Kristen Kao - The Social Sources of Legal Pluralism

Where state and customary legal orders coexist, how do individuals choose between alternative providers of justice? When might non-state dispute resolution forums perceived as better-suited versus state forums? Widespread normative notions support the idea that true justice is blind. Yet, there may exist situations where citizens prefer justice institutions consider social relationships. I argue that more attention should be paid to the dyadic social relationship between plaintiffs and opponents in empirical work on legal pluralism. Employing a series of vignette experiments embedded within a larger survey in Iraq, I demonstrate how social intimacy with the disputant drives preferences between customary versus state forums. Disputes within the family are directed towards customary orders. Adopting a multi-method approach to understanding dispute resolution, analysis of focus group discussions suggests that customary orders offer a more restorative route for dispute resolution aimed at the maintenance of social relationships among community members. Yet, Iraqis also face a difficult choice between a corrupt but highly powerful state system versus a less enforceable, less corrupt non-state orders. These findings contribute to ongoing debates over how much prevailing models of state-building should be wary of competition between customary and state governance institutions, contributing to a burgeoning research field finding complementarity between the two tends to offer a wider range of and more appropriate options for solving everyday citizen problems.

Kristen Kao is a Docent (Associate Professor) with the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Kristen has published work on post-conflict reconciliation, non-state authorities, ethnic politics, and forced migration in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, the American Journal of Comparative Law, World Development, Mediterranean Politics, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties, Survey Practice, and the Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies, among others. Her edited volume Decentralization, Local Governance, and Inequality in the Middle East and North Africa with Ellen Lust is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. Kristen is an expert in in-depth interviewing, survey methods, and experimental design in the Middle East and African contexts.  She has been conducting fieldwork-based studies since 2006 across countries as varied as Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Tunisia, Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Malawi, Kenya, Zambia, and Egypt. She has served as an advisor to the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, and the World Bank, and is a Jordan country expert for the Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy Institute. Kristen is a former Fulbright Scholar in Egypt and a Boren Fellow in Jordan and Kuwait. You can read more about Kristen’s research at www.kristenkao.com.