A collection of interdisciplinary essays about access to justice in Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, Sudan and Britain showing the need to recognise that each culture has its own sense of rule of law and highlighting the importance of the perceptions of the litigants and court personnel. BNS, 250pp, NETHERLANDS. E J BRILL.

An attempt to move away from punitive theories of justice to a more informal approach to conflict resolution. The author looks at both restorative justice and conventional formal approaches and considers what each can offer, especially in the context of accountability. The author examines the experiences of restorative justice in 25 programmes in six countries; Canada, South Africa, USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Index, refs, apps, notes, xv, 316pp, UK. OXFORD UNIV PRESS.

The principal aim of this work is to provide a forum for leading international lawyers with experience and interest in Africa to address a broad range of intellectual challenges concerning the contribution of African states and peoples to international law. As such, the volume addresses orthodox topics of international law such as jurisdiction and intervention but tackles them from an African perspective, and seeks to ask whether, in each case, the African perspec-tive is unique or affirms existing arrangements of international law. Index, bib, 338pp, UK. HART PUBLISHING LTD.

The African continent exceeds in size and natural resources the combined territories of Europe, the United States and China. Yet most Africans struggle just to survive. The authors of Africa's Challenge describe the experiences of different African countries, underscoring the need to use law to transform Africa's inherited institutions. Without sensible legal change, Africa will suffer the consequences of inherited systems built ramshackle and on the fly according to principles of individual greed and ad hoc manipulation. The essays contained herein offer practical critiques of a problem that has plagued a continent. Index, 228pp, USA. AFRICA WORLD PRESS.

APCOF is a network of African policing practitioners drawn from state and nonstate institutions. It is active in promoting police accountability through civilian oversight. It believes that the broad values behind establishment of civilian oversight is to assist in restoring public confidence, develop a culture of human rights, integrity and transparency within the police, and promote good working relationships between the police and the community. Through this publication APCOF also seeks to highlight the importance of policing oversight in the ongoing efforts to build African police agencies into organisations that are effective and efficient but also respectful of peoples' and human rights. 128pp, SOUTH AFRICA. AFRICAN MINDS.

First published by the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, this revised edition remains a rare study of criminology in the African context, considered from a pan-African perspective. Some topics covered include traditional, colonial and present days administration of criminal justice; the problems associated with criminal justice in Madagascar; state violence in Uganda; a case study of corruption in Nigeria; criminal politics in Cameroon; drug trafficking and abuse; homicide in Sierra Leone; youth and crime; the relationship between migration, crime and delinquency; and violence as a weapon of the dispossessed. A final chapter considers the state of teaching and research in the field of criminology in Africa. The contributions are in both English and French. 285pp, UGANDA. FOUNTAIN PUBLISHERS.

Self-justice and legal self-help groups have been gaining importance throughout Africa. The question of who is entitled to formulate 'legal principles', enact 'justice', police 'morality' and sanction 'wrongdoings' has increasingly become a subject of controversy and conflict. These conflicts focus on the strained relationship between state sovereignty and citizens' self-determination. More particularly, they concern the conditions, modes and means of the legitimate execution of power, and in this volume are seen as a diagnostics as to how social actors in Africa debate and practise socio-political order. State agencies try to bring vigilante groups under control by channelling their activities, repressing them, or using them for their own interests. Vigilante groups usually must struggle for recognition and acceptance in local socio-political spheres. As several of the contributions in the volume show, legal self-help groups in Africa therefore 'domesticate' themselves by, among other things, seeking legitimation, engaging in publicly acceptable non-vigilante activities, or institutionalizing what often began as a rather unrestrained and 'disorderly' social movement. 192pp, UK. JAMES CURREY PUBLISHERS.

Explores the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex. 336pp, USA. OHIO U P.

By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies all practices that detail the ways that justice is made real. 350pp, UK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Customary laws and traditional institutions in Africa constitute comprehensive legal systems that regulate the entire spectrum of activities from birth to death. Once the sole source of law, customary rules now exist in the context of pluralist legal systems with competing bodies of domestic constitutional law, statutory law, common law and international human rights treaties. The book promotes discussion and understanding of customary law and explores its continued relevance in sub-Saharan Africa. This volume considers the characteristics of customary law and efforts to ascertain and codify customary law, and how this body of law differs in content, form and status from legislation and common law. It also addresses a number of substantive areas of customary law including the role and power of traditional authorities; customary criminal law; customary land tenure, property rights and interstate succession; and the relationship between customary law, human rights and gender equality. 562pp, UK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Law is considered by lawyers and sociologists to be at the very center of social integration in Western societies, whereas social anthropological discourses regard law as marginal in Non-Western societies. Empirical studies of multi-sited legal frameworks in many post-colonial political settings demonstrate the difficulties to achieve any predictable mode of governance, much less good governance. The volume challenges both the marginalization of legal arrangements and discourses in social anthropology as well as the marginalization of legal anthropology within social anthropology. 304pp, GERMANY. LIT VERLAG.

A collection of essays constructing a history of prisons in Africa. Topics include punishments, living conditions, ethnic mapping, contemporary prison camps and the political use of prison from the slave trade to the Rwandan genocide. The authors also looks at the historical development of incarceration in Africa, from being a relatively unknown punishment in pre-colonial times to its widespread use during colonisation and its continuing use by modern states. Index, bib, notes, b/w illus, x, 287pp, USA. HEINEMANN INC.

Ranges widely over topics as diverse as cultural property, coups d'etat and the plunder of antiquities, formalities of marriage; child betrothal, divorce, sororate marriage, levirate marriage; succession and inheritance, oral will, and administration of estate. xv, 256pp. index. GERMANY. LIT VERLAG.

1998 3825840093 Paperback

While law and development discourse has dealt with international poverty, advocates of poverty reduction usually operate within a nation-state context. This book provides a new framework for the future theoretical development of international poverty law. It also explores specific human rights initiatives that address particular aspects of poverty, including human rights conventions, measures to counter the tendency of intellectual property law to undermine food security, the right to food as framed in UN development documents, and the startlingly important develop-ment in South Africa of an alternative vision of constitutional law. The contributors position international poverty law as a legitimate field for multidisciplinary research and dialogue, and open up new arenas for international poverty law to contribute to addressing poverty reduction. Index, bib, 250pp, UK. ZED BOOKS.

Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In this collection, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth and order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the south in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. Index, 357pp, USA. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.

Using both pre-industrial and modern settings, the author examines the tension between the idea of law as an attempt to regulate society, and these attempts at control being only temporary and incomplete with consequences that are not fully predictable. Bib, index, xxx, 270pp, UK. JAMES CURREY, 0852559100

Drawing on material from Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America and Europe, the authors reflect on the experiences of people of African descent to offer a convergence of criminologies in and outside the West. Also investigates whether Western criminological accounts are relevant to the comprehension of crime, criminality and systems of justice in Africa, the Caribbean and South America. Index, ix, refs, 266pp, UK. ASHGATE.

Explains the terms, concepts and rules of humanitarian law in accessible and reader friendly A-Z entries. Outlines the dangers, spells out the law and points the way toward dealing with violators. BNS, 489pp, UK. ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD.

An introduction to the issue of intellectual property rights discussing in particular the privatisation of ideas and traditional knowledge for the benefit of corporations. Refs, 146pp, UK. ZED BOOKS, 1842771094

A study about the ambit of criminal law identifying the international legal issues arising when a state exercises extraterritorial jurisdiction. The author brings together detailed accounts of universal jurisdiction in fourteen countries including Senegal, the UK, the USA, Australia, France and Israel. BNS, 286pp, UK. OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 0199274266

In Sub-Saharan Africa, property rights law is an especially potent source of instability. As the worldwide post-Cold War era trend toward state-run property rights expansion clashes with longstanding customs and what many would consider bureaucratic incapacity, conflicts are inevitable. Many advocates from NGOs have argued that the region's manifold governance problems stem at least in part from the state's inability to enforce property rights. Instead, 'private' property rights regimes, largely independent of the state, have flourished. In recent years, there has, in fact, been a concerted effort to create stronger property rights laws, and here, Joireman traces how this has played out in Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya. The problem is that while new, better laws might now be on the books, they effectively do not exist if they are not enforced--a fact that causes major problems for development. Those who possess land cannot legally prove it's theirs, and those who are often culturally prohibited from owning property, like women and migrants, have trouble exercising their legal rights to property. While there are those who may argue that African understandings of property law are relatively efficient and adaptable because they have evolved organically, Joireman contends that this view discounts one very likely possibility - that such systems are in fact predatory and favour elites. 224pp, USA. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA.