Bringing official norms back in. Inheritance disputes, state courts and the law in Cotonou

Over the last ten years, African states have been increasingly studied through their bureaucracies and the ways in which public servants appropriate reforms, relate to the state and interact with citizens. The aforementioned research highlighted the importance of informal norms and practices in order to understand how the state and its institutions ‘worked’ on a daily basis. Based on inheritance disputes cases, this talk will delve into the ways in which family members use the law in order to renegotiate access to land and money in Cotonou. It will show that, citizens go to court because ‘the state’ conveys a form of authority that allows them to either legitimize, or challenge family decisions in inheritance matters. I will therefore argue for the need to ‘bring official norms back in’ when studying African bureaucracies, to start apprehending public institutions through the specific service that they provide and the ways in which ordinary citizens mobilize them in order to produce social or political effects.