Citizenship In the Shadow of Law: The Exercise and Contestation of Authoritarian Power in Jordan

Why are legal rights, even ones firmly established by constitutions and statue, often so difficult to exercise and assert in authoritarian societies? Much work on authoritarian rule of law takes a top-down view that rights are hollow primarily because autocrats can override, or completely bypass, the normal legal system. We offer an alternative perspective by arguing that state officials, including cabinet ministers, bureaucrats, and judges, are often the primary actors destabilizing legal rights, whether autocrats desire them to do so or not. These state officials can limit legal rights by creatively exploiting legal loopholes and rigidly enforcing legal technicalities. Thus, citizenship rights are fragile not just because authoritarian states ignore rule of law, but also because many officials learn to identify gaps in law that afford them significant discretionary authority or because they strictly follow the letter of the law. Using a detailed case study of Jordan between 1988 and 2019, we find that a great deal of day-to-day authoritarian politics is administered in the shadow of the law—where opaque and variable rulings by state officials precipitate shifts in citizenship rights more than formal legal change. These rulings often start as general regulations issued by ministers and directors, and then gradually evolve as they translate into decisions by individual bureaucrats. This pattern of state decision-making occupies a blurry space between legality and illegality. On the one hand, most regulations begin with clear references to what law says and where law is silent. On the other hand, decision-making outcomes often contradict the spirit of law and erode the rights it guarantees. In this context, citizens typically lack concrete information about who violated their rights, when, and how. Furthermore, when people pursue rights violations in court, these informational deficiencies often result in their cases being rejected according to technical legal rules. Our empirical analysis uses extensive fine-grained data from Jordan to explore how the exercise of state authority in the shadow of the law whittles away at citizenship rights. We draw on 230 interviews with key Jordanian ministers, judges, lawyers, and activists from 2016–2019. We also leverage insights from an original dataset tracking all court verdicts on disputes between Jordanian citizens and state actors in 1993, 2011, 2014, and 2017. We use this difficult-to-access data first to chart how ambiguous legal regulations on nationality revocation since 1988 inhibit citizens’ abilities to identify and understand violations of their rights. Second, we show how litigation challenging the revocation of nationality often fails due to a judicial culture that prioritizes procedural above substantive jurisprudence. In nationality lawsuits, judges over-enforcing the letter of law—as opposed to neglecting the rule of law—is what makes the violation of constitutional and statutory rights so difficult to contest through the formal legal process. Overall, our findings suggest that the hollowness of rights in authoritarian societies is often a result of there being too many legal rules as well as too much rigid adherence to those rules by state officials, not just too little rule of law.