Giovanni Arrighi Array

“As the editors point out in their insightful introduction, rising criminality in postcolonies is not merely an antisocial response to poverty, exclusion, or scarcity; nor is it simply the result of a breakdown in the state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. It is also the expression of a “dialectic of law and dis/order, framed by neoliberal mechanisms of deregulation and new modes of mediating human transactions.” As such, “criminal violence does not so much repudiate the rule of law or the licit operations of the market as appropriate their forms—and recommission their substance.”… In a short review it is impossible to do justice to the richness of the ethnographic material presented in the individual chapters. This material not only shows the variety of situations in which we can detect the dialectic of law and dis/order that the Comaroffs theorize in their introductory summation. Equally important, they point to new directions in which the theorization can be usefully developed.”