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...carjacked family's at a traffic light. As the child struggled to get out of his seatbelt and out the open car door, the assailants drove off, dragging Joao Helio's body for several miles before abandoning the dismembered remains.
In recounting this horrific murder, media accounts--particularly the international reports--fixated on the overwhelming outcry of the city's inhabitants. In a city inured to violence, reporters asked, why the exceptional outrage in this particular case? Stepping back even further, how did collective dispassion become the predicted response to sensational violence and police paralysis?
The collected essays in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony intervene in this conversation, further complicating perceptions of public cynicism towards "law and order" in postcolonial societies. Disorder, as utilized by the authors, denotes endemic lawlessness and is illustrated by violence and extra-legal activities. But this crisis in governance does not signify indifference towards law, its power and institutions. Through case studies conducted in a diverse spectrum of postcolonial states, the authors demonstrate that law and its accoutrements continue to capture popular imaginings, despite repeated failures to reflect or govern the local realities. One of the ironies that the authors attempt to explicate is the fact that mounting criminal violence and illicit economic practices are not a "rejoinder" to the law, nor do they prove popular disillusionment with the normative or ethical power of law. As editors Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff claim in their introduction, "[L]aw has been further fetishized, even as, in most postcolonies, higher and higher walls are built to protect the propertied from lawlessness, even as the language of legality insinuates itself deeper and deeper into the realm of the illicit." (1) "Legality," they claim, is the...
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