The Department of Anthropology and Department of Criminology, Law and Society present

“Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan”
with Mark Fathi Massoud, Assistant Professor, Politics Department and Legal Studies Program, UC Santa Cruz

Tuesday, April 8, 2014
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Social & Behavioral Science Gateway (SBSG), Room 3323

How do a legal order and the rule of law develop in a war-torn state? Using his field research in Sudan, Massoud uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments, and international aid agencies have used legal tools and practices to promote stability and their own visions of the rule of law amid political violence and war in Sudan. Refuting the conventional wisdom of a legal vacuum in fragile states, the book offers a thoughtful and readable account of the important ways that law matters in even the most extreme cases of states still fighting for political stability. Law's Fragile State helps scholars, students, policymakers, and the interested public to make sense of Sudan and what law does, and what it fails to do, in the world's most desperate environments.
Massoud is an assistant professor in the politics department and legal studies program at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on law in conflict settings and authoritarian states, and on Islamic law and society. He received the Law & Society Association Dissertation Prize, the American Political Science Association Edward S. Corwin Award for the best dissertation in public law, and the Law & Society Association 50th Anniversary Junior Scholars Essay Award. Massoud spent 15 months in Sudan researching this book, including a year under a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.

For further information, please contact Anne Marie Flores, annemf@uci.edu or 949-824-3230.