Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
134
years after its publication, these topics are far from being exhausted. Recently, Italo Pardo and
Giuliana Prato (2011a) edited a second collection, which explores these meanings further. In
Citizenship and the Legitimacy of Governance. Anthropology in the Mediterranean Region
(Pardo and Prato, 2011a), legitimacy is studied in its relation to the contested concept of
citizenship in the Mediterranean Region. Both volumes start by examining the discourse on
legitimacy, pointing to a general agreement about the crisis of legitimacy and of democracy.
However, the most recent book aims specifically to address the ‘displacement of citizenship’,
which according to the authors is demonstrated by two distinct but interconnected phenomena:
‘the re-emergence of localisms’ and ‘the development of transnationalism’ (Pardo and Prato
2011b: 11).
In spite of the difference in geographical focus, the two volumes share a wide range of
topics. In his introduction to
Morals of Legitimacy
(2000a), Pardo clearly explains that people do
not see what is legal as necessarily legitimate; on the other hand, what is not legal is not
automatically regarded as illegitimate. Pardo and Prato (2011b) also follow this line of reasoning
when they write that ‘what is not legal may, thus, acquire an aura of moral justification and
become widely accepted as legitimate’ (p.2). In the case of the shipwreck mentioned earlier, the
rescue of human beings in the Mediterranean was seen by ordinary people as legitimate even if it
was illegal according to the national Italian law, and these actions were also portrayed as a moral
duty by the media. These processes of legitimation and de-legitimation constitute the fulcrum of
the two volumes under discussion here.
According to this theoretical framework, the system of law and of morality, which is often
viewed as rigid and unchanging, is in fact negotiable and Pardo’s (2000a: 9) expression in this
matter is particularly evocative, as he talks of ‘the porosity of the law’. This idea is further
explored by Peter Fitzpatrick (2000), who takes into account the need for the law to respond to
changes and to adjust to the shifting circumstances of social life. In order to adapt to society,
‘[l]aw cannot be purely fixed and pre-existent’ (p. 159).
While seeing the need for the law to be responsive to an ever-changing society, a warning
about bureaucratization and ‘juridification’ of all life aspects comes across many of the essays in
these volumes. John Fitzpatrick (2000: 178) overtly worries about the juridification of the private
sphere, which in the past was mediated by communities and collectivities. In his discussion about
the increased number of noise complaints in the UK he introduces the concept of juridification
borrowed from Habermas (1987 quoted in Fitzpatrick J., 2000). More precisely, he shares
Habermas’s concern about the pervasiveness of the law entering aspects of social life, such as
family and school, previously regulated informally by ‘mutual understanding’ (J. Fitzparick
2000: 178).
From this point of view, a central question is the way in which the state takes legitimate
control. In his essay about vigilantism, Abrahams (2000) shows how Tanzanian institutional
powers, such as the police, bureaucrats and lawyers, stress the illegal nature of vigilantes groups,
implying that the right to exercise ‘arrest and punishment’ (p. 111) belongs only to the state.
