Selbstjustiz in Benin. Zur Debatte über den Charakter außerstaatlicher Sanktionsformen in Afrika

A particular practice of arbitrary law has become common in Benin in the 1990s, usually exacted in cases of theft by unorganised assemblages of people. The author situates this phenomenon in the context of a practice of extra-legal justice (i.e. justice as practised outside the realm of the state), generally marked by an increase in crimes against property and by a growth of violent forms of reaction towards such crimes. The reason behind this tendency is neither to be found in the suppression of "traditional", i.e. pre-colonial law, as is sometimes argued by "traditionalistic" positions in African legal studies; nor can extra-legal justice, as practised today, be understood to have emerged from "African tradition", as a "modernistic" point of view may have it. Pre-colonial practices of justice are difficult to reconstruct, but they probably varied considerably; thus it is meaningless to speak of "traditional sanctions". The author identifies a number of social and political factors that have functionally transformed legal practice: the most important among them are the emergence of a commodity economy, urbanisation, and the failure of the neopatrimonial state to enact the rule of law. Thus, today's extra-legal sanction practices are resulting from contemporary Benin society, rather than from the suppression or continuation of "tradition".