Performing Power in Zimbabwe: Politics, Law, and the Courts since 2000
Susanne Verheul
Sep 2021 · African Studies Book 155 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
287
Pages
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About this ebook
Focusing on political trials in Zimbabwe's Magistrates' Courts between 2000 and 2012, Susanne Verheul explores why the judiciary have remained a central site of contestation in post-independence Zimbabwe. Drawing on rich court observations and in-depth interviews, this book foregrounds law's potential to reproduce or transform social and political power through the narrative, material, and sensory dimensions of courtroom performances. Instead of viewing appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, Susanne Verheul argues that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in performative legal engagements. In this manner, law was much more than a mere instrument. Law was a site in which competing conceptions of political authority were given expression, and in which people's understandings of themselves as citizens were formed and performed.
About the author
Susanne Verheul is a Research Fellow in International Development at the University of Oxford where her research focuses on questions of law and politics in Southern Africa. She previously taught at University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
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