The Comaroffs begin the paper in a manner that is a part question and part description. The object both acts being lawlessness in the post-colonies. They expound stated facts and discussed features regarding the extent of post-colonies violence, corruption, and crime. At the same time, the question these same facts and features upon starting them. However, their question is not directed at the truth or falsity of the fact, but rather the nature of the object. The conveyed 'lawlessness' with the statement.
Indeed the paper goes further and further into this vain of communicated truths, challenging not the statements themselves but the avenues of communications, the silences made possible by the patterns of communication. 'Lawless' as a signifying concept, in particular, is extensively dealt with. The characteristic of denotes an occasion of absence or failing of the lawful procedure. This can mean anything from corruptive practice, or out violent suspension of sovereignty. Moreover, this characterization is not devoid of particularity. This lawless is a sustained state within the post-colonies. However, by drawing attention in this way to the lawlessness as a characteristic feature, in it's sustained actuality within functioning nation-states, and its principled contradiction of a nation-state revels cross firing off signals. The Comaroffs systematically deal with the actual, the ideal and communicated overlaps of disorder in the post-colonies, in segregating problems, presumptions, and paradoxes.
What groundwork that is laid here has to do with the interconnectedness of law as a functioning system within globalized neoliberal histories of economic production, and sovereign argument. These historical processes revel opportunities for judicial arguments as well as criminal emprise. Through this categorical linkage the Comaroffs, with multiple cases show how the opposing two are directly liked through the very same processes.
