In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

In Chapter Five, I broaden the legal landscape by means of a global scale - the globalization of law. As I understand it, however, the globalization of law includes the translocal networks of local laws as well as the complex interaction between the national state and its law, on the one hand, and the imperatives of globalization, on the other. I set out to offer an analytical framework and a research agenda for understanding the changes of law in the context of globalization. Given the broadness of the agenda and the need to develop an overarching theoretical framework, I only mapped the central issues and did not seek to offer a detailed analysis of each of them. I also swerve from conventional conceptions, in the case in point, the conventional conceptions of globalization. I submit that there is not one kind of globalization alone, but rather two, and I draw a crucial distinction between hegemonic globalization and counter-hegemonic globalization.