ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political dynamics of legal pluralism, and, specifically, the concept of 'hybridity' as a lens through which power relations in local justice may be viewed. It explores the relationship between justice provision, hybridity and power at the local level in West Africa. Emanating originally from postcolonial approaches to culture and the work of Bhabha in particular, hybridity is something that occurs within a 'Third Space' that exists between the dominant and the dominated, the coloniser and the colonised, and the global and the local. However, the real value in using hybridity as a lens is that one can move away from divisions of the world into simple binary systems (state/non-state, traditional/modern, formal/informal) and recognise the fluidity of social systems and their politics. In addition, the discussion of hybridity is also partly a discussion between balances of power between alternative sources of legitimacy and, as Foucault may have put it, between different forms of 'productive' power.
