Government plans to criminalise forced marriage have intensified debate over how to address the practice without alienating communities. Feminist and Critical Race literature on forced marriage castigates the government for treating forced marriage as a cultural event fostered by a deviant and alien ‘other’ and for seeking to ‘liberate’ women from their culture, but itself views community with suspicion and denies subject agency. Re-examining policy developments through personal experience – setting up the Forced Marriage Unit – I excavate the now forgotten imperative of community engagement and how government became invested in its exclusion. Given the porosity of the forced–arranged marriage distinction I then examine why engaging community is important. Young British Asians’ experience of the marriage process puts high value on family and community involvement. This power-laden paradigm, where consensus is valued over the Western liberal concept of ‘free consent’, is the context into which government policy must fit.

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Starting with Moore’s ‘semi-autonomous social field’ as an analytical and descriptive tool the paper explores how Foucault’s concept of power relations contributes to an understanding of the dynamic nature of individual interaction with legal pluralism in the social field. The interplay of power and legal pluralism is illustrated through an examination of the use of alternative legal orders as a ‘strategy of struggles’ by members of an adivasi (indigenous tribal) community in India and Bangladesh (the Santal). The Santal are diasporic, often living with other adivasi peoples and non-adivasis. Santal individuals face injustices linked to gender, ethnicity, poverty, political powerlessness, and illiteracy. Relations between individuals are affected by rules and processes of socialisation in a number of co-existing and interconnected normative fields (the legal orders of the family, local community and State). The paper illustrates how individuals navigate through the legal orders of the family, local Santal community and State to access justice, and the factors that limit their opportunity to renegotiate power relations.

This paper argues that if we can gain a better understanding of the possibilities (and limitations) of the individual's strategies of renegotiating inequalities in societies, communities and households we will be better equipped to address complex factors affecting social justice outcomes. There is no quick fix to inequality and the pursuit of social justice is an ongoing process that demands structural, institutional, political, economic and social change. However, the daily process of renegotiations of power relations by marginalised groups and individuals has a vital role to play in the success or failure of social justice initiatives. In this paper I use the concepts of legal pluralism and power relations to discuss the ways in which the individual is constantly negotiating power. In understanding this process we can better facilitate the inherent struggle by the underprivileged to reduce inequality.

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