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Drawing on socio-legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules-based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war-torn societies.
The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff.
-Max Weber, Economy and Society (1978, 220)
I'm put in a cage [in civil society]. It's hard for me to believe that working with the United Nations or an international NGO will give me freedom.
-Interview with Dominic, youth activist and NGO program manager, in Juba, South Sudan (June 2010)1
While conducting research in South Sudan in the years leading up to its 2011 secession from Sudan, I met with a justice of the Supreme Court. South Sudan had just emerged from one of Africa's longest and deadliest civil wars and, aside from a single petition on his desk, there were no legal proceedings before the court. His computer was off (there may not have been electricity). His office was sparse. Down the road from the court, the legislative assembly was at the time still drafting and debating legislation to govern the country after the war's end. In a territory the size of France, the South Sudanese Bar-a dozen or so lawyers at the time-could easily be squeezed into a small sitting room.
What forms does law take in new or weak states like South Sudan? When a national government is emerging, legal doctrine and regulations are under development, and lawyers and federal judges are in short supply, where is the law? Citizens historically have experienced legal culture through interactions with local courts, chiefs, and...