Decoupling and Its Explanatory Insufficiency

The world society model addresses the issue of state capacities in a partial manner through its emphasis on decoupling. Decoupling is the contradiction that arises between the official goals, norms, and sanctioned practices of organizations and the actual practices of agents striving to enact and maintain them (Meyer and Rowan Reference Meyer and Rowan1977). In this view, it is expected that a gap will emerge between the formal goals and rules of state organizations and the practices of their members in implementing them. Every complex organization based on institutionalized norms must adapt to environmental contingencies and become embedded in local processes. Therefore, every formal organizational order must continuously negotiate between its formal rules, goals, and legitimizing ideologies and the localized, embedded practices of social actors. The challenge for state builders is to ensure that the particular state's organizational structures and practices mimic the standardized organizational schemas of world society: “Decoupling is endemic because nation-states are modeled on an external culture that cannot simply be imported wholesale as a fully functioning system” (Meyer et al. Reference Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez1997: 154). From this perspective, national states in the global periphery, which presumably borrow external organizational forms most heavily, are most likely to experience decoupling. This occurs as local social structures cope with and adapt to the pressures of internationalizing world norms. These local structures must negotiate the construction of modular organizational forms and practices that use universalized rationalities and legitimacy schemas, expressed via catchwords such as “progress,” “development,” “modernization,” and “the rule of law.”

A problem of the concept of decoupling is that it remains too broadly and descriptively defined to provide any causal account of the processes of institutional structuration that lead to variation in state institutions and their capabilities. A perfectly isomorphic model would predict either that all states will become weak (because of endemic decoupling processes), or that all will become strong (because state organizations are isomorphic). That this is not the case suggests that processes other than decoupling must account for the divergence between a given state's institutional claims of power and its actual ability to shape the behaviors and beliefs of the population it claims to rule. In the case of legal authority, these behaviors and beliefs must be shaped in fundamental ways. This is because legal authority is not merely coercive but must at some level correspond to generalized social beliefs about the legitimacy of the regulation and administration of social life by the plethora of interconnected, third-party organizations that we typically designate under the umbrella term “state”: the police, an independent court system, educational and penal institutions, and so forth.

The challenge faced by states builders does not necessarily lie in legitimizing the idea of the state institution, but rather its organizational practices among the ruled. For legal authority this involves transforming existing conceptions of right, law, and justice and replacing them with those premised upon the institutional monopolization of the legal order by the state. This must begin with the definition of the state as the single social institution vested with the power to define, articulate, enact, and enforce a single body of legal precepts that are, in theory, universally applicable. The question for institutionalist theorists, then, is not only one of the mechanisms of diffusion; it is also about the mechanisms through which new forms of authority, and new understandings of social order, are implanted while existing ones are marginalized, stigmatized, or repressed. Anthropologists have documented the great diversity of social institutions among human societies, particularly those related to the organization of law (Geertz Reference Geertz1983; Malinowski Reference Malinowski1926; Watson Reference Watson1974). The world society model's emphasis on isomorphic processes of state development neglects the complex interplay and contradictions that emerge between state-based and socially and culturally embedded forms of legal norms and social regulatory claims. It downplays or ignores the deeply contentious processes involved in the establishment of modern state authority.

To summarize, state-centric approaches emphasize the role of political power premised upon the capacity of sustained and durable coercion as a key factor in the construction of modern state power. This model is theoretically efficient, but fails to explain how states are able to build effective coercive organizations in the first place. The world society model points to the global diffusion of cultural models as a key process in the making of modern states. For these theorists, organizations are the result of cultural scripts of the modern nation-state, originally formulated in the West and implemented by national elites worldwide. While these are both crucial and necessary conditions for the making of modern state authority, they are neither by themselves nor in combination sufficient conditions for the emergence of durable state power.

The Albanian state failed to gain durable institutional authority in its highlands region despite reasonably fulfilling the condition specified by state-centric theories: the accumulation of sufficient infrastructural capacities to exercise force. Moreover, a key reason for this failure was that state elites broke from a path of an endogenously driven institutional formation and tried to implement what they described as a “Western” model of legal governance. This presents a problem for both of the aforementioned theoretical approaches in that neither considers the intersection between the rise of modern state power and cultures of legality. Organized coercive capacities are certainly a necessary condition for the rise of the modern state, but are by themselves insufficient because organized political power alone does not determine the efficiency of modern political governance (Loveman Reference Loveman2005; Parsons Reference Parsons and Parsons1967). Global cultural scripts may explain why state elites choose to implement particular institutional models, but when those models prove ineffective in local contexts, then theorists who forefront them can only resort to the inadequate explanation of “decoupling.”

I argue here that attempts at state building that involve rapid expansions of bureaucratic authority over society are prone to “jurisdictional struggles” (Abbott Reference Abbott1988) between competing political authorities. These struggles more often than not involve intense cultural contestations of the legitimacy of state authority and of the actors who attempt to wield it. As Bourdieu argued (Reference Bourdieu1991; Reference Bourdieu and Steinmetz1999; Reference Bourdieu2004), states struggle to accumulate cultural forms of “symbolic power” as much as they strive to concentrate coercive capacities. Modern bureaucratic states typically have the upper hand in such struggles. Yet attempts to substitute malleable, “pre-national” arrangements with stable, centrally controlled organizations can provoke marginal social groups to evade “political capture” (Scott Reference Scott2009) simply by refusing to comply with state-sanctioned norms of social behavior. Under such conditions, state-building efforts end up weakening rather than strengthening the state's governing capacities. The Albanian case I present here will illustrate this.

Communal Institutions in the Service of State Building: Honor and State Building in the Pre-Code Period

Soon after the defeat of the Ottoman military in the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, the new state of Albania was recognized by Western powers at the London Conference of Ambassadors in 1913 with the territorial reconstitution of four former Ottoman provinces. Around 70 percent of the new state's territory was mountainous terrain, most of it in the northern and northeastern parts of the country. In the early twentieth century these highland regions were estimated to be home to about a quarter of the country's people. They constitute Albania's greatest concentration of mountain village settlements. The rest of the populace lived in the more arable lowland hills, coastal plains, and urban centers of central and southern Albania.

Albania established its first sovereign national government in 1919, after World War I ended. As foreign combatants of the war—mainly Austrians, French, Greeks, and Serbians—withdrew, territorial control became a key imperative, and national authorities established a system of centralized territorial governance based on the French post-Napoleonic prefectural system. The government successfully established territorial jurisdiction throughout most of the country, but the highlands became a problematic region due to the intransigence of local peasants and the refusal of rural communities to relinquish their autonomy. A series of 1919 reports from the northern prefecture of Shkodër, which included part of the highland region, illustrate challenges the prefecture faced in extending its authority into the highlands surrounding the town. They point to difficulties in convincing communities to accept government rule, sign up gendarmes, and pay taxes.Footnote ⁹ This warned of the sort of resistance the state would face in trying to establish its authority in the region.

Over the years that followed, the state's intrusion into the highlands provoked a number of rural rebellions; the historical record indicates armed uprisings by highlanders in 1921, 1922, 1924, and 1926. These were more than minor local disturbances—each posed severe threats to state control in the region as well as nationally. The 1921 rebellion in the Mirdita region became a full-fledged secessionist movement to establish an independent highland peasant “republic” (Skendi Reference Skendi1954). In this case and others, rural rebels failed to repel the state and the national government reestablished military control. Nonetheless, military dominance proved inadequate to imposing permanent administrative control. In this context, how state builders developed local networks to assert cultural claims of national authority proved critical to their eventual success in consolidating political control.

State Building and Peasant Honor Society

The Albanian highlands of the early twentieth century were characterized by a local system of communal organization based on an indigenous tradition of customary law, known locally as the ligj or kanun (words for law in Albanian and Turkish, respectively). The specific norms and practices of customary law were locally embedded and varied across distinct microregions, but several basic institutional features were shared across the population. These included norms that regulated aspects of domestic and family life within the household such as paternal authority and the division of labor, and communal affairs such as property relations, use of commons, and defense against outside threats. In this sense, the communal system of the Albanian highlands represented a specific form of rural political, economic, and territorial organization (Doçi Reference Doçi1996). These were mainly pastoral communities that secured a meager but steady existence through household production and commerce with local towns. They followed the peasant zadruga organization typical of the Balkan peasantry (Lampe and Jackson Reference Lampe and Jackson1982; Mile Reference Mile1984; Stoianovich Reference Stoianovich1980). While extended family production became less common in the Balkans over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this form of peasant economic organization persisted in Albania and especially in the highlands. The 1923 census found highlands households to have upward of thirty extended family members.

The household (shpi) was represented by the elder patriarch and identified by the name of a real or mythical ancestor, and was the key political and social unit (Doçi Reference Doçi1996; Hasluck Reference Hasluck1954). Customary law functioned as a public system of norms and rules that regulated relations between households and their members (Gjeçov Reference Gjeçov1989; Illia Reference Illia1993). Intra-household disputes were typically handled by councils of elders (pleqësi) made up of respected men of the community noted for their wisdom and knowledge of customary law. More general communal affairs were deliberated in assemblies (kuvend) in which usually all households of a village or village alliance were represented.

The exception to the collective mediation and management of affairs under customary institutions was homicide cases, especially those resulting from interpersonal conflict. In such cases restitution was gained through blood vengeance. The victim's male kin exercised executive power directly against the perpetrator or a male member of his kin group. Here legal restitution was based on a self-help principle in which aggrieved parties were responsible for securing their own retribution through vengeance, although within a regulated framework of norms and procedures of proper blood taking (Whitaker Reference Whitaker and Lewis1968: 265–74).Footnote ¹⁰ Outside observers often saw blood feuding to be the main cause of highlands interpersonal violence, since a feud did not always end with the taking of the original perpetrator's life but could persist if his kin avenged his death. This gave feuds a cyclical nature that often carried over from one generation to the next (Durham Reference Durham1909; Reference Durham1928).

Blood feuds and the social standing of clans were intricately embedded in a system of honor. Honor-based societies, found in many parts of the world, are historically characteristic of Mediterranean mountain societies, where honor serves as a highly effective status principle and medium of social transactions (Peristiany Reference Peristiany1966; Schneider Reference Schneider1971). Studies of social relations in honor-based societies have found that strategies to optimally ensure the accumulation and conservation of honor structure the entire “game” of peasant interactions and social relations (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Miller Reference Miller1990). Similarly, Albanian highland customary law was organized as a cultural order in which all forms of injury were treated as violations of honor, and its restoration was the primary purpose of restitutive actions, including revenge killings. Vengeance was dictated by the loss of “blood”—loss of a male member of the group—and taking vengeance, or threatening to do so, was a fundamental social obligation. Failure to do so could cost the group its honor in the eyes of the wider community (Gellçi Reference Gellçi2005).

Honor was a general property ascribed to family (household) and extended kinship groups, but was more fundamentally a personal characteristic of men. A man's honor was on the line when he made a pledge, offered protection to a guest, or received injury from another, especially when that injury occurred in the view of third parties.Footnote ¹¹ Honor and its symbolism organized all-important aspects of social relations. It provided an interpretive frame that gave normative meaning to transactions, and was a mark of social status and privilege, and a source of personal dignity and self-worth. Among Albanian highland men, honor was also constitutive of gender relations and identities since women were not considered legitimate bearers of honor, but rather were the objects of male honor (Shryock Reference Shryock1988).Footnote ¹²

Frequent rebellions and peasant intransigence made state building in the highlands especially difficult. In Ottoman times the region enjoyed a high degree of political autonomy from imperial authorities, either by political design or, more likely, by sheer omission and disinterest. Ottoman authorities were based in urban centers and ruled the highlands mostly through intermediaries (Mile Reference Mile1984).Footnote ¹³ Albanian highland peasants also provided the Ottoman state with a pool of irregular military recruits, though evidently—at least during the late nineteenth century—an unreliable one (Erdem Reference Erdem, Anastasopoulos and Kolovos2007). For the most part, Ottoman elites saw the highlands as an unruly and ungovernable region best left to its own devices (Blumi Reference Blumi2003; Gawrych Reference Gawrych2006).

During the final struggle for Albanian national independence in the early twentieth century, the highland peasantry had largely accepted the premises of the Albanian nationalism promoted by urban elites and the notion of a distinct Albanian ethnic nation. The most imposing challenge to state builders after 1919 was not so much to convince peasants of the existence of the ethnic nation as an abstract “imagined community” (Anderson Reference Anderson1991), but rather to instill in them the idea of the state as an authority with the right to administer local society.Footnote ¹⁴

The solution state builders found was to turn to a local institution, the honor-based pledge called a besa, as a means of establishing the national state's political authority. The besa was a central institution in the clan-based, honor-centered rural highlands society.Footnote ¹⁵ A besa pledge could engage diverse parties, ranging from individuals to clans to entire regions, into temporary, limited pacts upheld by pledges of honor. While the besa's primary function was to create temporary truces between feuding parties, such as when going to war together against rival clans, its invocation also extended into other occasions that required establishing trust between parties. Thus, the besa could be given as a personal pledge of loyalty or faith in affirming an agreement between parties during a transaction or joint enterprise, or in resolving a dispute. It could also form the basis of alliances between adversarial groups in extraordinary situations, or in negotiating pacts between communities and external third parties. In addition to its institutional function, the besa played a central symbolic function in highland peasant culture—the violation of a besa was considered among the most treacherous of acts, and the surest road to dishonor for an individual and his clan (Durham Reference Durham1909; Gjeçov Reference Gjeçov1989; Hasluck Reference Hasluck1954).

In the early months of establishing state authority in the highlands, this element of local culture offered itself as the most effective resource through which to mobilize highland communities, demand loyalty to the government, and compel peasants to submit to the new administrative claims of local prefectures being established in the region. The besa institution was used in two ways. The first was its actual ritual performance, in which local officials such as military officers, prefects, and their subordinates invited communities to make solemn pledges of allegiance to the government, to give their besa word of honor to obey its officials and laws. One such compact is appended below.

Second, and more significantly, during the early period of state building the government compromised its goal of creating an administratively and legally homogenous society by establishing special committees that combined, and therefore divided, jurisdictional authorities between central and rural communal institutions. The framework was provided by a 1921 government order that established a distinct set of institutions in charge of governance and the maintenance of public order in the highlands. A crucial institution within the system was “the besa committee,” a body that mediated between the prefecture and local society. In its formal structure, the besa committee was headed by a subprefect appointed by the local prefect (who was accountable to the national Ministry of the Interior), and included “representatives” of highland communities from the subprefecture. The duty of the committees was to administer the besa between local communities and the national government. While they were given authority to decide local matters, their two main functions were to mediate between the state's administrative claims and local society and to ensure the maintenance of public order on behalf of the prefecture and other national authorities.

This policy of creating besa committees to fuse state control with communal authority followed from a 1920 government regulation that stipulated a distinct legal regime for the highlands based on customary law. It effectively excluded the highlands from the civil and penal authorities that would be applied in the rest of Albania. According to this regulation, “When delinquent acts take place in subprefectures and regions, such as banditry or murder within the boundaries of the subprefecture or region, as acts against the existing besa, the committees formed by the besa are obliged to act together with government forces to capture the responsible individuals.… The subprefecture committees will penalize those found guilty of delinquent acts in accordance with local custom and the [region's] customary law” (in Elezi Reference Elezi1997: 35).

These early arrangements were reinforced in the aftermath of highlander rebellions and during times of political unrest. For example, in 1924, when Albania underwent a revolutionary change in government the new government renewed besas with highland communities, claiming their loyalty to the state and the new regime. When the revolutionary government itself fell, the new one under the conservative President Ahmet Zogu instituted a new set of besas with highland communities. In 1926, under Zogu's patronage, the government organized a ceremonial event in which notables from the highlands were summoned to the national capital and required to pledge their besa to the state and to Zogu as its supreme leader. In exchange, the government recognized the exclusive jurisdiction of communal institutions and customary law in the highlands. While these measures required constant renewal and negotiation with local communities, they largely consolidated national political (if not administrative and legal) control in the highlands. By the late 1920s, rebellious movements there had largely subsided and the national government's presence, in the form of military and gendarmerie posts and subprefectural offices, extended into even the most remote and intransigent regions.

Legal Modernization in the Post-Code Period and the Rise of Social Disorder

After the establishment of President Zogu's authoritarian regime in 1925 (he became King Zog after 1928 constitutional changes), Albania experienced a period of relative political stability that was used to channel energies toward legal and administrative reforms (Anastasi Reference Anastasi1998; Fischer Reference Fischer1984; Tomes Reference Tomes2004). An important marker of this new period was the Albanian parliament's passage of new penal and civil codes during 1927–1929, modeled upon similar Western codes. Their adoption was seen as not only an effort at legal reform but also a more fundamental civilizational drive to eradicate vestiges of cultural backwardness and bring Albania into the fold of Western “civilized” nations. In a speech to parliament describing the reforms, Zogu insisted that “retrograde customs that damage the State morally and materially” would no longer be tolerated. “We must understand that the geographical position of our State forces Albania as soon as possible to enter the ranks of civilized States” (in Tomes Reference Tomes2004: 158).

This policy shift at the center had direct ramifications for governance in the highlands. The immediate impact came with implementation of the penal and civil codes there. The main problem, as we will see, was that in order to fully implement the codes the state had to gain jurisdiction over domains once reserved for communal institutions. What ultimately weakened the state's claim to legal authority in the highlands was not only its manifest claims of authority, but also its attempt to bypass the earlier process of cultural legitimation and guarantees of social autonomy.

The government turned increasingly against local institutions in the post-code period, for a number of reasons. First, it had strengthened its administrative capacities by consolidating a national apparatus of administration throughout the country, including by expanding the presence of the national gendarmerie (Tomes Reference Tomes2004). With increasing police presence came more successful disarmament campaigns and dramatic improvements in taxation. The xhelep was the in-kind tax on livestock that was the main tax collected in the highlands, and in 1927 xhelep revenues were a staggering sixteen times higher than only two years prior. They continued to increase annually by an average 3.6 percent until 1929.Footnote ¹⁶

A second reason for the government shift was that a middle-class intelligentsia with growing influence increasingly decried Albania's cultural backwardness, and called for authoritarian measures to “civilize” Albanian society by applying a putative Western cultural model.Footnote ¹⁷ This elite particularly decried peasant law and communal institutions, which they saw as remnants of local cultural ways that had to be eradicated.Footnote ¹⁸

Third, confrontation with communal institutions was instigated when officials, especially from the Ministry of Justice, grew less tolerant of the special jurisdictional areas in the highlands that lay outside the purview of state authority. This intolerance intensified after passage of the penal and civil codes. The Ministry of Justice trumpeted the new laws as a great victory, “especially for the highlands…, where the fate and the rights of the population have thus far been judged arbitrarily by special committees following the traditions inherited from [customary law]” (in Musaj Reference Musaj2002: 187–88).

When the codes were implemented, voices within the state administration decried the continuing authority of local councils and other communal bodies. This became most prominent in a pivotal 1927 report that the General Inspectorate of Administration submitted to the Presidency of the Republic. In response to a complaint sent by the highland subprefecture of Malësia-e-Madhe, the Inspectorate warned that local councils seemed to exercise greater authority in the administration of local matters than did the subprefecture office. In some instances, the Inspectorate claimed, local councils blocked the gendarmerie from carrying out official subprefecture orders such as arrests. The Inspectorate suggested that corruption, crime, and violence in the highlands could be traced to the power of the councils and elders, and urged the immediate “abolition” of their authority and of customary law. The report is unclear as to the basis for this charge that customary law and its communal authorities were corrupt, abusive, and incited violence, and it seems doubtful that those authorities had changed their behaviors from the past. What had more likely changed was the vision held by government officials (who were still largely urban-based) as to what constituted a properly administered social order; the new vision categorically excluded autonomous collective bodies exercising legal powers independently from the state.

The Ministry of Justice framed the problem as a matter of improper jurisdiction over legal cases. In response to the report, in 1928 parliament passed a law “on reviewing inherited cases in the highlands governed by customary law.” It abolished the authority of elder councils and other communal institutions and required the “transfer” of legal cases from them to state courts. But state authorities in the highlands lacked the power to demand that legal cases be so “transferred.” For one thing, those handled by councils were not “cases” in the manner understood by modern bureaucratic systems of justice. No written documents or formal procedures were followed during hearings and rulings. Second, disputes were typically resolved in a few hearings, and sometimes in just one, and so there was no ongoing caseload to be transferred to state courts. The unrealistic law may have been intended as a mere political display. Alternatively, it might have simply reflected the ignorance of lawmakers living in the capital as to how elder councils operated in the highlands, and lawmakers' disregard for the knowledge and advice of the state's own local officials.

In addition to demanding the general “abolition” of councils' authority and customary law, national officials worked to encroach upon specific council prerogatives. For example, through the civil code the state claimed greater jurisdiction over the domain of matrimony. State officials in the highlands portrayed agreements for matrimonial exchange as a significant cause of conflict between clans, thus giving cause for the government to assert greater regulatory control over this domain. The state claimed the power to regulate brideprices, set limits on wedding expenditures, and establish procedures for households making nuptial agreements, which had to be registered with prefecture offices. One byproduct of state regulation in this domain was that it advanced women's rights in matters of marriage, child custody, and inheritance. But overall the measures further galvanized local councils against what they saw as undue government interference deep within the domestic and communal realm (Musaj Reference Musaj2002: 208–11). Political confrontations between councils and local authorities increased, as did practices of evasion.

The state's attempts to regulate other domains failed as well. Official data show that out of 1,800 murders penalized by state courts from 1930–1938, 738 were motivated by blood vengeance. As late as 1939, ten years after institution of the penal code, some 40 percent of deaths in the highlands were attributed to blood vengeance (Elezi Reference Elezi1983: 199–204). Banditry also seemed ineradicable, despite the Ministry of Interior enacting stiff penalties against convicted bandits and even though the government had developed a vast network of informants in the region.Footnote ¹⁹ Enforcement of the civil and penal codes made it harder to carry out more routine government activities such as tax collections (Meta Reference Meta1999: 89–90).Footnote ²⁰ In the late 1930s, nearly two decades after the state had expanded its presence in the highlands, local officials complained to central authorities that peasants were still routinely submitting disputes to local councils rather than prefecture offices or state courts.

The rise in public disorder is displayed in the high rates of reported crime. One would normally expect crime levels to be higher in the more densely populated urban and lowland regions, but a paradox of modern Albania was that crime was overwhelmingly concentrated in the rural highlands. An internal Ministry of Interior report in 1935 showed that the number of men wanted for ordinary and political crimes in the highlands prefectures of Shkodër, Kukës, and Dibra ranged between 115 to 137, while the mean number for non-highland districts was about twenty-four (see figure 1). In per capita terms, the numbers of people per ten thousand wanted for criminal acts in the highlands ranged from eleven in Shkodër to thirty-two in Kukës. By contrast, the mean for districts outside the highlands was 3.5 (see figure 2).Footnote ²¹ The gendarmerie imposed collective punishments when people refused to reveal the whereabouts of family members who were wanted renegades. Family members were in some cases detained, while in others local councils were pressured to impose traditional punishments on them such as the burning of their homesteads. Local officials also employed local peasants as “hired guns” to pursue wanted criminals.Footnote ²² By using local actors to carry out the executive's legal mandates the state amplified the cycle of feuds and violence.

Figure 1

Total number of people wanted by the Ministry of Interior for criminal acts in 1935, by district (* denotes districts that encompass the highlands).

Figure 2

Number of people wanted by the Ministry of Interior in 1935 per ten thousand inhabitants, by district, based on 1923 census data (* denotes districts encompassing the highlands). Population data for the district of Tirana is unavailable.

The degradation of local political authority led further to an overall disintegration of the region's legal culture during the post-code period. With more than one path for legal redress now available, even the manner in which it was pursued became an object of contention. Local observers report peasant litigants strategically choosing to involve either state courts or elder councils in disputes, based on which they would provide the most favorable ruling. It also expressed a growing moral and spiritual destitution of highland society in the modern nation state era. The Roman Catholic priest Anton Harapi, writing in 1932, described this condition in regards to a dispute between two phratries in the Shala region over water rights:

Government efforts to assert state legal authority by implementing the codes not only failed to bring adherence to state law, but also helped galvanize highland peasants to politically confront the state. This is seen in the changed political attitudes that local councils displayed regarding their willingness to cooperate with state officials. During the pre-code period councils had been relatively open to cooperating in the establishment of state institutions; now their political outlook became increasingly conservative and they came to see their mission as the defense of customary law. The more that councils resisted state authority, the more national officials found fault in the “primitiveness” and “backwardness” of local culture. Although the state displayed a conspicuous inability to impose a new social order, a widely distributed government report in 1937 boasted that it was successfully “teaching” highland peasants “basic notions of the state” and eradicating their “compromises against the payment of taxes, living in accordance with primitive custom, and refusal to recognize a central authority.” These were described as expressing traditional features of their society (Selenica Reference Selenica1937: 266). For the traditional elites of the highlands region, customary law became as symbol of an alternative social order and of resistance against an illegitimate and increasingly repressive political authority.