Work Rules: How International NGOs Build Law in War-Torn Societies

Massoud, Mark Fathi

doi:10.1111/lasr.12138

Cited by 37 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…I used two residents to assist me in tracking down individuals who had either been referred to in previous interviews or from incidents that I had read about in the media. I utilized a snowball approach with my initial analysis determining where to go, and what to look for, in my next round of interviews (Massoud ). Since most incidents of “mob justice” took place in informal settlements I shifted my focus to these locations.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volatile Sovereignty: Governing Crime through the Community in Khayelitsha

Super¹

2016

Law Soc Rev

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This paper asks what crime prevention looks like for residents in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. It engages with the idea of vigilantism and hybrid policing formations, analyzing the overlaps and intersections between legal community-based crime prevention initiatives, and local 'punitive practices'. The focus is not on the intensely violent spectacle of 'mob justice', where suspects are killed, but on the more ubiquitous, hybrid formations that also fall on the vigilantism continuum. These include coercive practices such as banishment, corporal punishment, retrieval of stolen goods by local policing formations and, trials conducted by street committees. The core argument I make is that, at times, particularly in poor areas where the state is absent and encourages citizens to take responsibility for their own crime prevention, the boundary between legality and coercive illegality collapses in on itself. Thus, the notion of voluntarism, that is so important to official discourse on crime, is particularly problematic when applied in poor communities with high rates of unemployment and high crime rates. As such, the state's encouraging of citizens to take responsibility for their own safety, alongside a punitive state discourse on crime and criminality, creates the space for illegal vigilante style actions to emerge in the shadow of legal crime prevention initiatives.We chased the witchdoctor away from Khayelitsha. We went in his house, saw lots of medicine, snakes. He lived in E block. We told him: you can't stay in Khayelitsha so he left.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volatile Sovereignty: Governing Crime through the Community in Khayelitsha

Super¹

2016

Law Soc Rev

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“…They not only lack cultural resonance (Engel ), but they could also attract backlash (Currier ; Kollman and Waites ) and jeopardize local activists. Engrossed in fulfilling donor conditions, human rights organizations eventually neglect local objectives (Massoud ) and fail to empower their target population (Swidler ), or lose legitimacy (Mutua ).…”

Section: Human Rights Activism and Micromobilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating Social Norms and Relations in the Micromobilization of Human Rights: The Case of Burmese Lesbian Activism

Chua¹

2016

Law soc. inq.

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This article provides the first sociolegal analysis of lesbian rights activism in Myanmar. It elucidates the processes through which a group of lesbian activists navigate sexual and gender norms that oppress lesbians as sexual minorities and as women while they use human rights discourse to carry out micromobilization work, organizing constituents and building up grassroots participation in Myanmar. It analyzes how the collective deployment of human rights encompasses resistance against social norms that pose organizing obstacles for activists and the negotiations of social relations to counter them. These micromobilization processes shape whether and how activists adopt human-rights-based strategies and tactics. Bringing together law and society scholarship and social movement studies, the article highlights the importance of understanding human rights mobilization by marginalized populations who face multiple, overlapping forms of oppression and contend with plural sources of power.

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“…But the process of understanding who the actors are, how their strategies change over time, whom they purport to assist with the rule‐of‐law ideal, and why they engage in these programs are important ethnographic sources of sociolegal scholarship and social policy. Building the rule‐of‐law ideal, for activists in Sudan and elsewhere, is shaped by daily practices, which may at times be as routine as submitting job applications, signing employment contracts, attending weekly staff meetings, and adding field codes into a spreadsheet (Massoud 2015).…”

Section: Studying Rule‐of‐law Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It may reveal how the rule of law augments the power of persons or groups—including lawyers, judges, religious leaders, and foreign aid donors—deemed to be the expositors of the law, and the contests of power between them. Investigating the rule of law from the perspective of the most impoverished or marginalized may also facilitate the study of gaps in the rule of law's reach, and it may reveal both law's ability to coerce and law's soft power—its “capacity to reframe political conflict and structure ongoing relationships” (Massoud 2015, 335).…”

Section: Studying Rule‐of‐law Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideals and Practices in the Rule of Law: An Essay on Legal Politics

Massoud¹

2016

Law soc. inq.

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This essay responds to the three commentators in the symposium on my book, Law's Fragile State, by describing the sociolegal study of the rule of law as an investigation into both a set of ideals (the rule of law as a normative question) and a set of practices (the rule of law as an empirical question). Studying the rule of law involves understanding the contingent nature of its ideals as well as investigating the actual work that lawyers, judges, state officials, aid workers, activists, and others have done in specific contexts to promote legal remedies to social or political ills. These overlapping layers of the study of the rule of law-ideals and practices, normative and empiricalprovide a sociolegal framework for understanding the successes and failures of legal work and, ultimately, how citizens experience state power in democratic and nondemocratic societies alike.If law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then [our] situation is full of promise and [we] enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state.Plato (

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Work Rules: How International NGOs Build Law in War-Torn Societies

Cited by 37 publications

References 61 publications

Volatile Sovereignty: Governing Crime through the Community in Khayelitsha

Volatile Sovereignty: Governing Crime through the Community in Khayelitsha

Negotiating Social Norms and Relations in the Micromobilization of Human Rights: The Case of Burmese Lesbian Activism

Ideals and Practices in the Rule of Law: An Essay on Legal Politics

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