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.
