Fractured Sites of Law

In this article I consider how reconstruction processes, from the post-disaster site to everyday life, present a physical, concrete location to trace the way international law shapes and defines cultural, material and social spaces, while producing abstract spaces in which to engage, negotiate with and manipulate social legalities. Following the Maharashtra earthquake in India domestic and supranational law transformed the geographical area of 67 rural villages into a modern township, shifting the material base of the economy and demographic make up of the population. The World Bank, state government and formal and informal legal processes presented different sites of socio-legal regulation in the reconstruction of houses, families and communities. In this article I trace the role of international law in the physical reconstruction of the rural villages to the modern townships in which state, law and capital sketch a new urban skyline. This site of shifting physical, social and cultural relations provides a micro-example of broader everyday reconstruction processes, whereby the home, the community and the state are reshaped through different scales of socio-legal relations. The analysis of this local physical site of reconstruction provides a snapshot at a moment of crisis, a fracture in the lawscape where the local traditional stone boundary walls were shattered and redesigned through patriarchal and capitalist urban nuclear structures of concrete and steel. It is this rupture in social relations that exposes the circles, like those of a tree, of law’s historic role in shaping society from post-coloniality to globalisation. In this article I draw on feminist geographic and legal theory to trace the fissures in this concrete site of reconstruction, to reveal the ‘man-made’ fabrications of legal materialism in which alternative feminist agencies may negotiate, manoeuvre and disrupt the material urbanisation of law

Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Population · Sociology · Law · Law in Society and Culture

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