Suchergebnisse

Recent episodes of severe police repression and violence against protesters around the world have brought new urgency to longstanding calls for police reform and in some cases more fundamental structural changes including abolition of existing police institutions. However, the police are not monolithic and there is considerable subnational variation in the extent to which individual police officers and units use excessive force against civilians, and this variation has important implications for police legitimacy in the eyes of the public. In Iraq, where federal police violently repressed anti-government demonstrations in 2019—killing more than 600 protesters—but local police refrained from violence and in some cases intervened to protect civilians, public opinion became significantly more negative toward federal police but not toward local police. These results suggest that civilians distinguish between the conduct of different actors in a decentralized, fragmented security apparatus and attribute blame individually rather than collectively blaming the state security apparatus as a whole. I suggest that two mechanisms—decentralization and fragmentation of state security institutions—interact to shape the pattern of subnational police violence in Iraq and discuss broader implications for police reform in Iraq and beyond.

When rebel groups with state-building ambitions capture territory, who stays and why? Through semi-structured interviews and an original household survey in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which was controlled by the Islamic State for more than three years, I conduct a multi-method descriptive comparison of the characteristics of "stayers" against "leavers." I test and find some quantitative and qualitative support for a theory of competitive governance: Civilians who perceived improvements in the quality of governance under IS rule—relative to the Iraqi state—were more likely to stay under IS rule than those who perceived no change or a deterioration, but displacement decisions are multi-causal, influenced by many factors including economic resources, social networks and family structures, information, threat perceptions, and ideology. These findings suggest that historical experiences with weak rule of law and bad governance by states may affect the attitudes and actions of civilians living under rebel governance.

To the extent that legal scholars have addressed the post-authoritarian transitions underway in the Middle East, the scope of their work has been primarily confined to the formal infrastructure of state-manufactured law. Attention has focused on the activities of high courts, parliaments, and the administrative apparatus of official justice systems, while largely neglecting to acknowledge the importance of non-state institutions and systems of normative rules that operate in the shadow of modern bureaucratic governments. The concept of legal pluralism, defined as the coexistence of multiple legal or normative orders within a common geographical area, has been applied extensively in European, South American, and sub-Saharan African contexts, but is underutilized in analysis of revolutionary and transitional change in the Middle East. Nowhere is the presence of legal pluralism more apparent than in Egypt's geographically remote Sinai Peninsula, where non-state Islamic courts that emerged in the post-revolutionary security vacuum in 2011 claim to have absorbed 75 percent of the caseload once handled by Egypt's official justice system and aspire to achieve full autonomy from the state. This paper, based on field research conducted in the governorate of North Sinai, argues that the rapid institutionalization of non-state shari'a courts since the 2011 uprising can be explained in part by two historical trends: (1) the Islamizing effects of state-sponsored development and labor migration policies on Bedouin society in North Sinai; and (2) growing disillusionment with state and tribal judiciaries, which are often viewed as complicit in the disenfranchisement of the Bedouin and expropriation of their lands.

To the extent that legal scholars have addressed the post-authoritarian transitions underway in the Middle East, the scope of their work has been primarily confined to the formal infrastructure of state-manufactured law. Attention has focused on the activities of high courts, parliaments, and the administrative apparatus of official justice systems, while largely neglecting to acknowledge the importance of non-state institutions and systems of normative rules that operate in the shadow of modern bureaucratic governments. The concept of legal pluralism, defined as the coexistence of multiple legal or normative orders within a common geographical area, has been applied extensively in European, South American, and sub-Saharan African contexts, but is underutilized in analysis of revolutionary and transitional changein the Middle East. Nowhere is the presence of legal pluralism more apparent than in Egypt's geographically remote Sinai Peninsula, where non-state Islamic courts that emerged in the post-revolutionary security vacuum in 2011 claim to have absorbed 75 percent of the caseload once handled by Egypt's official justice system and aspire to achieve full autonomy from thestate. This paper, based on field research conducted in the governorate of North Sinai, argues that the rapid institutionalization of non-state shari'a courts since the 2011 uprising can be explained in part by two historical trends: (1) the Islamizing effects of state-sponsored development and labor migration policies on Bedouin society in North Sinai; and (2) growing disillusionment with state and tribal judiciaries, which are often viewed as complicit in the disenfranchisement of the Bedouin and expropriation of their lands.

AbstractArmed groups seeking to govern territory require the cooperation of many civilians, who are widely perceived as enemy collaborators after conflict ends. The empirical literature on attitudes toward transitional justice focuses heavily on fighters, overlooking more nuanced understandings of proportional justice for civilian collaborators. Through a survey experiment conducted in an Iraqi city that was controlled by the Islamic State, we find that variations in the type of collaboration an actor engages in strongly determine preferences for punishment and forgiveness. While exposure to violence is associated with a greater desire for revenge, perceived volition behind an act—a relatively unstudied factor—is much more important. This research provides unique empirical data on the microfoundations of enemy collaborator culpability. By widening our analytical lens to consider a more realistically broad spectrum of enemy collaboration, we avoid affirming a false dichotomy between victims and perpetrators that is commonly adopted in postwar settings.