Law as salvation, law as civilisation, law as development: the attempted containment of indigenous dispute resolution in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This article traces the encounter between indigenous dispute settlement and introduced law in Papua New Guinea through the practices and discourses of the early Christian mission, the Australian colonial administration and, finally, the post-independence state. It argues that the relationship between these two antithetical forms has, and continues to be, animated by the racist and imperial logic of the civilising mission. This article contends the discursive practices of the civilising mission set out to contain the heterogeneity of Papua New Guinean dispute settlement through pathologising it as something less than law while privileging other introduced values which are employed to justify the transcendent status of positive law (Christian virtue, civilisation or state developmentalism). In every instance, this discourse attempts to concentrate regulatory power in the church, colonial administration or state, and to articulate local societies with the international economic order, while only ever permitting benign legal forms (in the form of circumscribed ‘customary law’) to remain. While this discourse has been productive of new laws and institutions, its effects have been far from totalising and, in reality, much more than just benign difference remains. Rather than completely abandoning traditional forms, many Papua New Guineans have actively adapted the introduced law and its institutions to local circumstances, often in a manner which detracts from the centrality of the state and accommodates the continuation of informal dispute settlement practices.