The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique

 Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by political analysts as well as by the international community of donors, who have supported the juridical reform of the state which has been ongoing since the end of the civil war and transition from Socialism in the mid 1990s. The present book by anthropologist Juan Obarrio reveals a very different picture. The work is an ethnographic study of transformations of the state in Mozambique over a span of thirty-five years: from Portuguese colonialism, through Afro-Marxism, civil war, and the current neoliberal democratic transition. It examines the ongoing construction of a complex juridical and political field of forces in which several competing authorities claim sovereignty over the local. Obarrio's main argument is that despite the wave of democratization and liberalization that has occurred over the last two decades, the current Mozambican state enforces a type of restricted citizenship, linked to the re-appraisal of pre-colonial "customary" formations. Ultimately, Obarrio views the African postcolony as a maze of competing jurisdictions through which historical difference is reproduced, showing the limits of state sovereignty as well as democratic citizenship. The legacies of violence from the colonial regime, the Socialist experience and the devastating the civil war still inhabit the force of law today, underscoring the necessity of an anthropology of law and justice for enriching the approaches of Africanist postcolonial theory. In Obarrio's account, custom re-emerges, not as a figure of the past but, rather, as the ambiguous future of postcolonial political history.