Mipela Makim Gavman: Unofficial Village Courts and Local Perceptions of Order in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

In remote villages of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where official village courts and other state institutions are absent, local leaders routinely hold unofficial village courts to maintain law and order. They base their decisions on local perceptions of order and justice, all the while emulating elements of state justice and constantly referring to the state as the source of their legitimacy. As these unofficial judicial institutions historically emerged as a convergence of local patterns of leadership with colonial concepts of order, they neither form a completely new nor completely autochthonous method of conflict settlement, but are an example of para-statehood, in which local leaders take on state functions in the absence of the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Village courts
• dispute settlement
• leadership
• para-state
• Papua New Guinea

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Tobias Schwoerer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7065-8359

Notes

1 Fieldwork for research in four villages of the Obura-Wonenara and Okapa Districts of the Eastern Highlands Province between 2005 and 2007 has been generously supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (7352) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (PBZH11-110322). Previous versions of this paper have been presented at meetings of the Swiss Ethnological Society and the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. I would like to thank Don Gardner, Doris Bacalzo, Alex Golub, and the two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped improve this article. My deepest gratitude goes to the communities in the Lamari River basin and the leaders portrayed in this article.

2 Original in Tok Pisin:

Authority igat strongpela sapot long law na order na nau putim ples klia ol trabel isave kamap too mas insait long ward four (4) na sapos yu bukim [sic] lo, yu mas baim fain, sapos yu no baim fine authority bai kisim yu igo long police station na kotim yu.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung: [grant number PBZH11-110322]; Wenner-Gren Foundation [grant number 7352].