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George C. Pavlich, "Political Logic, Colonial Law and the 'Land of the Long White Cloud'", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 175-206: Colonial discourses produce particular political rationales to justify, and to direct, proposed expansions over other lands. This paper focuses on a political rationality enunciated in a discourse seeking to deploy a British colonial legal system over Aotearoa/New Zealand. It focuses on the colonial discourse's development towards the end of the 1830s, and charts several founding precepts. The discussion indicates how, by defining "New Zealand" society as intrinsically anarchic, this colonial discourse comes to declare colonial state law as necessary for the "orderly progress" towards a "civilised" society. Such foundations are challenged from the apparatuses of a different archive, an "outpost", where the erstwhile discourse is confronted through the horizons of more recent one. Here, the paper shows how traces of modern political discourses (including cameralist notions) continue to haunt, in quite fundamental ways, specific political features of contemporary political logics and orders. Possible ways of transcending the auspices of the erstwhile colonial discourse are entertained as a prelude to contemplating political rationales in postcolonial contexts. e-mail: g.pavlich@auckland.ac.nz

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