Cohen — Volume 57, Issue 2

The "turn to culture" in law and development scholarship proposes that transplanted laws and institutions fail because they lack cultural foundations in recipient societies. Cohen examines neocultural interventionist proposals promoting rule of law through culture change, critiquing how culture is conceptualized as either consciousness (individual values and beliefs) or lawlike rules conditioning behavior. Cohen argues these conceptualizations produce misrecognitions of actual people and their practices. Drawing on anthropological accounts of development challenges, she suggests local populations may use law contrary to rule-of-law agendas, setting law against itself and mobilizing violence. Cohen contends that understanding culture change requires complicating the relationship between changing consciousness and changing behavior. She uses ethnographic analysis to caution against prescriptive deployments of culture in development projects, arguing instead for recognition of how culture and law interact in complex, contested ways that development interventions cannot easily control or predict.

Topics: Legal Theory · International Law

Keywords: law and development · culture change · legal culture · rule of law · institutional transplants