Conventional wisdom often treats the rule of law and legal reforms as a panacea for good governance and reconstruction efforts in post-conflict and transitional contexts. While scholarly attention to the limitations of such views has grown, little has been paid to how these initiatives are received by local populations and how they integrate with existing legal and normative frameworks. Legal Consciousness and the Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Societies addresses this gap by investigating the effects of rule of law initiatives on citizens’ attitudes and perceptions toward the law and legal systems in the Uvira region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Whereas political scientists often prioritize parsimonious theoretical frameworks at the expense of nuance and complexity, Holly Dunn successfully carves out a rich, complex, and nuanced theory of legal consciousness without losing clarity and structure. She argues that top-down initiatives seeking to strengthen the rule of law and the legal system do not erase existing practices and attitudes toward it. Instead, these interventions interact with existing practices and belief systems that are sometimes in contradiction with one another.
In chapter 2, Holly Dunn explains that this contradictory legal consciousness manifests in two ways. First, individuals show a disconnect in harm naming: they may recognize certain behaviors as harmful where the state does not criminalize them (e.g., witchcraft), or conversely, may not perceive harm in a behavior that the state does criminalize (e.g., some cases of statutory rape). Beyond holding conflicted views about what constitutes a crime, populations can also hold different logics of justice, whereby individuals have different ideas about how legal disputes ought to be resolved. This contradictory legal consciousness, shaped by individuals’ varied experiences and exposure to different normative and legal frameworks, gives rise to an emergent legal hybridity in which international, national, local, and customary norms interact.
After years of conflict during which sexual and gender-based violence became widespread, many international initiatives focused on reforming the legal system to eliminate certain practices, while domestic civil society groups worked to raise awareness among local populations (sensibilization). As mapped in chapter 4, this top-down approach to shaping legal consciousness contributed to the rise of an emergent hybrid legality, particularly in areas targeted and funded by international initiatives, such as gender-based violence and the advancement of women’s rights.
Chapter 5 focuses on the cases of early marriage and statutory rape, two areas that were heavily reformed in recent decades. Despite sustained efforts to raise awareness of the new legal framework and displace older practices, these campaigns yielded neither straightforward success nor outright failure. Rather than erasing prior practices, international and civil society interventions shaped a more ambivalent consciousness around harm, one where individuals’ perceptions of wrongdoing were heavily conditioned by the specific circumstances of an event and by the behavior of those involved. Equally, even when offences technically warranted referral to formal tribunals, individuals often preferred alternative forms of justice (e.g., mediation) as these were seen as better equipped to capture the social complexity of such situations.
Chapter 6 focuses on the case of witchcraft, which is far from anecdotal in Congolese society. Holly Dunn shows how witchcraft accusations are commonly used by the population to explain tragedy or otherwise inexplicable phenomena, such as infertility or a sudden death, despite not being recognized within the Congolese national legal framework (whereas other countries do recognize it legally). Because the legal system does not recognize these practices as harms, no formal avenues for justice exist, leaving populations to develop their own mechanisms for resolving what they experience as real and serious wrongs, including, in some cases, mob justice. This is perhaps the starkest illustration of the disconnect in harm naming: where the state sees no crime, communities may see an urgent injustice demanding redress, and in the absence of formal recourse, they turn to informal and sometimes violent means.
The book concludes with a broader reflection on the rule of law, its underlying goals, and the need to rethink both these initiatives and how their success is assessed. Holly Dunn makes a compelling case that such efforts cannot be evaluated in isolation from the social, cultural, and normative landscape into which they are introduced and that meaningful reform requires grappling seriously with the hybrid legal realities that initiatives inevitably produce rather than erase.
There is much to like about this book. First, I would argue that its theoretical contribution is greater than Holly Dunn herself claims: the conceptualization and theorization of legal consciousness and how it is shaped has much to offer the broader literature on judicial politics. Scholars in this field tend to think in terms of one or two factors that explain attitudes toward the legal system, but this book reveals the multiple layers that come into play in shaping legal consciousness and attitudes toward the law. This is particularly important for those of us who study legal systems marked by multiple, overlapping histories, colonization, ethnicity, customary law, and so on.
Second, and beyond scholarly debates, this book is essential reading for policy practitioners, as it challenges us to rethink how we conceive of Western-led rule of law initiatives, how we might approach them differently, and how do we assess their implementation. Third, the empirical richness of this book is remarkable. Conducting extensive fieldwork in a region as difficult and dangerous to access is no small feat, and the depth of the evidence Holly Dunn brings to bear reflects that considerable effort. The result is a book that feels genuinely grounded in the realities of the people and communities it seeks to understand. Finally, we must commend the author for her chapter on fieldwork and research practices (chapter 3). From case selection to fieldwork practices, positionality, and ethical considerations, this chapter deserves a place on the syllabus of any graduate course on fieldwork or methodology.
Despite this empirical richness and theoretical contribution, the book has some limitations. Holly Dunn documents well the process through which international initiatives are implemented on the ground and how local populations engage with the new legal framework, but the national justice system receives comparatively little attention. More evidence from magistrates and their perceptions of legal hybridity would have strengthened the analysis. By not engaging more closely with the courts and their day-to-day workings, the book does not fully grapple with a potential confounder: the question of capacity. In a weak state where resources are scarce, a justice system unable to handle its caseload creates a judicial void that may itself be a driver of emergent legal hybridity. One wonders whether the same patterns would hold if the projection of judicial power were stronger across the territory.
Second, while the case of witchcraft is a compelling illustration of the disconnect in harm naming and different logics of justice, it feels less central to the book’s theoretical framework than chapter 5 on sexual and gender-based violence. Until the chapter’s conclusion, it remains somewhat unclear how witchcraft falls within the scope of rule of law and transnational initiatives more broadly. These limitations notwithstanding, Legal Consciousness and the Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Societies is a significant and timely contribution.
