Overview

Legal orders do not emerge from a prior social contract or abstract norms. They crystallize out of acts of resistance – revolutions, protests and transgressions – that break with an existing juridical order and force the articulation of a new one. Resistance is therefore not external to law but constitutive of it. Yet once instituted, law must disavow this beginning to sustain its fiction of autonomy, neutrality, and universality. This disavowal, however, is never complete, as law relies on resistance to delineate its boundaries and secure its porous frontiers. At the same time, resistance depends on law as its field of intelligibility: it requires law’s stage, grammar, and normative framework to articulate its claim. Law and resistance are thus mutually constitutive and structurally interdependent, bound together in a dynamic that is inherently unstable and antagonistic. This book explores this constitutive paradox that defines the relationship between law and resistance. Against theories that treat law as a closed normative system or as a mere instrument of domination, the book develops a performative account of law in which this paradox emerges as constitutive of the conditions under which resistance becomes possible. Focusing on the political trial – a contested space in which law cannot obscure the rupture and contingency from which it emerges but must instead engage the forces it seeks to domesticate – the book shows how law, neither fully autonomous nor wholly determined by power, can become a site of struggle in which authority is performed and contested. Law and Resistance considers the different ways in which a politics of resistance is enabled in the courtroom, as it uncovers a performative logic that contingently conditions, and thus breaks open, law’s otherwise closed normativity.

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9781138693951

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Reviews

""In this book, Allo carefully analyses the political trial to develop a performative theory of law which shows how legal authority is more fragile and contingent than is often taken be the case. With its focus on resistance as a constitutive element of law, this is a timely and important book."" Lindsay Farmer, University of Glasgow, UK.

Author Information

Awol Allo is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Sheffield, UK. He holds an LLB from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), an LLM from the University of Notre Dame (USA), and a PhD from the University of Glasgow (UK). He has been a Fung Global fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) and a visiting scholar at Princeton University Center for Human Values. Allo’s research examines the fundamental paradox at the heart of law and resistance, with particular attention to how legal moments, spaces, and discourses both enable and constrain political struggles. He is the editor of The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial (2015), and his scholarly work has been published in leading academic journals. Beyond academia, his public writings have appeared in major international outlets, such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, CNN, and Al Jazeera.

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