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Contentious Politics in the Courthouse: Law as a Tool for Resisting Authoritarian States in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Steven D. Schaaf Open the ORCID record for Steven D. Schaaf [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Under what conditions will individuals mobilize law to resist states that operate above the law? In authoritarian countries, particularly in the Middle East, law is a weapon the state wields for social control, centralizing power, and legitimation. Authoritarian legal codes are overwhelmingly more deferential to state authority than protective of citizens' rights. Nevertheless, people throughout the Arab world deploy law to contest a broad array of state abuses: land expropriations, unlawful arrests, denials of jobs and welfare, and so on. Using detailed interviews in Jordan and Palestine, I outline a theory of law as a tool for resisting authoritarian state actors. Integrating qualitative insights with survey experiments fielded in Egypt and Jordan, I test this theory and show that aggrieved individuals mobilize law when they expect courts are powerful and attainable allies in contentious politics. My results further demonstrate that judicial independence does not uniformly increase authoritarian publics' willingness to access courts.

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Law & Society Review , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 139 - 176
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© 2021 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was supported by grants and fellowships from the American Center for Oriental Research, the National Security Education Program, the Institute for Middle East Studies, and the Charles Koch Foundation. For comments on previous drafts, I thank Celeste Arrington, Brandon Bartels, Nathan Brown, Miles Evers, Yonatan Lupu, and Marc Lynch as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Law & Society Review.

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