The Rule of Law and Its Rivals: Commentary on Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order by Nick Cheesman

This comment on Cheesman’s Opposing the Rule of Law explores five elements of the work that lead me to describe it as exemplary. These are its interdisciplinary fluency and reach, spanning high theory and ground-level ethnography; its specific argument about the independent significance of law and order as not just the absence of the rule of law but a rival conception altogether; its specific contribution to the understanding of Myanmar political and legal realities; its distinctive, linguistically alert, mode of analysis; and its moral underlay. The comment ends with three questions about Cheesman’s argument: one having to do with whether law and order is better described as a rival conception to the rule of law, rather than its asymmetrical opposite, the second suggesting there might be dynamic interconnections between the two, and the third asking whether the terms in which Cheesman cashes out his contrast might owe more to anatomical mainstream definitions, which he and I suspect, than they do to the sort of ethnography he does so well.