New book State Violence and Human Rights

State Violence and Human Rights (2009) is edited by S. Jensen and J. Jefferson (senior researchers at RCT, Copenhagen). It addresses how legal practices - rooted in global human rights discourse or local demands - take hold in societies where issues of state violence remain to be resolved. Attempts to make societies accountable to human rights norms regularly draw on international legal conventions governing state conduct.

As such, interventions tend to be based on inherently normative assumptions about conflict, justice, rights and law, and so often fail to take into consideration the reality of local circumstances, and in particular of state institutions and their structures of authority. Against the grain of these analyses, State Violence and Human Rights takes as its point of departure the fact that law and authority are contested. Grounded in the recognition that concepts of rights and legal practices are not fixed, the contributors to this volume address their contestation 'in situ'; as they focus on the everyday practices of state officials, non-state authorities and reformers. Addressing how state representatives - the police officer, the prison officer, the ex-combatant militia member, the hangman and the traditional leader - have to negotiate the tensions between international legal imperatives, the expectations of donors, the demands of institutions, as well as their own interests, this volume thus explores how legal discourses are translated from policy into everyday practice.

The book includes chapters with case-studies from Palestine, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, India and Costa Rica. The Chapter by DIIS researcher Helene Maria Kyed, Traditional Authority and Localization of State Law. The Intricacies of boundary marking in policing rural Mozambique, particularly explores the interaction between traditional authorities and the police as new legislation on legal pluralism is translated into practice by local state police officers. The chapter illustrates the ways in which national law is creatively appropriated, contested and transformed as it meets locally lived realities and becomes the subject of local negotiations and competition for sovereign authority. In the process new forms of state violence emerge, and people's avenues to justice and security becomes predicated on their ability to negotiate with individual traditional leaders and the state police.