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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mark Fathi Massoud
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Abstract

Drawing on socio-legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules-based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war-torn societies.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 333 - 364
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

For helpful feedback, the author thanks Ziad Al-Khatib, Kirsten Anker, Mark Antaki, Adelle Blackett, Aziz Choudry, Lynette Chua, Evan Fox-Decent, Amanda Fulmer, Allan Hutchinson, Robert Leckey, Zeynep Kasli, Karen Knop, Michael McCann, Adam Millard-Ball, Steve Smith, Shauhin Talesh, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Leila Kawar, whose collaboration with the author refined ideas in this article. The author is also grateful to audiences at McGill University Faculty of Law, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics, University of Washington Comparative Law and Society Studies Center, and at Western Political Science Association and Law and Society Association conferences, where earlier versions of this article were presented. Research was funded by grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz. This article would not have been possible without the kindness of many respondents in South Sudan and Sudan.

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