Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie

Abstract

Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa ‘gyara’, meaning ‘repair’. Taking seriously the gendarmes’ perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not the gendarmes’ application of the law that is deficient, but the law itself is. In their search for justice, the gendarmes in Niger repaired a law that they deemed inappropriate for policing the life worlds of the people they were confronted with.