Table Of ContentI HEGEMONIC POWER IS NOT A UNIVERSAL
Part I
Hegemonic Power Is Not a Universal
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I.1. OUTLINE OF THE PROBLEM AND STATEMENT
OF OBJECTIVES
“Once there was a brawl between two brothers, and one of
them lost his life. The clan head found the victor responsible
for the other’s death, and ordered him executed. Word of
this verdict reached the guilty man in his hiding place. He
summoned his friends and explained to them the situation:
his brother had swindled him and had beaten him afterward.
During the scuffle, his brother succumbed to his wounds.
The listeners then resolved to form a delegation that would
address such allegations in the future. After examining the
circumstances, solutions would be arrived at by common
consent. From now on, they declared, the clan head could no
longer decide on his own; indeed, he would henceforward be
excluded from the proceedings. He would only be notified
once a verdict had been reached, and his role would be
merely to sanction this verdict. That happened long, long
ago, and that is our tradition.”
I was told this story, which allegedly took place in Ethiopia,
in Gollango, to the south of Lake Chamo (long known in
Europe by the name Lake Ruspoli), during a research trip to
the Horn of Africa. I was speaking with my informants about
our respective notions of legality and illegality, and those
empowered to decide between them. Here, a few scant
words suffice to portray a radical social process: the trans-
fer of jurisdiction from a centralized authority to a multitude
of responsible parties. This signified an extraordinary
expansion of a basic principle of Roman law concerning fair
negotiations—audiatur et altera pars, which no one in
southern Ethiopia could have heard of—so that not only
were all sides heard but the community of those present
was even drawn into the judgment process. The above tale
contains, in a concentrated form, all those constellations
pursued in the following inquiry: power and counterpower,
hegemony and resistance to hegemony, communication
and conceptions of law. These processes are examined
among communities where reciprocity is a dominant socie-
tal principle—communities where the interpenetration of
social networks and institutions obviates the need for cen-
tralized power. They offer a counterpoint to societies with
strict hierarchical structures. The people who have devised
this form of life in common are acting coequals.
Communities with this form, which can be found the
world over, are in no sense a historical forestage of monar-
chy or a primitive state. They are instead a countermodel to
the state of a kind that today only persists within state bor-
ders, and therefore must confront and occasionally negoti-
ate with state organizational structures. Sometimes these
communities are small social units, but frequently they
encompass millions of people. Often they have been
declared dead or obsolete as a social model, yet they con-
tinue to exist, despite the dangers they face from within and
without.
2 Part I
In the course of my inquiry, I would like to shed light on
social forms of expression, emanations, ideas, practices,
and institutions that oppose or at least problematize the
hegemony of one group of people over another. What has
particularly aroused my interest, in examining the reasons
for the strength and stability of these nonhegemonic forms
of communal life, is the extent to which reigning concep-
tions of values and laws uphold the continuity of societies
with this structure, for example, by counteracting tenden-
cies toward the accumulation of power.
My considerations depart from several brief, elemen-
tary observations concerning the many forms of human
coexistence. In the course of history, people have developed
manifold varieties of communal life; the state is only one
of the possibilities for society. I will contrast state struc-
tures with nonhegemonic societies presently observable in
many parts of the world, and in this connection, will give
particular attention to nonhierarchical societies in the Horn
of Africa.
Since British anthropologists in the 1940s first shed
light on “regulated anarchist” societies in Africa, there have
been continuous attempts to disparage these communities’
social and political achievements. This merits mention, even
if I will not enter into this particular anthropological contro-
versy here.1 The steadfast skepticism directed at antihege-
monic movements is all the more remarkable insofar as
critiques of hierarchical structures appear regularly within
Western societies, which at times have been described as
undergoing a fundamental crisis. Germane here are both
political structures (for example, in the form of protest
HegemonIc Power Is not a UnIversal 3
movements) as well as societal coexistence taken as a
whole (with, say, the demand for “streamlined hierarchies”
and the mediation law that came into force in 2012); here,
too, stress should be laid on egalitarian tendencies evident
in present-day industrial societies that highlight the rele-
vance of this problematic.
Afterward, I will examine the nature of those communi-
ties where law has no recourse to coercion, no authority
possesses a monopoly on violence, and legitimacy is
granted to systems of rules elaborated by members them-
selves.2 Only a detailed presentation of these societies will
suffice to clarify the complex historical and sociopolitical
relationships that link this peculiar form of law to nonhege-
monic societies. The efficacy of the law here forms the basis
for the established power relations—which are neither
hegemonic nor violent; it is thus advisable to elucidate these
concepts with reference to the analyses of Western theo-
rists and philosophers concerning this theme. Their consid-
erations will frequently prove suggestive, even when not
directly apropos.
For my observations, power relationships have a two-
fold significance: in general, as a supportive or disruptive
element within nonhegemonic societies, and in particular, in
relation to the legal order. After examining the concept of
law as a constituent part of the reality of life as a whole, I
will look at specific legal cases and study in detail the ways
that communicative action, undertaken in common, reaches
consensual solutions and makes possible consent to deci-
sions without resort to violence.
4 Part I
