States marred by conflicts and serious human rights violations are frequently associated with lawlessness. Sudan is no exception. In challenging this view, Massoud provides an important and original contribution to extant literature. His ground-breaking monograph is both an in-depth empirical study of how colonial states, authoritarian regimes and humanitarian actors use law, and a history of the law in Sudan. As such, it addresses an important gap in socio-legal studies on Sudan. Its use of sources is impressive, including invaluable personal interviews with a range of actors (175 in total), personal observations of law in action, and archival research in the United Kingdom, Egypt and Sudan. The book also provides unique insights into recent developments concerning the judiciary in Sudan, such as court infrastructure, gathered by the author “based on data collected at and certified by Sudan Judiciary Department of Statistics”.Footnote ¹ This reliance on first hand sources generates important, contextual information. However, this approach does to some extent come at the expense of references to the wealth of materials that have recently become available on the law in Sudan. This includes reports by the United Nations and African Union (particularly the AU High-Level Panel on Darfur) resulting from their engagement in Sudan, publications by civil society initiatives (such as the Project for Criminal Law Reform in Sudan)Footnote ² and books on law reform.Footnote ³

Setting out a broad understanding of law and taking an approach that “analyse[s] the legal order as a whole” (chapter 1), Massoud discusses pertinent developments in Sudan's legal history with reference to colonial, authoritarian and humanitarian approaches. While the book is comprehensive in scope from 1898 onwards, it does not examine the use of law under the Mahdiyya (1885–98) which merits further consideration as a prototype for the authoritarian use of law in Sudan, particularly of Shari'a (Islamic law). Customary law is also excluded because of “access limitations” and the understandable focus on state laws. However, its inclusion would have added an important dimension. This is in relation to both the intricate relationship between formal and customary laws, and the part that the co-optation and manipulation of customary law have played in Sudan's legal politics.Footnote ⁴ It is certainly an area that deserves further attention, ideally taking a similar socio-legal approach.

Chapter 2, “The Colonial Path to the Rule of Law, 1898–1956”, shows how “promoting a rule-of-law ideology was the cornerstone of the colonial administration”Footnote ⁵ that “helped to facilitate British control and maintain political order”Footnote ⁶ while “the Sudanese in turn used the logic of the British legal system to help them expel their colonial overlords and achieve self-determination”.Footnote ⁷ Identifying the dialectical role of colonial approaches in Sudan makes an important contribution to the understanding of how law was used to serve, and embed, colonial legitimacy, rather than simply being a tool of repression.

Chapter 3, “Law in a State of Crisis, 1956–1989”, examines in detail how successive regimes sought to use law as a tool and “turned to legal strategies to control the populace”,Footnote ⁸ detaching law “from its colonial origins”Footnote ⁹ in the process. The chapter provides fascinating and critical insights into crucial developments of legal politics during the Nimeiri regime. These are based on, inter alia, interviews with its main architect, Babiker Awadalla, the former speaker of Parliament, chief justice and prime minister, who as “one of the most prominent defenders of judicial autonomy, was the first (so openly) to remake the post-independence legal order into a tool of the political elite”.Footnote ¹⁰ The chapter is, however, largely silent on the interim period of 1985–89. A closer examination of this period promises to yield important lessons on the degree to which “democratic” forces shared authoritarian mindsets and why they ultimately failed to bring about legislative reform, which was high on the political agenda at the time.

Chapter 4, “Authoritarian Legal Politics and Islamic Law, 1989–2011”, demonstrates how the Bashir regime sought to establish control by “drastically increasing the number of courts, law schools, lawyers, and judges operating under the same regime-approved version of Islamic law”.Footnote ¹¹ However, as Massoud rightly points out, the “regime's efforts to create legal stability rest on shaky ground. Despite the citizenry's increased use of courts, it remains debatable whether Bashir's turn to legal politics fully remade the military regime to appear more legitimate and moderate”.Footnote ¹² If anything, one could point further, as partly reflected in the chapter, to the adverse impact of repressive laws and the failure adequately to implement the legal provisions envisaged under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005. This includes the arbitrariness inherent in many of the broad and vague laws enacted or amended since 1989 and the manifest failure of Sudan's legal system to provide protection against human rights violations, or justice and accountability for the same. Appropriately, Massoud concludes that “[a]n authoritarian government can impose a top-down interpretation of legal politics – manipulating the legal system to punish enemies, installing supporters and judges to handle people's grievances and claims, and foisting a particular legal ideology on the nation – but it cannot in the longue durée [in the long term view of history] force the public to trust or legitimize its rule.”Footnote ¹³

Chapter 5 “Law and Civil Society, 1956–2011”, focuses on how “foreign aid workers, international development agencies, and Sudanese civil society activists have ... relied on law and legal theory in their efforts to oppose authoritarianism and empower Sudanese citizens”.Footnote ¹⁴ Charting the history of civil society engagement, it explores supply-oriented (state) and demand-oriented (civil society, grassroots) programmes. What emerges is a clear picture of approaches taken, the realities on the ground and the views of various actors. These developments raise critical questions, including external notions of human rights and agenda setting, limited awareness of local priorities, dependency and structural weaknesses of civil society. While these problems are readily apparent, it is important to credit Sudanese-led civil society movements that have laid the ground for later efforts;Footnote ¹⁵ this is to some degree reflected in Massoud's discussion of the intricate relationship between, and mutual dependency of, internal and external actors. The following, related chapter, “Humanitarian Legal Politics in an Authoritarian State, 2005–11”, provides an excellent account of training activities and pertinently poses the challenge: “[i]n a fragile state riven by war, it is unclear that training people to understand their rights leads to actual mobilization of those rights, particularly from an authoritarian bureaucracy that uses law and institutions to absorb, defuse, and stymie grievances.”Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, the impacts of training are found to be varied, benefiting civil society elites and being useful as an event for participants. However, they are often found to create additional risks, and to fail in bringing about changes and meeting the expectations raised. Humanitarian legal politics are, however, not confined to training and empowerment of the poor, but include monitoring, litigation and advocacy at local, national, regional and international levels. Such legal politics frequently serve to create alternative discourses and have to be located in broader social movements that challenge the government and the way power is exercised. The role of women's rights groups and the burgeoning youth movement in Sudan would merit further, close attention in this regard.

The final chapter, “Reflection on Legal Politics”, gives a sobering account of the role of law, cautioning against seeing it as an unqualified good in a country such as Sudan where “law becomes one more weapon in the arsenal”Footnote ¹⁷ of political actors and elites. Taking a contextual approach is an important message to those who see law as some kind of deus ex machina [“god from the machine” plot device]. A human rights critique of the law in Sudan must in this regard not necessarily fall into the trap of presenting a ready-made alternative. Instead, it can focus on opening discourse and political processes with a view to addressing the law's ambivalence and dark sides. Ultimately, for those Sudanese, such as the displaced women whom Massoud met, “to experience a reduction in their suffering, Sudan must be transformed from a state in which law serves the violent interests of the powerful to one in which it secures the dignity of each person and his or her community”.Footnote ¹⁸

The overall findings of parallels in how the various actors have used the law as a tool in Sudan provide important lessons, which counsel against an abstract, formalistic and conventional approach to the promotion of the rule of law in “fragile states”. Massoud's outsider/insider perspective, constituted and informed by the empirical, participatory research undertaken, enables him to evaluate critically policy approaches and their application. His approach provides an overdue and much needed questioning of the modes of “doing things” relating to the rule of law and promotion of human rights, which can easily become self-serving. Their downsides have been known and discussed within civil society working in and on Sudan but they have not been identified and analysed explicitly in writing. The book can be expected to serve as an important reference point and prompt for further introspection and discussions in this regard, not only for civil society organizations but also donors and other actors in Sudan and beyond. Given the country's systemic crisis of human rights and governance, the opening of perspectives for further engagement with Sudan's legal order in its historical and socio-political context could not be more timely.