Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. By Mark Fathi Massoud. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. 277 pp. $79.00 cloth.

Abstract

Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. By Mark Fathi Massoud. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. 277 pp. $79.00 cloth.By any account, Sudan would seem to be uniquely inhospitable to law. As an authoritarian state that was, until recently, the site of one of Africa's most brutal and longest lasting civil wars, it would be easy to assume that and institutions play little role in Sudanese life. Few other countries have so consistently been labeled a failed state, nor been the subject of such withering international sanctions. What hope, then, does the of have?Quite a bit, it turns out. This is the argument presented in Mark Massoud's fascinating book, Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan. Surveying the last one hundred and fourteen years of Sudanese history, Massoud finds that has played a decisive role in bringing stability and public order to a notoriously fragile country. In practice, this has usually meant the perpetuation of authoritarian rule, but the pervasiveness of has created openings for opposition movements and civil society groups as well. By exploring how colonial, authoritarian, and humanitarian actors have all deployed the for their own ends, Massoud aims to show both the potential and the limits of as an instrument of political power, even in the most unstable of states.The first half of the book sets out Massoud's theory of legal and presents some of its most successful applications. Legal politics, according to Massoud, is the strategic use of texts, practices, and arrangements to achieve political or economic goals (p. 24). The framework here draws heavily on the so-called rule by law literature, which focuses on how authoritarian regimes use their judiciaries to overcome some of the pathologies of nondemocratic (e.g., Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008). In colonial Sudan, for instance, the British government used its vast network of secular, religious, and customary courts to ensnare private grievances in public institutions, where litigants could be monitored for signs of nationalist or anticolonial sentiment (Chapter 2). Likewise, during the first chaotic years following independence in 1956, a succession of weak governments relied on the judiciary to implement policy and preserve social order (Chapter 3). Massoud is especially convincing in his discussion of politics under the regime of Umar al-Bashir (Chapter 4). Following the 1989 coup that brought Bashir to power, his government launched a nationwide campaign to shorten the judicial shadow (p. 143), a policy that involved greatly increasing the number of lawyers, courthouses, and schools in Sudan. This expansion in judicial capacity was part of Bashir's larger effort to overcome opposition to his regime's Islamist reforms, a program that remains understudied by scholars of Sudan. They and others interested in modern Islamic reform will find Massoud's argument here especially valuable, as it includes evidence from government archives that have heretofore been inaccessible to researchers. …