Western interventions in Africa, whether promoting development, peace, public health, or human rights, tend to be informed by a common narrative. In it, Africa is presumed to suffer from a deficit in some area, a deficit that the continent lacks the capacity to remedy on its own and that foreign intervention is required to fix. This long-standing conception dates back to the colonial civilizing mission and up to today’s idea of an African “poverty trap.” Mark Massoud’s excellent book convincingly shows how this conception underlies Western legal intervention in Sudan and explores the unintended and largely perverse consequences such misinformed interventions produce in practice.

As Massoud makes clear, just because Sudan is a fragile state—or is deemed to be one by the West—does not mean there is a deficit of law there. In fact, there may be a surplus of law, as “a multitude of legal spaces flourish in conflict settings” (p. xiii). In reality, therefore, Western legal intervention is not remedying a self-evident lack, but rather is inserting its often blunt tools into a complex, conflict-ridden, existing legal milieu, a situation already full of long-standing historical struggles over politics and law. Intervention thus cannot help but enter into these existing, often violent, political and legal contests, contributing to the contending forces in ways entirely unanticipated, or even invisible, to the interveners. The consequences that these legal interventions produce can be equally unanticipated or invisible to the interveners, even as they systematically fail to meet declared liberal objectives.

Massoud’s book is structured as an archaeological study, digging down through successive strata of law in Sudan, in order to show how today’s legal landscape has been shaped by well over a hundred years of conflicts fought over the law and fought using the law. The author makes clear that the law must be understood as socially and politically institutionalized, as going far beyond formal, written law to incorporate lawyers, courts, political and religious authorities, social practices, elite and popular discourses, and significant flows of money and power.

Massoud’s historical sociology of law enables him to make an important theoretical point about law itself. He argues that a naive belief in the inherently progressive power of law has grounded much of the West’s law-promotion activities in Africa, from the colonial era until today (p. 15). However, he argues, attention to the actual use and practice of law in Sudan makes clear that law is often little more than a tool in existing political struggles, with significant instrumental and ideological malleability. While that capacity for instrumentalization is most often seized upon by the powerful to do what they will, leaving the poor and marginalized to do what they must, the polyvalence of law runs deep enough so that unexpected reversals can take place, and those who were previously subjugated by an authoritarian or externally promoted legal regime may deploy it instead for their own emancipation.

Three periods, each with its own distinct legal politics, define the development of law in Sudan, Massoud argues (p. 25). First, he shows the two-sided nature of colonial law, which served as a tool for constructing an undemocratic, illiberal state and enforcing unaccountable foreign rule. Simultaneously, however, that law provided a set of resources that nationalist leaders took up to demand an end to colonial power. Especially interesting is Massoud’s discussion of how law itself, through its articulation of an abstract national legal identity, helped provide the basis for claims against British rule. However, with independence, another reversal took place: Colonial law, even though used successfully against the British, turned out to be unsuited for ensuring a fundamental transformation of Sudanese society and politics. Thus, Sudanese elites were able to take advantage of independence to serve their own interests against those of the predominantly rural poor, and “the colonial law they sought to repeal persisted” into the postcolonial era (p. 81).

This colonial legal legacy had its failures but also its benefits, Massoud explains. It provided a “ballast,” moderating the wrenching conflicts within the postcolonial state, and went through significant development toward a Sudanese common law. But the law could not remain impervious to political upheaval forever, and it eventually went from ballast to battleground. Political leaders wrought legal havoc by shifting the legal regime from common law to civil law and then back again, followed by an attempt to redraft the entire legal system to conform to sharia law. By the time Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, the legal system was fragmented, politicized, and opaque to practitioners and citizens alike. It was not a legal deficit but, rather, a legal surplus that had arisen, with too many disparate and uncoordinated laws at too many levels, which eased the way for its political instrumentalization.

The legal transformations of the first few decades of independence were minor compared to the wholesale overhaul undertaken by Bashir in his effort to forge law as a tool of authoritarian power, Massoud explains. Bashir’s project of imposing a unified, repressive system of sharia law was “decisive, sweeping, and lasting” (p. 120), involving a massive expansion of the number of lawyers, courts, and legal institutions on a single, repressive model throughout the country. Again, this contradicts the notion that law is lacking in fragile states. However, Bashir’s effort to replace all existing social legal practice with a single regime was also ambiguous, as the often dysfunctional legal system eroded confidence in the regime, which could eventually lead to “heightened activism and dissent” (p. 153).

Finally, the book deals with law as a project of Sudanese civil society and of international intervention, what Massoud calls humanitarian legal politics, debunking the belief in the inherent benefit of building legal capacity and rights-based development. He distinguishes between the practice of law among elite Sudanese managing interventions, on the one hand, and among nonelite, poor, and marginalized communities, supposedly the beneficiaries of intervention, on the other. He shows how the impact of interventions are often far from what their liberal funders believe them to be: Elite actors are largely drawn to interventions to find funding for their own welfare and security; the poor, at best, might receive basic education or a bit of material relief from workshops and trainings. Instead of promoting the conditions for a democratic rule of law, legal interventions produce a further divorce between Sudanese elites and the poor, when an alliance between those groups would be necessary for any lasting political transformation. In fact, Massoud explains, the supposedly universal concepts of human rights informing these interventions may be irrelevant to the “lifeworlds” or material conditions of the Sudanese poor. Nevertheless, he ends with a note of optimism concerning the potential impact of human rights interventions, declaring that “imparting knowledge about rights can encourage this symbolic or psychological liberation from the bonds of oppression” (p. 199).

Massoud’s research is impressive. A fluent speaker of Arabic, he draws on more than a year of “in-depth personal interviews, archival research, and ethnographic observations,” (p. 39) much of it undertaken in Sudan under difficult conditions. Especially remarkable was his access to former high-ranking judges, ministers, political leaders, and civil society activists, whose interviews provide some of the book’s most gripping material.

Law’s Fragile State raises a set of questions that might be fruitfully pursued through future research. First, it would be interesting to go further back in the archaeology and explore precolonial legal systems in Sudan, whether Islamic or customary, to discern how these were differentially institutionalized within the colonial state and what their legacies might be up to the present. Second, an engagement with internal differences within Sudan would be important, especially given the country’s great diversity. Much of Massoud’s ethnographic research was conducted with internally displaced populations, which, as he explains, cannot be taken as representative of all Sudan. An attention to differences in the lived practice of law across internal divisions would thus be fascinating—the most obvious being the North–South division, but also the divides between rural and urban, pastoral and sedentary, urban elite and urban underclass, and so forth. How do different legal systems interplay and conflict on different sides of these divides? And how might building theory from these particular experiences lead to a richer understanding of the politics of law in general? The book provides a convincing statement about the rich contribution that historically nuanced studies of law—even in “fragile states”—can make to our understanding of law and politics, and of their tempestuous and often surprising relationship.