The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa

Olaf Zenker is Professor and Chair of Social Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. He has published on modern statehood, rule of law, bureaucracy, justice, land reform as well as conflict and identity formations in South Africa and Northern Ireland. His book publications include the co-edited volumes South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid's Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era (Routledge, 2017), Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Representational Practices (Berghahn Books, 2010) as well as the monograph Irish/ness Is All around Us: Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland (Berghahn Books, 2013).Markus Virgil Hoehne is Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He works on conflict, identity, state formation, borderlands, transitional justice and forensic anthropology in Somalia. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Rift Valley Institute 2015), the editor of a special issue on The Effects of 'Statelessness': Dynamics of Somali Politics, Economy and Society Since 1991 (Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2013), and co-editor of Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa (James Currey, 2010) and Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, society and Politics (Hurst, 2010).