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

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. Authori tarian political systems are characterized by an absence of electoral accountability for public officials (Geddes et al. 2014; Przeworski 1991). But the inability to hold state actors accountable through democratic elections does not mean that authoritarian publics acquiesce to state abuse. When authoritarian states cause individuals injury-through violence, arrest, expropriating land, depriving citizenship, or denying jobs and welfare-many avenues of resistance and contestation exist outside the electoral arena. This paper examines law as a tool for resistance under authoritarianism, asking: under what conditions will individuals use litigation to pursue grievances against authoritarian state actors? Much research on resistance to authoritarian states focuses on large-scale instances of political violence (Petersen 2001) and

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