Field Research on Law in Conflict Zones and Authoritarian States

Abstract

Scholars of law and social science have challenged conventional wisdom that law and courts in authoritarian states are, at best, the tools of dictators and that law fails to matter in places riven by violence or warfare. Less discussed is how this expansive body of research is being carried out in conflict zones and authoritarian states. This article takes on that challenge: to describe the state of the study of field research on law by paying close attention to those unlikely places—conflict-affected and authoritarian states—that illuminate law's power in unexpected ways and to those close-to-the-ground methods—ethnographic, interview-based, and archival—that generate new hypotheses for law and social science research.