parikshith_shashikumar Annotations

In response to:
Law and disorder in the postcolony

3. Argument Anatomy: Excluding the Introduction, list out/ identify the key movements of the argument, till conclusion. Each one a few sentences. (If a Book, list out what each chapter/section contributed)

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 1:21pm
Most of the paper goes into questioning the supposed condition of lawlessness, located within the post-colonies. Using a plethora of case studies a link is drawn between an increased tread in privatized economic opportunity on a global level and a simultaneous diffusing centralized governance. The post -colonies are primed sites for such conditions resulting in a socio-cultural system of economic exploitation micro and micro level. 
However, such an argument stands on relations of law, as well as post-coloniality to these neoliberally engineered socio-cultural systems of economic exploitation. The Comaroffs do so in separate dedicated to both. In a section titled "Fetishism of the Law", they cite multiple cases to show hoe legal infrastructure exists admits complex socio-political trends and the intentions and interactions of actors. Suspended amidst such dynamic factors the legal framework is not an insulated system of judicial value, but just framework where the same culture of economic opportunity can infiltrate and change. Moreover, the economic trend has much to gain from the tool of law. A subtle point made here is that legal precedence is a result of legal procedure, thus manipulation or semiotic mimicking of said procedure would serve as a legal condition. The decentralized framework creates many such conditions for manipulation and mimicry.
As for the second leg of the argument, the post-colonial relation to economic exploitation on a culturally systemic scale is given a pass. Rather a negative argument is made, where such systemic exploitation is mapped in the developed global north. It is shown that systemic exploitation is only better covered up by judicially centralized nations but they fall prey to the same conditions of corrupt exploitation. Moreover, just as in the post-colonial cases illegal activities taken the form of heterogeneous organized systems, where the type of activity committed is commodified based on the market of exploitive needs. Indeed in centralized government, the state itself is the major site of "lawless" activity.          
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2. Agenda : Thesis, Ideas of Focus, Claims/ Assumptions, Method

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 1:18pm
The method of analysis is through the uses of cases. They refer to the works of a multitude of scholars, who have themselves studied particular events of violence, corruption, and crime within the post-colony. The first stem is showing the presence of judicial elements amidst the site of violation. Presences could be through opportunities made by or encouraged by legal parties, the deliberate using of legal means for dubious ends or the opportune suspension of particular legalities for wholly different reasons creating disorder in its wake. The point fundamentally made is is that lawlessness bares the figure prints of lawful procedure.
The argument is scaled up when illegal activities are analyzed in tandem with particular post-colony histories. It is shown, again through cases, that economic frameworks of privatized opportunity and systemic disadvantage encourage markets of illegal activity, particular to the larger socio-economic labor patterns of each jurisdictional area. Adding to this the conclusion of the earlier point, it is shown that global economic calls for further dispersed control and the strengthening of the free market. In post-colonial states, that bears the imprint of imperial economic suzerainty, often have non-centralized governments that are primed for the promotion of young economies. Such a setting is exacerbated global market trends, making premium sites of opportunity both from a top-down and bottom-up point of view. The
The final leg of the argument rests on a linking of legal structure to economic opportunity. The argument is slick here, drawing more from the ideas of economic and political thinkers rather than a post-colonial case study. Legal activity is quickly shown to be an act of objectifying and they're creating the opportunity of sovereignty. Likewise, the trend of promoting privatized distributed power is an act of diffusing of an oligarchic distribution of power into a more democratically arranged one. Between the two principles, processes are set into motion where ruthless economic exploitation is made into a cultural industry and control of the same is weakened to the point of being exploited by the same culture.
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1. Framing : Identify the Concern, Context and Question. Comment on the relation of the three.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 1:15pm
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. 
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