This collection of essays hand explores a major undercurrent of the debate on rights, namely the question of universalism and cultural relativism. It also explores how rights are claimed and contested, vindicated and politicized and, in different ways, transform social practice.

Focusing on the condition of public authority in Africa, Twilight Institutions investigates how, when confronted with state failure, public institutions attempt to gain authority; operating in the twilight between state and society, between public and private.

• Approaches public authority 'from below', exploring a variety of concrete encounters between forms of public authority and the more or less mundane practices of ordinary people

Access to land and property is vital to people s livelihoods in rural, peri-urban, and urban areas in Africa. People exert tremendous energy and imagination to have land claims recognized as rights with a variety of political, administrative, and legal institutions. This book is dedicated to a detailed analysis of how public authority and the state are formed through debates and struggles over property in the Upper East Region of Ghana. While scarcity may indeed promote exclusivity, the evidence from this book shows that when there are many institutions competing for the right to authorize...

The authors in this volume focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes and territorializations.