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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 law and legal 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 rule of law 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 law 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 law has created openings for opposition movements and civil society groups as well. By exploring how colonial, authoritarian, and humanitarian actors have all deployed the law for their own ends, Massoud aims to show both the potential and the limits of law 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...