This book analyses translations of 'the rule of law', focusing on contemporary donor-driven projects with non-state courts in rural Bangladesh, and shows how in these projects, global norms change local courts - but only if they are translated, often in unexpected ways from the perspective of international actors.
As norms are translated, their meaning changes and only if their meaning changes in ways that are intelligible to people within a specific context, the social and political dynamics of this context do change as well. It demonstrates how such translations do not follow linear trajectories from 'the global' to 'the local', rather, they unfold in a recursive back and forth movement between different actors located in different context. What happens to transnational norms when they travel from one place to another? How do norms change when they move and how do they affect the place where they arrive? This book develops a novel theoretical account of norm translation that is located in between theories of norm diffusion and norm localization.
Instead, this essay links recent trends in writing to more entangled histories of development. Furthermore, my analysis sheds a different light on critical debates that perceive the “development encounter” as a story of the “West versus the rest”.
Bringing them into dialogue with institutional discourses relevant to their respective periods, I argue that these works of fiction open up a unique understanding of key issues and problems in development thinking and planning. The texts are from three different historical periods from the colonial past to the present. The article presents an analysis of two novels and a short story from Uganda and Kenya: Akiki Nyabongo’s The Story of an African Chief (1935), Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976), and Binyavanga Wainaina’s Discovering Home (2003). The article combines two lines of enquiry: first, a historical perspective on “development” as a history of changing and conflicting meanings and practices in planning and controlling social and economic change, and, second, a narrative studies perspective on fiction as a source of knowledge in social and political research. In this article I address how East African writers have responded to and conceptualized the encounter with development in works of fiction.
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