When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

When we turned to Aleppo, we discovered a cityscape that was more complicated than those of Raqqa, Saraqeb, and Darayya. Its battle lines crisscrossed the city, continually shifting during our period of study, making each neighborhood its own unique nucleus in an atomized space. Aleppo is the oldest and second largest Syrian city. Known for its mercantile past and modern industrial present, the city had approximately 3 million residents before the conflict began. The first wave of protests began in 2011, and the city council came into being in March 2013 and was staffed by over 550 personnel by 2016.1

As the Syrian uprising took a violent turn, armed fighters and civilian leaders alike carved out insurgent micropolitical economies across the country’s contested territories. Raqqa City was the first provincial capital to fall from the regime’s control into the hands of opposition forces. The city elected its first opposition council, the Raqqa city council, in early 2014, but the council proved short-lived. By mid-2014, a zealous band of foreign fighters had consolidated control over the city with the aim of establishing a caliphate that would transcend the Westphalian state system and manifest an extreme vision of Islamic rule. These aspiring governors quickly established a monopoly over coercion and availed themselves of a range of capital assets through access to natural resources, looting, and various forms of taxation in the service of their state-building effort. Our close reading of accounts from the city of Raqqa between 2014 and 2016 revealed the corresponding emergence of tight forms of social control as well as the demonstrated capacity to deliver a wide array of key services. In these ways, the so-called Islamic State proved to be a paragon of rebel governance, mobilizing key forms of material power to erect a robust new political order.

The institutions that constitute a rebel government have long been understood and evaluated in comparable terms to those of a state government, the only difference being orientation (i.e. against versus on behalf of the state). Similarly, the doctrine underpinning modern state-building and counterinsurgency campaigns, repurposed in Syria in the service of a “good” rebellion, has emphasized the import of rationalized governance in winning the population’s support, its “hearts and minds.” In this chapter, we consider the limits of employing rational legitimacy as a conceptual outcome and offer our own – institutional closeness – as a theoretical alternative with distinct analytical possibilities for the study of insurgent rule.

Shari’a jurisdiction among the Palestinian minority in Israel is one of long standing. Its goes back to the Ottoman millet system. However, in light of the geo-constitutional context of the state of Israel as a Jewish nation state, sustaining Shari’a jurisdiction was subjected to various policies emanating from state institutions as well as Palestinian internal organizations. To understand this reality, it is essential to understand not only the historical origins of this jurisdictional authority but the constitutional and political forces that define Israel of today.

This chapter provides a summary of recent legal reforms undertaken by the state of Qatar to advance the status of women. While most legal initiatives in Qatar were top-down, initiated mostly by the state, there is a growing and active civil society that is emerging to press for even more progressive reforms. One of the most important legal reforms was the codification of the Qatari Family Law (QFL) in 2006. This chapter explores the most important articles of the family law, as well as highlighting potential challenges, to women’s equality in the state of Qatar.

This chapter examines the 2004 Moroccan Family Code governing marriage, divorce, marital property, child custody guardianship, and parentage. The enactment process, which included a multi-stakeholder Royal Commission and Parliamentary debate, and was marked by unprecedented public mobilization for and against reforms, marked a break with the previous Personal Status Code. Multiple references in the law to international human rights standards, positive law, and religious precepts create a certain legal schizophrenia and inconsistent decisions across jurisdictions. While substantial reforms were made on the face of the law, in particular to provisions regarding marriage, substantial inequality and discrimination persist, particularly in unequal access to divorce for women, financial relationships between spouses, and child custody and guardianship. International human rights bodies and local activists alike have highlighted the need for further revisions to the Family Code to abolish remaining inequality. Since 2011, Morocco has been led by an Islamist-majority governmental coalition opposed to further Family Code reform, raising questions about the relationship between democracy and women’s rights.

The Lebanese family law system characterized by legal and judicial pluralism controls major aspects of a woman’s rights such as marital, child custody and social rights. While issues of personal status are exclusively left to religious courts and sectarian legislation, it is undeniable that women in Lebanon, are left at the whim of not only an entrenched religious establishment but also cultural norms of patriarchy. Historical practices of Islamic family law issues find little premise in shari’a but rather in the interpretation and implementation thereof. Thus, opening the door to activism and Islamic jurisprudential approach could bring change on religiously delicate issues. In pursuit of gender equality, efforts to reform laws and break the status quo have in certain instances proved successful, yet the transition to a secular personal status law system at the image of Lebanon’s progressive civil society, is far from being reached.

The 1959 Iraqi Personal Status Code was controversial at enactment, and it remains so to this day. Some of the controversy relates to its progressive elements, which include a ban on child marriage, expanded child custody rights granted to mothers, and limitations on polygamy. Another significant dimension to the controversy, less remarked upon in scholarly and media circles, concerns the extent to which the Iraqi state should have the power to legislate at all with respect to personal status matters, and instead to defer to traditional religious authorities for rulemaking. This chapter highlights some of the key rules of the Personal Status Code, its evolution over time, its treatment in the courts, and the controversies that continue to surround it. The chapter shows that in many ways, the challenges facing the Personal Status Code reflect the cleavages that have posed an existential threat to Iraq since its creation.

This chapter examines the development of the Jordanian Personal Status Law (JPSL) from the Ottoman Family Rights Law (1917) to the 2019 reforms. It provides an overview of the main changes which the JPSL has undergone. Centrally, the chapter argues that most changes have not been progressive in terms of leading to greater gender equality or justice. In addition to being discriminatory in terms of sex, the JPSL also enshrines class hierarchies. Where alterations have been made, they have not touched the overall rationale of the law. There were no efforts to revisit the sources of the law, to rethink certain assumptions which were based on seventh-century Arabian society, or stem from conservative colonial European jurisprudence, or to think of alternative "Islamic versions." Unlike their Ottoman predecessors, Jordanian legislators have stayed clear from rethinking the JPSL in terms of current times and requirements.

This chapter examines the 1984 Algerian Family Code and 2005 amendments governing marriage, divorce, marital property, child custody and guardianship, and parentage. Both the original Code and the amendments faced substantial challenges in their enactment and were drawn out over decades. Algerian women’s groups have had to advocate for reforms in a difficult context involving an entrenched state bureaucracy, military dominance, a decade long civil war between security forces and armed Islamist groups, discrimination against the Amazigh, and major natural disasters. The Code perpetuates inequality and discrimination against women, including limited access by women to divorce, the persistence of polygamy and unilateral divorce at will by the husband. 2005 amendments to the Code were only enacted by Presidential ordinance after legislative deadlock; women’s groups note that the reforms reflect concessions to the Islamists, by maintaining the mandatory presence of the male marital guardian (wali) for women at marriage.

Palestinians fall under a dizzying array of laws and courts, which adjudicate their personal status matters. The specific court or law that applies depends both on the religious/communal identity of the person and the area in which the person lives. Those who are residing in the State of Israel as it existed before 1967 are governed by Israeli laws. The Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have also been under Israeli law since the 1967 Occupation. This chapter concerns the personal status law for those Palestinians who are living in the two other main areas – the West Bank and Gaza. Those living in the West Bank are governed by Jordanian Personal Status Law. Those in Gaza are governed by the Egyptian Law on Family Rights. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the respective family laws will be unified in the near future given political and legislative paralysis in Palestine.