Rechtspluralismus und überlappende souveränitäten: Globalisierung und der »listige staat« in Indien

The article addresses the issues of legal plurality, overlapping sovereignties, the consequent fragmentation of state action and the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs which characterize the new architecture of global governance. It will be argued that the widely prevalent diagnosis of the irrelevance of the state and an erosion of its sovereignty overlooks the continued importance of the state as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neoliberal agendas to the national and local levels. The article introduces the idea of the cunning state in an attempt to shift the focus of study from a consideration of state (in)capacity measured against a Western ideal to a delineation of state strategies. It is argued that whereas weak states lack the capacity to protect the interests of vulnerable citizens, cunning states show strength or weakness depending on the domestic interests at stake. The paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatisation of the commons in India. The case studies point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalisation that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. They also reveal pragmatic issue-based alliances between civil society and the state. Finally, they point to the need to ground the study of globalisation in a fine-grained ethnography, linking the little to the large and to explore the specificity of various trajectories of legal plurality and its transnationalisation in particular contexts and cases.