Rebel Law: Insurgents, Courts and Justice in Modern Conflict. Frank Ledwidge. Hurst. 2017.

Rebel Law: Insurgents, Courts and Justice in Modern Conflict is a fascinating exploration of the role of courts and law in insurgencies and civil wars. The author, Frank Ledwidge, is a barrister and former intelligence officer in the British military who has had a varied career as an advisor in justice-related development projects, including in the British-occupied Helmand province of Afghanistan. The first half of the book examines how a variety of insurgent movements have used courts and law, while the second focuses on the role of law in counterinsurgency strategies, including a critique of British operations in Helmand.

From the perspective of my discipline of Islamic legal studies, the first half of the book is of particular interest. Ledwidge recasts the sharīʿa-based justice systems created in recent conflict zones in Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and Iraq – usually portrayed as reversions to barbaric punishments driven ideologically by militants – as a phenomenon comparable to other insurgencies in non-Muslim countries. Observers of Afghanistan have noted previously that the Taliban built a reputation for providing justice in the context of the rampant warlordism of the 1990s: that their appeal was founded on fairness as much as the specifically Islamic character of their legal regime. But Ledwidge explores this idea at length, and illustrates it by juxtaposing Afghanistan and other Islamic examples against an event central to modern British history: the Irish War of Independence, when Sinn Fein and the IRA set up a network of courts in Ireland as part of their boycott of the British state. Their strategy was, of course, violent: litigants and witnesses were intimidated into not cooperating with the British justice system. But, at the same time, Sinn Fein’s courts were widely seen as fair and efficient. Brute force was not sufficient to mount a successful insurgency in Ireland: the republicans also had to offer the Irish people an alternative model of governance that they would accept.

Having presented the Irish case as the paradigm of an insurgent judicial strategy, Ledwidge then explores a series of insurgencies in the Muslim world in which law and courts have played a significant role. Beginning with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he moves on to the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia, competing courts run by mainstream opposition forces and by the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra group in rebel-held Aleppo and, finally, the judicial activities of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Image Credit: Nawa District Justice Centre, Helmand, Afghanistan, 2011 (ResoluteSupportMedia CC BY 2.0)

These various court systems represent a range of models of justice. The Taliban, Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS all claimed to ‘restore sharīʿa’ – by which they meant implementing a hardline interpretation of sharīʿa complete with harsh corporal punishment and attention to moral infractions. Somalia’s Islamic Courts were not driven by such an ideological Islamist agenda: they still relied partly on sharīʿa, Somalia’s major legal tradition, but were more eclectic in their interpretation of it and also used customary law. Meanwhile, the courts affiliated with Aleppo’s mainstream rebels ran the kind of civil law system that is typical of most Arab countries today, using a code of largely European extraction along with elements taken from the sharīʿa tradition.

But even in the most ideological of these insurgencies, the sharīʿa element was incidental to the courts’ appeal and success. What mattered was their efficiency and fairness, in the sense of procedural regularity and refusal to accept bribes. What made these courts effective tools of insurgency was that they brought order and stability where previously there had been chaos, and that their procedural standards compared favourably with the alternatives. The courts were a key component of the insurgents’ pitch to local populations. Not only did they focus on preventing the kind of crimes that plague communities after the breakdown of the state – kidnapping, robbery, extortion and so on – they also sought to prevent corruption among their own judges.

The second half of the book provides a critique of the ‘rule of law’ model of nation-building that the US and its allies have pursued in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion. Ledwidge begins this section by discussing how older empires attempted to stabilise remote and volatile regions, exploring the strategies pursued by the Ottoman and British empires in Albania, Yemen, India’s North West Frontier Province and southern Sudan in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ledwidge claims that both Ottoman and British imperial elites recognised that engagement with local institutions and practices was crucial to success. He believes that US and British forces today have forgotten this lesson, insisting instead on the centralised state as the solution in unstable countries, even though such states often have little legitimacy and few ways to build it.

Ledwidge’s treatment of the British empire sometimes seems uncomfortably nostalgic: on page 125 he quotes, apparently approvingly, Charles Napier bemoaning that ‘so perverse is mankind that every nation prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another’. Ledwidge argues, based on military manuals, that British counterinsurgency doctrine in the mid-twentieth century emphasised the use of the minimum necessary force in order not to alienate the population. But he doesn’t do much to explore whether the British response to insurgencies lived up to the theory: the example of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya suggests not.

Ledwidge’s criticism of the British intervention in Helmand is much sharper. He reflects candidly on his own experience: at the time of his posting in 2007, Ledwidge writes that he ‘had never been to Afghanistan, spoke none of the languages and had but the haziest idea of how justice was provided in the country’ (140). His background was typical of those involved in ‘rule of law’ development projects, and Ledwidge argues that the resulting lack of local knowledge is one of the key reasons why most have failed. In the place of deep engagement with local networks and cultural traditions, British and US forces adopted a ‘cookie-cutter’ approach, transposing institutions and practices based on western models. Ledwidge argues that such projects are doomed to failure because they rely on an authority and credibility that the Afghan state lacks.

Ledwidge describes the judicial terrain in Helmand during 2006-14 as a situation of legal pluralism, with five options for resolving disputes: the formal judicial system; government officials acting informally; tribal elders; religious mullahs; and the Taliban. Litigants responded by forum-shopping, although their choices were often constrained by fear of violence. Within this range of options, the formal judicial system was not only ineffective and corrupt, but litigants often came under considerable pressure not to use it. In such circumstances, investment in the formal judicial system typically resulted in white elephants, such as the expensive but empty Justice Center built by the US in Khost, which Ledwidge claims failed to attract any litigants.

Ledwidge readily concedes that the alternatives to state-centric solutions – engaging with local and traditional practices of justice – also raise problems, in particular the lack of respect for gender equality and human rights norms among many local figures of authority. He doesn’t offer a solution to this dilemma. In places, he seems to be leading towards the suggestion that concerns about gender and human rights must be jettisoned if such projects are to succeed; but he backs away from this stark conclusion, citing an example when the mission successfully secured the installation of women members on a local judicial council. His ultimate conclusion is more modest: that just as development officials should be candid about the human rights failings of traditional practices, so they should be honest about the Afghan state’s lack of capacity and legitimacy.

Rebel Law is an intriguing and engaging book that covers a lot of ground. Ledwidge’s criticisms of the nation-building project in Afghanistan are broadly familiar, but they are presented with fresh details and anecdotes from his personal experience there. Meanwhile, Ledwidge’s approach to insurgent justice in the Muslim world is compelling: he brings a much-needed comparative perspective that serves as an antidote to the tendency to read such phenomena only through the lens of extremist ideology.

Theory of the Border. Thomas Nail. Oxford University Press. 2016.

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Borders define our lives. Private property rights protect our homes from unwarranted intrusion. Roads and sidewalks facilitate movement and set limits on where we are permitted to go. Security checkpoints mark entrances to government buildings or airports. Authorities allow passage or exclude and detain by inspecting drivers’ licences, passports and social security cards. Barbed wire fences and maritime patrols redirect migrants who lack the documents that would allow them to pass freely through authorised routes. For too many people, cell walls detain them until their prison sentence ends or a judge decides their asylum hearing. These borders are constituted by laws, police, judges, bureaucrats, social customs, symbols and physical barriers.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the ubiquity of borders, they are poorly understood and surprisingly difficult to define. In his ambitious and wide-ranging Theory of the Border, Thomas Nail seeks to provide a systematic theory that spans territorial, political, juridical and economic borders. It is part of a larger effort to establish a ‘kinopolitics’ – a theory of movement. It complements The Figure of the Migrant, Nail’s important attempt to construct a political theory in which the migrant, rather than the citizen, is the integral figure. Theory of the Border investigates the nature of borders that arise through processes of expansion and expulsion.

Theory of the Border is divided into a theoretical chapter outlining the types and functions of borders, a philosophical history of the border and a detailed application of the theory to the US-Mexico border. Nail understands borders as processes of social division that constitute, and are simultaneously constituted by, our societies. Borders are not static, but rather move as a result of political conflict, economic and juridical reforms as well as resistance from migrants and changes in the physical environment. Their function is not simply exclusion and inclusion, but also redirection and circulation. Borders expel, expand, bind and delimit.
Image Credit: US-Mexico Border (Brooke Binkowski CC BY 2.0)

Nail locates each type of border power – the fence, the wall, the cell and the checkpoint – in a historical period in which it emerged or dominated. Yet, he also qualifies his account, admitting that all of these types may be present in some form in earlier periods and that they often co-exist.

Nail defines fences as holes in the earth filled with vertical stones or wooden stakes that date from around 10,000 BCE. Under ‘fences’, he includes corrals, palisades and monuments. Their function is centripetal, directing flows from the periphery toward the centre. Some of the earliest fences were graves or tombs to which the living would periodically return. Neolithic kites funnelled wild animals toward hunters or herders. Fences did not require centralised power. Instead, they provided the conditions for early cities (c.3000 BCE) to consolidate resources with walls. Walls, defined as stacked bricks, provided defence for cities, allowing them to resist conquest and to redirect resources for warfare and trade. Nail understands ‘bricks’ as any material produced through standardisation, including people, so that ‘walls’ include not only citadel walls, but soldiers, military grids, siege towers, roads and ports.

Cells, in turn, emerged in Europe during the medieval period to divide and link individuals. Under ‘cells’, Nail includes rooms in monasteries, prisons, hospitals and asylums as well as passports, timetables and letters that establish identification and jurisdiction. Finally, checkpoints emerged during the modern period with the rise of statistics to allow for inspection at any point at any time. These include police patrols and spies, private property and national borders as well as informational checkpoints that gather, classify and analyse data.

These middle chapters offer many insights – but how do these varied types of borders and their functions hang together? The border technologies Nail categorises under fences, walls, cells and checkpoints have intriguing similarities, but also crucial differences. A kite and a monolith may both involve placing vertical objects in holes in the ground, but one allows hunters to herd animals to their deaths while the other guides travellers or preserves collective memories through communion with ancestors. Siege towers allow soldiers to breach citadel walls; roads are useful for war and policing, but also for trade. Passports mark national membership. Prisons confine and punish segments of the population defined as deviant.

When we move from Nail’s broad categories to an analysis of specific technologies, the processes of exclusion, inclusion, consolidation, selection and redirection do not map in any straightforward way onto his four categories. In fact, Nail does not offer a theory of the border, at least insofar as we understand theories as offering explanations or predictions. Rather, what he provides is a taxonomy of different types of border technologies that he derives from his understanding of different (mostly) European historical periods. His book gives little guidance for determining when these technologies will emerge, what will motivate them, who they will target and how they will combine.

The limits of his analysis become apparent when he applies his theory to contemporary borders using the US-Mexico border. Nail classifies technologies used by the US as fences, walls, cells and checkpoints. He notes that the US-Mexico border technologies do not only include or exclude, but also redirect movement through customs inspections and through detention and deportation. Their purpose is to slow and halt securitised flows (e.g., of illegalised migrants) while simultaneously facilitating economic flows. The effect of increased border enforcement has counterintuitively resulted in more immigrants in the US territory. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids can occur anywhere. They combine with immigrant detention and deportation to discipline and deter migrants through collective punishment, ensuring that those who remain are docile workers.

Sometimes Nail’s analysis provides striking analogies. The crosses covering the US-Mexico border wall to mark the deaths of migrants recall Neolithic graves lining roads, though it is unclear if they have the same meaning or function. Nail compares the US-Mexico border to a ‘two-thousand-mile desert kite’ in which ‘migrants are expelled from their homes and centripetally funneled by a fence structure into a chosen pit for extermination (by dehydration or hypothermia), capture (by the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit, BORSTAR), or accumulation (into the United States)’ (173). Nonetheless, most of his insights are independent of the theory elaborated in the middle chapters.

Finally, the book’s neglect of agents that construct and contest borders is striking. For example, Nail writes that ‘the border is the result of a negotiation between states and even between states and nonstate forces’, and that ‘the US-Mexico border remains an open and disputed nexus between territorial, state, legal, and economic forces, irreducible to one side or the other’ (168). Nonetheless, these chapters are curiously silent about the role of Mexican agents – or, for that matter, people on the US side of the frontier. This is partly a result of the decision to tackle the discussion of migrants and their resistance to border controls separately in The Figure of the Migrant. Still, what are the roles of politicians, employers, migrant rights groups, border enforcement agencies, police forces and community associations? Borders are the ambiguous, fluctuating, accidental and ephemeral consequences of many people’s actions. Some of these actions are intentional, but with unforeseen byproducts. Other effects of borders are neither intended nor imagined. Any attempt to theorise borders is incomplete without taking into account how people both succeed and fail in constructing their communities by establishing borders.

None of these remarks should detract from the significance of Nail’s project. Theory of the Border remains a rich and suggestive work that opens avenues for future research that may very well set the agenda for the political theory of migration.

Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism. Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2016.

Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism. Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2016.



With Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism, Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle have written a detailed and engaging study of contemporary feminist activism that examines the successes and failures of its digital forms. The ‘awkward’ in the title refers to their methodology, as well as a type of politics they have identified: they write that ‘awkward’ means a ‘misdirected motion’, movement that ‘messes with timing […] space and location’. According to Stehle and Smith-Prei, awkwardness is uncomfortable, relatable and a ‘politics of becoming, defiance and disruption’.

Through chapters on ‘popfeminism’ in film and literature, viral politics and feminism and on how to develop an ‘awkward ethos’, the authors explore the importance of awkwardness and its relation to feminist politics. The protest punk group Pussy Riot, the author Charlotte Roche and the actor/rapper Lady Bitch Ray are prominent subjects of their discussions. The authors also focus on four main features of economic neoliberalism that awkward politics is capable of confronting or harnessing: namely, cruel optimism; willfulness; circularity; and (the somewhat ill-defined) joy.

Firstly, ‘cruel optimism’, as defined by Lauren Berlant: ‘optimism is cruel when the object/ scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.’ Cruel optimism, according to Berlant, is a defining feature of neoliberalism, binding people to situations of ‘profound threat’ that are also problematically ‘confirming’ and ‘sustaining’. Stehle and Smith-Prei write that using awkwardness as a popfeminist methodology means ‘uncovering disruptions of the cruel optimism of neoliberalism’.

Awkwardness is capable of discovering ‘new avenues for connection and relatability and searching for new spaces for feminist community and joy’. An example used is the proliferation of SlutWalks, which are protest marches against rape culture that began when a Toronto police officer suggested that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts’ in order to prevent sexual assault. SlutWalks, the authors write, play with the ‘cruel optimistic mechanisms’ of neoliberalism through a celebration of ‘inappropriateness and joy’. SlutWalks are undoubtedly powerful, but their specific relation to the mechanisms of cruel optimism remains unclear.

‘Willfulness’ is another intriguing element of awkward politics, deriving from Sara Ahmed’s book, Willful Subjects. Stehle and Smith-Prei write that a willful child ‘stubbornly misbehaves, and does not conform to parental and societal expectations’. Willful children are usually girls, therefore ‘willful’ is a word to be reappropriated; as Ahmed writes: ‘transform this judgment into a project.’ Willfulness is ‘something that defies expectations’, something awkward and often related to adolescence or, as Smith-Prei and Stehle describe it, the process of ‘becoming’. Willfulness relates powerfully to awkwardness through its connections to adolescence and expectations; the authors write that awkwardness is ‘very much of the body’, but also ‘social and ephemeral’. This also describes ‘wilfulness’: the often awkward, bodily discomfort related to being an adolescent girl, combined with a will to social and cultural stubbornness.

The word ‘circularity’ also frequently appears in Awkward Politics, which Stehle and Smith-Prei seem to use as shorthand for Judith Butler’s conception of the repetition of gender norms. Butler writes in Gender Trouble that the task is ‘not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or indeed to repeat and through a radical proliferation of gender to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’. Butler suggests that the (inevitable) cultural repetition of gender norms is capable of destabilising whatever engendered the repetition in the first place. Similarly, Smith-Prei and Stehle’s conception of ‘circularity’ is about ‘always returning to the point of origin’, but somehow, on the way, destabilising it. For the authors, circularity also describes the close relationship between popfeminism and neoliberalism. They write: ‘it is constantly and consciously in danger of becoming an object of consumption’; they add that ‘these kinds of activisms can easily and simply be funnelled back in to a mainstream neoliberal discourse where they lose any kind of politically progressive edge’. For example, the authors cite Pussy Riot appearing on an episode of House of Cards.

However, ‘speed’ and ‘closeness’ enable possible disruptions of this relationship. Smith-Prei and Stehle write that ‘the speed at which messages and images spread in the digital age […] creates clear moments of political intervention and disturbance’. Similarly, the closeness of protest actions and the object of the protest can be productive. They write that digital campaigns often result in counter-campaigns that use the same image or hashtag to ‘subvert the original message’. The example they use is the ‘I am a feminist because…’ campaign, where feminists held up boards describing why they were feminists. This campaign provoked the ‘I am not a feminist because…’ counter-protest, which used the same image and format. Smith-Prei and Stehle observe that ‘the relationship between the two campaigns is awkward in that one relies on the other to get its message across, thereby destabilising the effectiveness of both’. They add that the ‘co-option of the ‘‘I am a feminist because’’ campaign enhances the visibility of both campaigns without voiding the political meaning of either, the controversy adds effect and urgency to both’. Thus, the authors conclude that digital protest is not about distancing oneself from the object of protest through ‘ironic provocation’; rather, protests using hashtags and images are often close and (productively) awkward.

Smith-Prei and Stehle write that their examples all ‘show once again that there is no outside of capitalism in a global neoliberal economy’. However, they also note that awkward politics ‘sticks’ to the economy in an ‘uncomfortable manner’, drawing on Ahmed’s writing on relationality and ‘stickiness’: ‘this stickiness contains the suggestion that there must be different modes of life, connection and community outside of the consumption patterns and identity stylings that drive neoliberal economies.’ Awkward Politics, despite initially implying the contrary, is driven by a hope for some kind of elusive ‘outside’, characterised by their buzzwords: ‘joy’, ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’. They write that awkward politics stick to neoliberal economies, but is ‘threatening to detach from what is already not working’; however, they fail to elaborate on the precise threat to neoliberalism of, for example, Pussy Riot declining to appear on a second episode of House of Cards or how this process of ‘detachment’ might happen.

But, ultimately, Awkward Politics is an unabashedly hopeful book: it wants to ‘push back on cynicism’ and places its authors at the centre of its narrative. They write that ‘instead of burying the researcher in an ostensibly objective view of the subject matter, we place ourselves, subjectively, at the forefront of these discussions’. They explore their own voices, histories and experiences, and the book is enriched for them, even if their calls for nebulous feminist ‘joy’ and ‘collaboration’ are sometimes grating or unexplained. Awkward Politics is a thorough study of digital feminist activism, with particularly compelling insights into ‘willfulness’, ‘circularity’ and the closeness of protest and the protested, and is recommended for students broadly familiar with terms and concepts relating to Marxist, feminist and affect theories.