This chapter delineates the changing contours of governance within and beyond the nation-state with a view to exploring the ambivalences of law as a tool of domination as well as of empowerment. It focuses on the complex articulation of state law with international law, customary rights and project law in the context of the new intellectual property rights regime of the WTO and two World Bank finance projects in India. Various trajectories of legal transnationalisation and of legal plurality are examined with regard to their consequences for differentiated citizenship rights, fractured sovereignty and the increasing heterogeneity of state practices. While discussing the domestication of neoliberal discipline by the Indian state (which is characterised here as a "cunning state"), the chapter considers the shifting contextual alliances of movement-NGOs with and against the state, viewed both as an ally and as an opponent in the struggle for peoples' rights to life and livelihood in a globalising world.