Suchergebnisse

This article investigates the ways in which state and non-state laws become intricately intertwined in practices of conflict resolution in rural Bangladesh. Instead of inhabiting separate legal universes, I show how state and non-state laws become entangled in what I call the logic of non-enforcement. People in rural Bangladesh frequently appeal to state courts—yet they frequently do so not in order to get binding and enforceable verdicts, but to alter the outcomes of a non-state justice institution like the shalish in their favour. This leads to unexpected patterns of political accountability: people expect local elected politicians to intervene in the state courts, stop pending cases and bring them back to community-based resolution in non-state fora. Elected politicians are thus held accountable according to their ability to prevent the enforcement of state laws. At the same time, state agencies frequently bring legal cases to trial in non-state courts. I conceptualise this blurring between state and non-state laws, its underlying social dynamics as well as its normative justifications as a distinct 'logic of non-enforcement'. According to this logic, state courts decisively affect the outcomes of processes of conflict resolution in rural Bangladesh while state laws nonetheless are systematically not enforced.

"Trends in legal philosophy, international law, transnational law, law and religion, and political science all point toward the increasing role played by non-state law in both public and private ordering. Numerous organizations, institutions, associations, and groups have emerged alongside the nation-state, each purporting to provide their members with rules and norms to govern their conduct and organize their affairs. The nation-state increasingly finds itself sandwiched, so to speak, between two broad and contrasting categories of non-state law. The first category - law above the state - captures a wide range of legal systems that function across the territorial borders of nation-states. The second category - law below the state - includes various forms of local customary, religious, and indigenous law. Indeed, as these forms of non-state law persist and proliferate alongside the nation-state, the relationship between state and non-state law becomes more complex, multifaceted, and tense. This volume addresses this relationship between the nation-state and these various forms of non-state law, considering whether and to what extent state and non-state law can coexist and how each form of law seeks to influence as well as transform the other."--Page 1 and back cover

Non-state actors have always been treated with ambivalence in the works of international law. While their empirical existence is widely acknowledged and their impact and influence uncontested, non-state actors are still not in the centre of international legal research. The idea that non-state actors are not law-makers, however, stands in sharp contrast with the growing notion of non-state actors as law-takers. This book examines the position of non-state actors in international law as law-makers and law-takers and questions whether these different positions can or should be separated from each other. Each contribution reveals both the political and normative aspects of the question as well as the positivistic possibilities and constraints to accommodate non-state actors as law-takers and law-makers in the contemporary international legal system. Altogether, each expert reveals that the position of non-state actors in international law is not a fixed one but changes with the functional and theoretical perspectives of the observer. Non-State Actor Dynamics in International Law is a welcomed addition to an under researched field of legal study. An indispensable read to scholars and policy makers wishing to gain new insights into general discourse on non-state actors in international law and the process of norm formation in the international realm. -- Back cover.