“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

in order to understand the social products spawned by sovereign frictions. 4 This dissertation
argues that the violent fraying of the colonial order and the vacuum of authority left in the
wake of revolutions paved the way for the peripheral legal and political order that emerged.
As control over the Río de la Plata’s borderlands rapidly shifted from one power to another,
peripheral inhabitants developed flexible institutions to maneuver and even prosper. The
most salient feature of this alternative order in fact was that it developed in the absence of
and in at least partial opposition to state-centered law. Instead, it drew upon shared
conceptions of local autonomy and justice, blending them with cross-border relationships
rooted in patronage and factional connections to provide the juridical underpinnings for a
system uniquely suited to the demands of the region’s contested ground. Like the
borderlands, it was a system that could operate between states as much as within them.
While this dissertation conceptualizes violence as the progenitor of alternative
legalities, it also sees the existence of alternative legalities as the trigger for renewed violence.
As state cores recovered from revolutionary chaos and began to extend their authority and
institutions out into the borderlands, they encountered vigorous defenders of rival,
peripheral legal relationships premised on the absence of centralized power and laws. In
resisting state control, borderlands inhabitants also exploited rival state projects, using the
tensions between each to preserve legal relationships that sustained their power and place in
peripheral societies. Ultimately, would-be state framers had to contort centralized models in
order to reconcile peripheral legalities with national authority, ensuring that traces of these
former practices and relationships found their way into seemingly consolidated state
structures.
4 Silvio Rogério Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, "Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle
Frontiers in Latin America," Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 590.
4