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This paper provides a political analysis of legal pluralism from a “new institutionalist” perspective. In response to question of why states recognize and incorporate non-state normative orderings into their legal systems, it is hypothesized that the decision of incorporation is made to enhance the capacities of postcolonial states with “rational” calculations. In this respect, two new categories of legal pluralism are introduced: capacity-enhancing recognition and capacity-diminishing recognition. The paper lastly assesses the implications of legal pluralism upon the state-society relations and individual rights and liberties of citizens in the case of Israel.

Legal syncretism seeks to provide a rather different account of how laws interact with one another as the people deal with them. The purpose of this study is to provide a rather different account of how laws interact with one another as the people deal with them in the society.

This paper discusses the current concept of legal pluralism as to whether it really holds as the right theory for building a harmonious and trustworthy legal system in a multi-cultural country such as Indonesia. This study involves socio-legal research drawing on empirical data. It discusses the practice of legal pluralism in Indonesia by analyzing the characteristics of her legal system, especially the roles of customs and religion in it.

The research, conducted in five Indonesian cities, reveals that the current proposal of legal pluralism is not really helping to solve the difficulties faced by the Indonesian legal system. Therefore, this paper proposes legal syncretism or the theory of unity in diversity (bhineka tunggal ika) as an alternative to help cope with some of the difficulties faced by many legal systems in developing countries, especially Indonesia.

Although legal pluralism sounds promising, wrong and misleading interpretations have been provided by many of its proponents. Legal pluralism has been touted by many socio-legal scholars as a key concept in the analysis of law. Yet, after almost 20 years of such claims, there has been little progress in the development of the concept. Despite these confident pronouncements and the apparent unanimity that underlie them, however, the concept gives rise to complex unresolved problems. Legal syncretism seeks to provide a rather different account of how laws interact with one another as the people deal with them.

This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to address sufficiently in the dimensions of power, meaning, and social relationships: bottom-up lawmaking; transnational legal processes; and global legal pluralism. The idea of bottom-up lawmaking, already discussed, has the strength of beginning from the everyday practices by which problems are solved that lead eventually to the creation of a body of law. However, the phrase bottom-up suggests that this is a grassroots movement, while it is typically cosmopolitan elites who generate the informal rules that become established over time. Explicit attention to the power relationships underlying this process would help to clarify what “bottom-up” means. As Judith Resnick points out, the terms “soft law” and “hard law” are themselves problematic, incorporating gender ideologies and suggesting that some international laws are enforced firmly, which is rarely the case in practice (personal communication).

The purpose of this paper is to identify mechanisms by which an international obligation to prevent or punish corporate bribery can be enforced by a national law through trade relations.

The UK Bribery Act 2010 is an example of national law which enforces OECD anti‐bribery norms, with a view to effecting an institutional change in the law and morality of other countries. Taiwan is used as a case study to look at how the UK Act may achieve its intended purposes.

The paper identifies three modes of governance in the enforcement of the Act: legal exclusivism, legal inclusivism, and legal pluralism. In the mode of legal exclusivism, the Act disregards the morality of Taiwan so as to enforce the principle of transparency in trade. In the mode of legal inclusivism, the Act allows UK multinational companies to make their own “laws” so that anti‐bribery norms can be more efficiently and effectively diffused. But in the mode of legal pluralism, the Act is forced to acknowledge the law and morality of other countries (e.g. Taiwan), especially when mutual legal assistance is crucial for cross‐border investigation and prosecution.

Although this paper is based on an analysis of how the Act will interact with the law and morality of Taiwan, the model developed provides a lens through which one can show how an international norm enforced by a national law can function in a way that brings about institutional change in other countries.

The paper provides a new insight into how legal norms can be diffused through trade.

This chapter explores expert witnessing in anthropology and the raison d’être of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal concept that accounts for the contribution of social sciences to the resolution of disputes and the protection of human rights. The first section of this chapter provides a short historical outline of the occurrence and reception of anthropological expertise as expert witnessing. The second section surveys the theoretical reflections on anthropologists’ engagement with law. The third section explores the potential for anthropological expertise as a broader socio-legal notion in the common law and civil law legal systems. The chapter concludes with the opportunity and raison d’être of cultural expertise grounded on a skeptical approach to culture. It suggests that expert witnessing has been viewed mainly from a technical perspective of applied social sciences, which was necessary to set the legal framework of cultural experts’ engagement with law, but had the consequence of entrenching the impossibility of a comprehensive study of anthropological expert witnessing. While this chapter adopts a skeptical approach to culture, it also argues the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach that leads to an integrated definition of cultural expertise.

As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale.

The paper first, indicates the references made by Greek legal order to different kind of cultural experts. Adopting a broader sociolegal definition of cultural expertise, it also refers to “cultural mediator,” a notion which has been introduced by the European Fund for the Integration of third-country nationals which launched the first educational programs for their training in Greece. The so-called cultural mediators should facilitate communication between third-country nationals and Greek Administration, the respect of their rights and thus in long term their integration. Secondly, the chapter exposes the experiences made by Asylum Service employees and lawyers of NGOs involved in the granting or refusing asylum proceedings. It will try to show how cultural mediation for asylum seekers works in action by exploring how do lawyers and officers involved in the process of asylum granting describe it. They also give their opinion about the training prerequisites for someone to work as a mediator and they refer to some common topics why cultural experts are mostly needed. Thirdly, the chapter presents the joint arguments of Greek anthropological theory and the political theory about EU regarding the importance of the effort to understand, to respect, and to integrate the culturally and politically different refugees. Cultural expertise may help Greek State and Society in learning how to respect the principle of equality and difference. At the same time, it may serve as a venue to solidify EU as a multiethnic political community and a cosmopolitan legal order.

The purpose of this paper is to present an expanded introduction of Jasanoff’s (2003, 2007) work on “technologies of humility” to the accounting literature and to show how it can be useful in developing critical dialogic accountings for non-financial matters.

Drawing on Jasanoff’s (2003, 2007) distinction between “technologies of hubris” and “technologies of humility”, this study extends prior research on critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA) that seeks to “take pluralism seriously” (Brown, 2009; Dillard and Vinnari, 2019). This study shows how Jasanoff’s work facilitates constructing critical, reflexive approaches to accounting for non-financial matters consistent with agonistics-based CDAA.

Jasanoff’s four proposed focal points for developing new analytical tools for accounting for non-financial matters and promoting participatory governance – framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning – are argued to be useful in conceptualising possible CDAA technologies. These aspects are all currently ignored or downplayed in conventional approaches to accounting for non-financial matters, limiting accounting’s ability to promote more socially just and ecologically sustainable societies.

The authors introduce Jasanoff’s work on technologies of humility to show how CDAA, informed by Jasanoff’s proposed focal points, can help to expose controversial issues that powerful interests prefer to obscure, to surface the normative foundations of technocratic analytic methods, to address the need for plural perspectives and social learning and to bring all these aspects “into the dynamics of democratic debate” (Jasanoff, 2003, p. 240). As such, they provide criteria for constructing accounting technology consistent with agonistics-based CDAA.

This paper aims to examine current land administration practices (LA) in Tanzania to pinpoint divergences and convergences from past experiences that necessitated the 1990s reforms.

Literature review was carried out to understand historical practices which were then matched with current regulatory framework and observable LA practices captured through in-depth individual and group interviews of LA professionals in the public and private sectors, as well as LA customers in Dodoma Region Tanzania.

The current practices and government’s responses through land law reforms is largely a replica of what happened in the pre- and post-independence eras until just before the 1990s reform and is still characterised by corruption, inefficiency in service delivery and poor coordination among LA actors. It introduces superficial land governance structure over customary land as it was during colonialism; induces a temporary hikes in title delivery without any sustainability prospects just as it was immediately after independence; and induces more uncertainties for local land holders/investors than it addresses as it was during the implementation of the 1982 agricultural policy. Furthermore, the current awareness education during rural land titling programmes is inadequate to address the perceived risk of land alienation and dispossession among the poor.

A uniform LA system and tenure type throughout Tanzania that cater for the need of the time rather than a fragmented system of LA, which fuels maladministration and inefficiency in LA, is dearly needed.

Convergence of current LA practices with some of the worst past experiences explains some failures in land policy reform in Tanzania and the developing world in general.

The recognition of indigenous law in the 1991 Colombian Constitution initiated significant social, political, and cultural transformations within indigenous communities. This article explores how the indigenous law of Pijao communities in Tolima is being constructed, imagined and (re)produced by indigenous leaders who are simultaneously staking out their own political position through an engagement with these processes. The article suggests that this new generation of indigenous leaders seeks to ground its political legitimacy by drawing on the (legal) realm of the state; at the same time, challenges to its legitimacy are also increasingly framed in a legal idiom.