030208 KU State-Building after Conflict (2021S)

The modern state that came into being in the wake of the Westphalian Peace in Europe subsequently spread, through both choice and coercion, to virtually the entire globe. The military and technological superiority of European societies acquired through the scientific and industrial revolutions allowed them to dominate and subjugate the rest of the world, but it is important to realise that the modern corporate state spread primarily because it was more effective and more efficient than traditional forms of political organisation. The modern administrative state offered capabilities and opportunities that other societies couldn’t do without, thus leading to sustained and ongoing efforts to transpose its constituent elements into different cultures and adapt them to local needs.

This course introduces you to these processes of transposition and adaptation of Western notions of law and governance to other parts of the world. To use a biological metaphor, concepts, institutions, organisational forms and mandates that had grown in a European cultural soil and in response to particular stimuli and interests were uprooted and replanted into foreign soil. Some of these plants flourished, often by adapting and transforming beyond recognition, while others withered. Here you will learn about this ecology of legal transplants and begin to become a gardener of comparative institutions.

Transplantation is a universal phenomenon and the central domain of comparative law. In this course, we draw many but not all examples from the tortuous modernisation process in the Muslim world. Its experience of sudden inferiority and humiliating domination is emblematic of many Southern societies. The resulting practical, ideational and psychological difficulties of introducing ‘best practices’ and ‘good governance’ into a competing traditional normative and social system are thus not uniquely Islamic but emblematic of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’ of modernity.