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| Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa
ISBN: 9781846159152
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Boydell & Brewer
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Vigilantes -- Africa; Crime prevention -- Africa -- Citizen participation;
An unprecedented overview of anthropological and political science research on vigilantism in Africa which makes an important and innovative contribution to current discussions on the relationship between violent self-justice andstate and non-state agencies.
Self-justice and legal self-help groups have been gaining importance throughout Africa. The question of who is entitled to formulate 'legal principles', enact 'justice', police 'morality' and sanction 'wrongdoings' has increasingly become a subject of controversy and conflict. These conflicts focus on the strained relationship between state sovereignty and citizens' self-determination. More particularly, they concern the conditions, modes and means of thelegitimate execution of power, and in this volume are seen as a diagnostics as to how social actors in Africa debate and practise socio-political order.
State agencies try to bring vigilante groups under control by channelling their activities, repressing them, or using them for their own interests. Vigilante groups usually must struggle for recognition and acceptance in local socio-political spheres. As several of the contributions in the volume show, legal self-help groups in Africa therefore 'domesticate' themselves by, among other things, seeking legitimation, engaging in publicly acceptable non-vigilante activities, or institutionalizing what often began as a rather unrestrained and 'disorderly' social movement.
Thomas G. Kirsch is Professor & Chair of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the University of Constance, Germany; Tilo Grätz is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany & Associate Lecturer at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
Pratten David :
David Pratten is Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa and Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Since 2010 David has been Co-Editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institut. His publications include Nigeria: The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (2007), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute. |
