Blood, Land, and Sex Legal and Political Pluralism in Eritrea [Paperback]

In Eritrea, state, traditional, and religious laws equally prevail, but any of these legal systems may be put into play depending upon the individual or individuals involved in a legal dispute. Because of conflicting laws, it has been difficult for Eritreans to come to a consensus on what constitutes their legal system. In Blood, Land, and Sex, Lyda Favali and Roy Pateman examine the roles of the state, ethnic groups, religious groups, and the international community in several key areas of Eritrean lawblood feud or murder, land tenure, gender relations (marriage, prostitution, rape), and female genital surgery. Favali and Pateman explore the intersections of the various laws and discuss how change can be brought to communities where legal ambiguity prevails, often to the grave harm of women and other powerless individuals. This significant book focuses on how Eritrea and other newly emerging democracies might build pluralist legal systems that will be acceptable to an ethnically and religiously diverse population.

Pateman (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) and Favali (law, Univ. of Turin, Italy) use a legal pluralist approach in an admirable attempt to unravel the intricate fabric of Eritrea's system of law. Eritrea is not atypical of African states with a population abundant in ethnic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity overlaid with a colonial past, a liberation struggle, a transitional era, and independence. For every legal issue there is a state rule, a traditional rule, and a sharia rule that may or may not differ because of divergence between state and ethnic or religious groups. Four major actorsthe state, ethnies (producing traditional law), religious groups (mainly Coptic Christians and Sunni Muslims), and the international/transnational communityoperate in this maze and define contemporary Ethiopian law. Complicating this task is the use of languages of state law, Amharic, Arabic, Italian, English, and now Tigrinya incomprehensible to malS>