Making Law Matter: The Legal Mobilization of Subaltern Actors In Cambodia

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to explain why and how subaltern actors engage in legal mobilization in an authoritarian country with a weak rule of law. Scholarship on authoritarian legality argue that citizen use the law under certain conditions—if the issue is apolitical, not involving powerful actors, or because the state purposefully redirects public grievances from the streets to legal institutions. I, however, argue that even on contentious issues involving the state, subaltern actors organize “from below” to develop innovative repertoires of legal mobilization tactics to build alternate forms of enforcement. My two case studies—a grassroots environmental group called the Prey Lang Community Network (PLCN) and garment factory workers and trade unions creatively employ complex legal mobilization repertoires. The PLCN use what is called “legal bricolage” by resourcefully and innovatively combining practices and beliefs from different normative orderings. Garment factory workers engage in what I call “contentious accountability” by mixing disruption with arbitration in going on strike and using a legal institution simultaneously. Through intensive fieldwork in Cambodia combining a multitude of different methods, this interdisciplinary social study of law illustrates how despite living in a repressive country that weaponizes the law against its citizens, subaltern actors engage in legal mobilization to build their own system of enforcement.