Daughters’ inheritance, legal pluralism, and governance in Pakistan

Abstract

This paper explores social actors' arguments regarding daughters' inheritance, their use in court, and the implications of legal pluralism on governance in Pakistan. It scrutinizes the notion of custom, non-state law, and positive law as crucial dynamics that shed light on the ways social actors make sense of power and governance. In Foucauldian terms, this paper deals with the formation of statements -their temporalization and their becoming but in particular sheds light on the potential logics of the perpetuation of gender discrimination in inheritance laws. This paper suggests that the everyday arguments that play a role in the elaboration of the story told to the courts and received by the judge have the role of actants. Within the framework of proceedings it is possible to isolate the micro-units on which the legal discourse is elaborated either for state-or non-state jurisdiction, or for both of them, not necessarily seen as antagonistic places, and not necessarily seen within a framework of justice and injustice. This paper concludes that notwithstanding polarized discourses on centralized and decentralized governance, everyday practices of law in Pakistan tend rather to perpetuate non-state law together with positive law as continuous and concomitant interlegalities in and beyond the state instead of exclusive and conflicting sources of legitimacy.

Moving from Legislation to Implementation: Participants’ Resolve on Inheritance Property of Women

“…The participants also mentioned the difficulty to understand the language and they recommend making these documents in easy language. These results are consistent with the previous studies conducted in Pakistan (Holden & Chaudhary, 2013;Judoon & Khan, 2015). The results reported participant's suggestions that recommend simplifying these documents and to make them people-friendly so people especially women can get advantages from the changes made by the government.…”

“…Rubab, Parveen, and Usman (2016) in their study highlighted strict legal procedures, high level of education, legal awareness, and changing patriarchal mindset as determining factors for women to get their inheritance share. Holden and Chaudhary (2013) in their ___________________________________________________________________________ study argued that everyday practices of law in Pakistan are so complex and complicated and have powerful implications on women that they prefer not to go through with the court.…”

Understanding Perceptions about the Role of Traditional Practices of Inheritance With Relation To Feud Settlement

“…This clearly indicated the fact that male's dominance was prevalent in the study area. In Punjab usually conflicts over the inheritance amongst male heirs are easily resolved (Holden & Azam, 2013). Similarly, the study also provided information about the drawbacks in customary practices such as in traditional set up women were denied from marriage to keep land and property in the family as was found significant (=0.007) with family feud settlement in relationship.…”

Seeking Justice Through Qanun Jinayat: The Narratives of Female Victims of Sexual Violence in Aceh, Indonesia

“…The plurality of law has contributed to the worsening position of women in seeking justice (Butt, 2018;Holden & Chaudhary, 2013;Moustafa, 2013;Nurlaelawati & van Huis, 2019;Parashar, 2013;Singh, 2019). As shown by Nurlaelawati and Van Huis (2019), legal pluralism adopted in Indonesia makes it difficult to guarantee the fulfillment of basic rights to women due to challenges arising from Islamic law and customary law, which still significantly affect judicial decisions.…”