitutes a contract, one might say (pace Rousseau), that links property and citizenship to political authority in society. In exchange for recognized valuable property rights in land and other entitlements, people recognize the political power of the institution by payment of tax in the form of money, tribute, labour, allegiance, or other resources (see Martin et al., 2009). I use the word ‘contract’ loosely, because such contracts are not exactly voluntary, not always consensual, often contentious, and always under renegotiation.7 Thus, they do not necessarily imply continuous or stable recognition of the legitimacy of the contractual terms. What actors have and who they are is made up, therefore, not of individual features but of relational — political — attributes. As rights and public authority are co-produced, the erosion of one also means the dissipation of the other. Ruptures may break the contract, and rights held under one regime may evaporate under the next.

Rights entailed through recognition as a political subject may be limited or extensive. In fact, the recognition may entail no rights at all, as the capacity to recognize rights is also the capacity to deny and expunge them.8 The relative strength between the political institution and the political subjects can vary tremendously between contexts. The relationship can range from the comprehensive subjugation of subjects by despotic institutions that tax heavily, to citizens holding governing bodies accountable (Fox, 1994). Obviously, the relations are always up for negotiation, where people dispute categorical disadvantageous positions, derived from gender, race and caste, as well as class, creed and conviction. But during open moments more radical reconfigurations of the social contract are possible.

DYNAMICS OF RECOGNITION

I have now established that political authority and rights are mutually constitutive. Moreover, I have argued that property and citizenship are recognized claims and that recognition should be the fulcrum of analysis. It is, therefore, time to explore some of the different dynamics of recognition that play out and interlace in contexts of institutional and legal pluralism, post-rupture. In some situations, firm hegemonic constellations emerge, or particular institutions acquire and consolidate a high degree of sovereignty where they are (practically) not beholden to other political authorities. In this issue, the contributions from Collins, Ansoms and Cioffo, Byrne, Korf and Nightingale, and Grajales analyse such moments of sovereignty.9 However, few property and citizenship issues are unambiguously situated with particular institutions, especially if we look at land struggles and view them over time. Many issues appear in multiple institutional realms at any particular moment in time. Which institution supports what claims as rights, and, especially, how — all combine to constitute a significant point of struggle. This becomes complicated when several competing normative and legal orders legitimize competing claims, and several groups and institutions compete over jurisdiction to settle disputes and set norms by precedent. In many such situations, therefore, public authority is challenged or completely fragmented by uneven interdependence, antagonistic collaboration and fickle alliances between institutions. Such a spectrum of cases is studied here by Lund and Rachman, Eilenberg, Calvo, Hoehne, Baczko, and Hoffmann, Vlassenroot and Marchais. In this Introduction I therefore first discuss the contracts of recognition between claimants of rights and institutions of authority, and then examine dynamics of categorization and competition over jurisdictions.

Contracts of Rights and Authority

Rights originate in claims. Sometimes they are hard-fought and not all claims result in rights. Rights are not simply there, bestowed on people by a benevolent higher body; they are wrested from power. But as the repertoires of claims are wide, there is also a broad array of processes in which people engage in order to pursue their interests, ranging from informal everyday negotiations to full-scale political and legal conflicts. Claims are recognized to a certain degree by significant political institutions; as rights they become more or less solidified and entrenched to the extent that they are successfully vindicated. Sometimes rights and privileges emerge from norms and practices, which are generally accepted as ‘good’ and ‘proper’ in society. It may be difficult to identify precise links to institutions in times of tacit consensus or consolidated hegemony. Such rights seem simply to ‘exist’. However, sometimes the naturalness of such rights is contested — be it men's rights to control the land of women, nobles’ rights to control the labour of slaves, first settlers’ rights to control the settlement of latecomers, or governments’ rights to evict squatters. In such moments of tension, it becomes more readily visible to whom people are beholden for their rights and, by implication, what institutions validate or ignore the plight of the disadvantaged (women, slaves, latecomers, squatters). Some institutions emerge to reproduce and protect entrenched rights, while other institutions undermine them by being responsive to claims challenging established contracts. Hence, political subjectivity does not only concern relations to formal governments or singular institutions. It concerns relations to any institutional actor that recognizes claims by political subjects as valid, and protects them as rights. This is where the dynamics of property and citizenship intertwine.

An individual is beholden to different institutions for different rights. In turn, different institutions are validated through these relationships. In societies with multiple competing institutions, multiple relationships are therefore established, reproduced and undermined between people and a range of institutions simultaneously, and the authority of one institution may challenge or support that of another. New claims to rights will emerge while others fade, just as institutions’ claims to authority evolve. In this process claimants and authorities look for mutual visibility. There are many examples of how ordinary people attempt to become visible to the relevant authorities to which they would otherwise be invisible. Agrawal's work on community forestry in India (2001, 2005) demonstrates how organization in village committees rendered communities visible to government and ‘compatible’ with its policies. In the Amazon, Campbell (2015) shows that people act in anticipation of government regulation long before any is adopted. This way, property and its regulation are conjured up by popular state practices in a supposedly ungoverned frontier region. Similarly, Körling (2011), Nielsen (2011) and Winayanti (2010) show how residents of informal urban settlements in Niamey, Maputo and Jakarta have organized their settlements in conformity with the formal technical norms (such as street width or the numbering of houses). By forming ‘societies’ or ‘associations’ with présidents de secteurs, people may resist and avert eviction and ensure access to public utilities; established presence may enable people to acquire identity cards (or proxies such as voting cards, or membership cards of political or cultural associations); paying for utilities provides customers with receipts documenting and legitimizing residence; and people's possession of land — along with the fact that government institutions ignore or tolerate a land market — allows for the gradual build-up of expectations of recognition. Likewise, by forming health committees, market guilds, or parent–teacher associations before there is a clinic, a marketplace or a school, citizens enter the orbit of certain governing institutions and conjure up the exercise of authority and recognition by anticipating the ‘contract’. In order to establish a ‘contract’ of mutual recognition, the inhabitants may be able to act and organize as they anticipate the municipality would expect proper citizens to act. Certain land claimant groups in South Africa, for example, were not yet formally registered as Communal Property Associations (CPAs) — a legal step necessary for land to be transferred to them through the restitution programme. However, they acted as if they were registered CPAs, fulfilling the criteria of a certain number of meetings, holding elections and having a constitution, in the hope that the government would be more likely to recognize them as serious and legitimate claimants when it came to the registration and transfer of land.10

In her work on public rural water supply in Senegal, Gomez-Temesio (2014) shows how the local population was beholden to the government agencies for the water supply, and the government agents were beholden to local villagers for facilitating their task. The actual face-to-face encounters between them became an exchange in which the agents delivered services, and the population facilitated the development of practical (technically non-legal) norms without which the administration could not function and service could not be delivered. The work of Bierschenk, De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan is interesting in this respect (see Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015). They show how official norms, rules and laws exist for bureaucrats and citizens as socio-legal markers. Yet, actual conditions often prohibit the observance of official norms and rules, and new practical norms develop. Thus, parallel, practical contracts of recognition emerge where authority and rights are functional and effective but have only faint connections to official norms and law.11 People have rights, but they do not have exclusively rightful means of exercising them. This is why they revert to informal arrangements — not to act in illegality, but, on the contrary, to access what they believe is legally theirs. This instrumentalization of practical norms, then, does not undermine the ideas of the state, law and rights. It underpins them.

Consolidating rights is hard work. Strategies of visibility and obscurity depend on the context, on the authorities’ ambitions and resources, and on people's available options. While being careful to avoid certain governing agencies, people simultaneously exert great effort, imagination and flexibility in order to be seen by others. Very often, people consolidate their visibility by engaging with several institutions — statutory or not. Rights are then often established by increments of vindicated ‘smaller’ claims and the gradual recognition by different, often competing, governing bodies such as legal courts, health authorities, land administrations, school administrations, public utility services, tax authorities, État civil, NGOs, chiefs, neighbourhood tribunals, militias, ‘area boys’, and others. Participation in ceremonies (in the widest sense), payment of tribute, and various forms of allegiance — as much as payment of property tax, registration in a census, payment of utilities, organization in neighbourhood committees that can address government institutions for infrastructure, health and school services — all work to undergird the claims people make to property, to residence and to rights of membership. By the same token, people breathe life into the institutions’ claims to authority.

However, there are also many instances in which such pursuits can be obstructed, and established rights dismantled. They may easily be eroded if the institution securing them is weakened. If someone holds land thanks to custom, rights may become weaker if a particular customary authority is marginalized. And if a landholder has a plot on the basis of municipal allotments, such rights may be vacuous if there is no enforcement. In Paraguay, Hetherington (2011) explains, campesinos held rights to land thanks to ‘improvements’ backed by the land reform, whereas large-scale soy farmers claimed the same space backed by the Civil Code. Which right actually prevailed was as much a political as a legal question. The scope for opportunity as well as the risk of marginalization widens with the complex intersectionality of societies characterized by institutional pluralism. This takes us to the question of categorization and the power to categorize.

Dynamics of Categorization and Competition over Jurisdictions

The production, reproduction and erosion of categories are central political processes. Claimants are categorized and institutions’ effective jurisdictions are established as rights and authority are claimed in mutually constitutive processes. Let us first focus on how claimants are categorized by themselves and others, and then on how institutions jockey to obtain authority and jurisdiction.

Who can acquire, hold and transact property? This involves questions of identity, since engagement with institutions is very often differentiated along ethnic, gender, occupational and age lines, as well as by class and wealth. Categories such as men/women, old/young, insiders/outsiders, noble/commoner, true believer/infidel, ethnic-this/ethnic-that have proved to be important when people struggle to legitimize land claims. Individuals and groups work to create, maintain, downplay, or unmake their own membership categories — but not under conditions of their own choosing. Often, actors stronger than those whose identities are at stake manipulate the available terms of recognition.

Formal national citizenship with the promise of universal rights is often conjugated with governments’ and other authorities’ actual practice of objectifying and instrumentalizing identities to differentiate between groups of people and their land rights. Gender, race and caste are sometimes (re-) produced through customary or statutory law. Even when statutory law has formally eliminated such distinctions, they may reproduce through a range of administrative, political and social practices (Sundar, 2011). Sometimes, certain communities are seen, en bloc, as belonging to one or another group, and entire communities — often defined in terms of ethnicity — can therefore be seen as either worthy of recognition of rights, or as requiring control and exclusion. The concept of Bantustans in apartheid South Africa is a particularly poignant example. Here, the reproduction of race as a key category consolidated the authority of chiefs by implication (Oomen, 2005). In other circumstances, categories such as landless people, peasants, autochthones, or comuneros may be produced by politically effective agents. Rivalry and competition over land easily take a communal form, and violence often follows such a pattern (Jega, 2000; Jensen, 2008; Locatelli and Nugent, 2009; Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, 2009). Yet communal violence is rarely a simple result of difference in entitlement or political identity; it is stoked and structured by the institutions that feed on categorical inequality.

Collective action often starts from a specific grievance and an issue (access to land, to political participation, to public service, to justice). The Mijikenda in Mombasa, for example, was the creative result of local groups defying colonial categories. On the basis of mutual economic interest they self-identified and assimilated into a single new group with a common culture, language and religion (Willis, 1993). Sometimes, groups are also edited out of history. The Nawuri, for example, aspired to become a recognized ethnic group in colonial Ghana. They failed to become institutionally visible and have disappeared from Ghana's administrative system (Stacey, 2014). Ideologies and legalities structure the categories through which legitimate claims to land and other valuable resources can be put forward. ‘Durable inequality among categories arises’, Tilly argues, ‘because people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions. Inadvertently, or otherwise, those people set up systems of social closure, exclusion, and control. Multiple parties — not all of them powerful, some of them even victims of exploitation — then acquire stakes in those solutions’ (Tilly, 1998: 7–8). Not all distinctions have single or easily identifiable authors (such as government) or formal policies. And distinct authorship may dim over time. Some distinctions will be ephemeral and short-lived, be undermined, and rapidly rendered irrelevant — to be conjured up later, perhaps. Others, however, will reproduce effectively, harden and institutionalize, and be propped up by statutory law, regulation, force and other practices. They may become habitual and sometimes even essential to all involved. Obviously, these categorizations are the result of complex historical processes. Some categorizations (such as seniority, gender, caste and the like) date back to pre-colonial times, and others are more recent. Some were brought about in colonial times when governments established courts with jurisdictions over certain categories of people based on religion or race. Spatial segregation of people along criteria such as race, ‘stage of civilization’, ethnicity, trade and religion, was a work of Sisyphus for colonial governments (Benton, 2002; Chanock, 1991; Comaroff, 2002; Fourchard, 2009; Guha, 1997; Hoffmann, 2014; Mamdani, 1996, 2012; T. Mitchell, 2002; Sundar, 2009, 2011). Absolute categories are probably impossible in reality, yet categorization can have enduring institutional effects.

Institutions compete to control categorical distinctions. This allows them to become institutional references — the institutions that people address when they have claims to vindicate. The categories they control are used to group people who, in turn, validate the institution. So, just as people render themselves visible in different ways, potential political authorities must also display the capacity to recognize claims. That is, institutions shop for clients, members and followers (K. von Benda-Beckmann, 1981). However, just as institutions compete over jurisdiction, they also, sometimes, depend on each other's recognition and endorsement of their respective authorities.

Not only statutory law, but also political power and practice shape the actual definition and enforcement of claims as rights, and work to define effective jurisdictions and authority. Institutions — like city councils, mayors, ministries of the interior, neighbourhood associations, chieftaincies — are often organized in formal, functional and structured hierarchies of power, and jurisdictions with accountabilities enshrined in a constitution or other legislation. However, while relations and powers are formally scripted, the actual practice very often abandons the script and establishes the real, effective, relations of collaboration and competition, of coordination and assertion of jurisdictions. Non-statutory institutions also participate in this dynamic. We can think of jurisdictions as overlapping and interfering fields of authority in the making, rather than discrete realms of defined legal scope. They may be thought of in terms of spatial or territorial jurisdiction, in terms of functional jurisdiction, and as jurisdiction over persons, depending on what issue is at stake. Such jurisdictional claims are not mutually exclusive: they can be compounding, as well as bases for competition (Lund and Boone, 2013; S.F. Moore, 1978).

Territorial jurisdictions can vary in terms of how unambiguously they are delimited, how they nest into administrative hierarchies of government, and the extent to which the institutions are recognized by key actors as setting the boundaries of (enclosing) legitimate and rightful territorial domains and social groupings. In his work on the political economy of oil in Nigeria, Watts (2004) identifies different forms of governable spaces, only partially imbricated in one another, in which different cultural, political and legal repertoires are backed by different power resources. By design or default, spatial jurisdictions are sometimes carved out from the national territory. These can range from small-scale segments where certain neighbourhoods are ‘black spots’ in which local big men or gangs govern over spaces that have been occupied by movements or militias, to de facto secession of territory. Sometimes this process is even orchestrated by government itself (Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009; Ng'weno, 2007; Pratten and Sen, 2007; Taussig, 2005; I. Wilson, 2010; L. Wilson, 2011; Wolford, 2010; in this issue, see Lund and Rachman, and Hoffmann, Vlassenroot and Marchais). The same space, thus, can comprise various functional jurisdictions exercised by different authorities. These functional divisions can be well specified, or ambiguously delineated and contested. Not infrequently, institutions compete to establish functional jurisdiction over a particular field: what institution allocates land and adjudicates conflicts, for example, or what institution adjudicates in inheritance disputes? Is it statutory institutions, neo-traditional ones, or is it a syncretistic negotiation between government bureaucrats, companies and local leaders? Neighbourhood associations, religious institutions, political parties, local strongmen, vigilantes and militias all compete to be able to define and enforce identity and property claims as rights. The actual relations between institutions are thus ‘in the making’.

Finally, within a given territorial jurisdiction, jurisdiction over persons can be fractured between and within different authorities. In British India, the East India Company represented the Crown. In civil cases, courts in a given territorial jurisdiction were to apply Islamic and Hindu laws to Muslims and Hindus, respectively. For criminal cases, jurisdictions configured differently. This ‘jumble’ animated disputes over jurisdictions (both in terms of legal subjects and subject matter). Competing principles of what was considered British, Muslim and Hindu law were instrumentalized, and forum shopping was widespread (Benton, 2002: 129–40). This does not mean that there is no hierarchy, no delimitation of jurisdiction, or mutual recognition of powers. The world is not flat. It simply means that we should see this as a constant dynamic. Two cases illustrate the issues at stake.

TWO CASES: GHANA AND INDONESIA

Let us first look at the example of chieftaincy in southern Ghana.12 In Ghana, as in most British colonies, a system of indirect rule developed. The colonial administration would rule through native chiefs. For the colonizer, the system had an appealing simplicity: it built on local customs and institutions, and it was cheap. Yet, what was meant to look like a continuation of chiefly power was, in fact, a rupture. For the chiefs, propped up by colonial power, indirect rule meant a unique opportunity to edit and create customs and justify convenient practice as ‘tradition’ by the mere status of chieftaincy. Chieftaincies managed to consolidate and reinvent their authority to become rulers of territory, owners of land and resources, and gatekeepers for migrants into society. But statutory government and chieftaincy have competed for authority over land throughout Ghana's modern history (Amanor, 2009; Berry, 2009; Lentz, 2013).

Cocoa production became very important in southern Ghana in the early twentieth century. Migrants from the north headed south to farm cocoa; from the early days, chiefs had the authority to settle migrants and allocate land to them. The colonial government had an interest in cocoa production and consequently in the massive migration of labour, and it had an interest in keeping production costs down. By considering that land belonged to the realm of ‘tradition’, and that markets were ‘non-traditional’, land could remain non-commoditized and cheap. Consequently, the government consolidated the chiefs’ authority to accept and ‘naturalize’ strangers, to control land allocation, and to gain land rent as revenue. Aside from this, chiefs’ jurisdictions were not subject to interference.

From the late 1940s and in the decades that followed, however, central government tried to recapture some control over land by a series of measures aimed at curbing chiefs’ jurisdictions. Government assumed the authority to expropriate land for major infrastructure projects. In fact, Amanor argues:

[An] accommodation was reached between the state and customary authorities. The state recognized the rights of the chiefs to control land and revenue, and the chiefs consented to the state gaining a share of these revenues and actively participating in the management of stool revenues. The chiefs also complied with facilitating the expropriation of land for the ‘national interest’ and for commercial sectors and investors supported by the state. This arrangement has served to undermine the rights in land of farmers and other land users. The most farmers could gain was compensation for the crops they had planted on the land. (Amanor, 2009: 109)

Government did not nationalize the land but took it ‘in trust’ whenever needed, with the help of the chiefs. While these policies restricted chiefs’ land authority, at least on paper, chiefs would continue to control land allocation locally. Furthermore, chiefs regained a formal position through a number of constitutional amendments from 1979 to 1992. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a Customary Land Secretariat was established which was intended to allow communities to have a say in management of land held under customary tenure. Effectively, however, the Secretariat was placed under the authority of the chiefs, strengthening their authority in the matter. This secured the Chiefs’ competencies to allocate land and to define and enforce property.

As land had gradually become scarce in the 1990s, the power of chiefs to accept ‘strangers’ in local communities had come to be challenged from within. Local youth, worried that what they considered their birth-right was being squandered on strangers, often put pressure on their chiefs to tighten and narrow the access to land, to privilege the autochthonous population, and to weaken the property rights of ‘strangers’ and their descendants — also retroactively. Charging a higher rent for land held on weaker terms by ‘strangers’ also worked in the interest of chiefs. This ability to define and enforce local citizenship rights — producing first- and second-class citizens among people who, in principle, all enjoy Ghanaian citizenship — demonstrates the power of chiefly jurisdiction.

This example of the rupture of colonization demonstrates that competition over jurisdiction is not simply a question of crass confrontation but equally one of clever collusion to reduce land users’ rights. While statutory institutions could trump an individual chief and acquire a particular piece of land, chiefs would manage most of the land most of the time. Moreover, with the support of statutory institutions, chiefs managed to rework the terms of the social contract of property with the land users to their advantage. Finally, their capacity to define citizenship and its ensuing rights was strengthened as it combined with increasing scarcity of land. This meant that jurisdiction over persons, at least locally, also tipped in favour of the chiefs. As long as the general discourse favoured ‘tradition’, ‘the past’, ‘history’ and ‘culture’, more egalitarian republican values of civic equality and the institutions associated with them would seem to yield. Discourse and terminology are therefore central fields of political struggle.

Another example comes from Indonesia.13 The country has a very turbulent history characterized by a series of ruptures, and violent entrepreneurs play a significant role in it. The Indonesian government and especially the army and police have regularly made use of groups of violent entrepreneurs as part of a network of sub-contracted enforcers.

In pre-colonial times, the ‘social landscape was peppered with an assortment of bandits, warriors, mercenaries, mystics, warlords, princes and a host of strongmen and violence wielding groups’ (I. Wilson, 2015: 11). Gradually, some became incorporated into the Dutch indirect rule while others remained ‘outlaws’. The latter were even sometimes referred to as ‘republics’ (ibid.: 13). Later, during the early twentieth century, many such groups (notably on Java) were recruited or developed into anti-colonial political movements, and the revolution and war of independence (1945–9) were fought by a multitude of different armed groups. Often, they delivered more organized resistance than the new official republican army. The republican leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, made efforts to incorporate these many militias into the Indonesian army. Many were integrated but, as Bakker (2015) has shown:

[the revolutionary concept of] ‘total people's defence and security’, which declared citizens to bear responsibility for the defence of the nation, legitimized the continued existence of paramilitary groups within the independent state. Notably during the New Order era, the border between paramilitaries and private muscle … groups [was] vague as military-trained paramilitary groups were used by the regime to carry out illegal violent and repressive actions against the civilian population. In exchange for their allegiance, these groups were allowed to engage in criminal activities and usually confirmed their loyalty by paying part of the profits they generated through violence, extortion, and other crimes to their patrons. Such … violence and criminality were normalized as practices affiliated with the regime and maintained through patrimonial alliances to the ruling elite. (Bakker, 2015: 80–81)

These groups are not revolutionary or antithetical to the Indonesian government. Generally, they are recognized as mass organizations (ormas — organisasi kemasyarakatan). This is a particular legal category for a range of non-government community, religious, ethnic, environmental and welfare organizations engaged in social activities. This label gives even the violent organizations legal visibility and, in principle, subjects them to government control. So, formally, government recognizes these ormas as legal and legitimate provided they comply with the legal requirements for reporting, registering, etc. Many do not comply, and hence are essentially operating illegally, but are nevertheless often on good terms with local government. In practice, the relationship between municipalities, police and army, and the ormas of the violent entrepreneur type, makes up a ‘patchwork of jurisdictions’ (Barker, 2007), which is both collaborative and competitive.

This relationship varies over time. Broad historical brush strokes would show that the colonial government, the Sukarno regime after independence, and Suharto's New Order from 1965 all attempted to domesticate these groups and succeeded to some extent. Yet these ormas do not simply derive their power from government recognition. In some periods — notably in the rupture after the New Order regime and Suharto's fall in 1998 — democratization and decentralization in Indonesia changed the context, and centralized control over these groups by the military and police was relaxed. Democracy and decentralization led to the emergence of new political entrepreneurs in a much more fragmented landscape. During the New Order, loyalties had to be with Suharto, the military and the state party, Golkar, as a unitary image of the Indonesian state, but the post-New Order changed that. The groups of violent entrepreneurs did not disappear; instead, they developed more autonomous profiles.