Justice and Security Provision in Mozambique: a plural and politically contested field

Two new articles by DIIS Senior Researcher Helene Maria Kyed discuss the complex empirical landscape of justice and security provision in Mozambique, and its political dynamics. They take the reader through a range of case studies of a wide variety of actors who in one way or the other engage in resolving disputes and policing society: from private security guards and state police, to traditional chiefs, healers, community courts, human rights NGOs and community police. In low-income urban neighborhoods groups of young men have formed their own informal courts and punish criminals on a daily basis. This is endorsed by the local state police, but plays itself out entirely outside of official law. In the rural areas the state police rely extensively on traditional chiefs to do their job, and they have recruited young civilian men to perform arrests and help them investigate cases. At the same time the police are compelled into handling witchcraft cases, although this is outside their official mandate. In fact much of what goes on in practice happens in the shadow of the law.

The plural landscape of justice and security actors, practices and norms has been deepening after the 16 year of civil war ended in 1992 between the former rebel movement Renamo and the party in power, Frelimo. In 2004 this led to the recognition of ‘legal pluralism’ in the Constitution of the country. The two articles claim that, albeit this has been officially cast as the recognition of the country’s socio-cultural diversity, the Frelimo government has principally used it to consolidate its powerbase in the Renamo dominated rural hinterlands and in the poor urban neighborhoods where state police authority is contested.

The first article, published in the Hague Journal of the Rule of Law shows that legal pluralism is a mine field of conflicting power interests and overlapping claims to authority, which have deep historical roots. Whereas the different security actors may collaborate at certain times, they also compete intensely over ‘clients’, resources and the power to order society. At the same time they are constantly subject to different forms of political manipulation by party politicians and other power-holders. This means that security and justice provision are oftentimes more about politics than about problem solving. In the larger picture, and historically speaking, this falls back on contested attempts by central governments to domesticate non-state sources of authority in light of the state’s lack of popular legitimacy and capacity.

The second article is a review article published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, and it discusses three different contributions to the debate about legal pluralism in Mozambique since 2000. Key here is the argument that the state itself is highly heterogeneous, made up of a variety of ‘micro-states’ within the state. This is because, to do their job in a legally pluralistic context, state officials cannot alone rely on the law that is applicable in the present. A divergence between local notions of justice and state-legal ones are central here, as are the competition over the authority to decide cases and punish wrongdoers. In practice this means that the boundaries between state and other ‘systems’ of justice, such as the ‘customary’ or ‘traditional’ are blurred. The article discusses the concept of hybridity to describe such blurred boundaries and the difficulty of coming to terms with the kind of dichotomous thinking that has dominated understandings of legal pluralism.