NUMBER 57 / 2008 "Strategies of Struggles" among the Santal Adviasi Fauzia Shariff 1 Punx and skins united Aimar Ventsel 45 The Everyday Functioning of Benin's Legal System Thomas Bierschenk 101 Decentralization and Co-Management of Protected Areas in Indonesia Yonariza and Ganesh P. Shivakoti 141 Book Reviews 167

Brauchler examines the Indonesian decentralisation process and the revival of tradition and cultural self-determination in the Moluccas. Tuori studies restatements and codifications of customary laws in Africa. Harboe Knudsen considers European Union regulation of the marketing of dairy products in Lithuania. Douglas and Hersi examine the attitudes of Muslims to the smoking of khat. Simarmata studies the contrast between Indonesian state law and local officials' practice regarding natural resources use in East Kalimantan.

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

Debates surrounding the concept of law are not new. For a wide variety of reasons and in a wide variety of ways, the meaning of 'law' has long been an important part of Western thought, both within legal scholarship and beyond. The contributors to Concepts of Law are international experts from the fields of comparative law, legal philosophy, and the social sciences. Combining theoretical analyses with case studies, they explore various legal concepts and contexts from diverse national and disciplinary perspectives. Legal and normative pluralism is a theme throughout. Some chapters discuss the development of state law and legal systems. Others wrestle with law’s rhetoric and the potential utility of alternative vocabularies, e.g., 'governance' and ’governmentality’. Others reveal the rich polyjurality of the present, from the local to the global. The result is a rich picture of both present scholarship on laws and norms and the state of contemporary legal complexity, each crossing traditional boundaries.

Although international development discourse considers the state as a crucial development actor, there remains a significant discrepancy between the official norms of the state and public services and the actual practices of political elites and civil servants. This text interrogates the variety of ways in which state policies and legal norms have been translated into the set of practical norms which make up real governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the concept of practical norms is an appropriate tool for an ethnographic investigation of public bureaucracies, interactions between civil servants and users, and the daily functioning of the state in Africa. It demonstrates that practical norms are usually different from official norms, complementing, bypassing and even contradicting them. In addition, it explores the positive and negative effects of different aspects of this ‘real governance’. This text will be of key interest to academics, students and researchers in the fields of development, political science, anthropology and development studies, African studies, international comparative studies, implementation studies, and public policy.

A major challenge for the advancement of democratic governance in Africa is the extraction of money by ruling parties from the state to fund their electoral campaigns and gain political advantage over opponents. Drawing upon in-depth case studies of Benin and Ghana, Rachel Sigman considers how, and with what consequences, party leaders control and access public funds to finance their political operations. Weaving together biographical data on government ministers, surveys of civil servants, elite interviews, and archival research, Sigman explains leaders' extraction strategies and connects these strategies to how politicians manage state personnel. In so doing, she challenges the perception of African states as uniformly weak and argues that effective government is possible even in contexts of widespread state politicization, corruption, and clientelism. Demonstrating the profound impact that extractive financing practices have on democratic institutions, Sigman illuminates and develops our understanding of “good governance” across the African continent.