The Rule of Law and Lexicons of Development and Justice in a Shifting Middle East and North Africa

Two phenomena have typically been true recently regarding the rule of law in Arab states as they seek to expand, or at least retain, their reach. First, judicial review has been minimized in order for it not to constrain executives (e.g., Brown 2001). Second, law has been deployed as a lexicon that can sustain bureaucratic growth and globalization. In such a context, states seek to instrumentalize the rule of law as a technology of public administration, and, sometimes, intimidation.

Nonetheless, legal values across Arab societies are contested complexly domestically, regionally and internationally (e.g., Dupret 2021). However autocratically states may deploy law, this contestation means liberalizing norms around law and justice emerge, and erupt, as they did in 2011 (e.g., Brown and Mednicoff chapters; Bali and Lerner 2017). Governments in the MENA reacted to 2011 in part by foregrounding legal change that they claim enhances the rule of law, a strategy assisted by multifaceted lexical meanings of “the rule of law” itself.

Building on original data from a $1 million grant project in the Arab Gulf, this paper argues that Arab governments, particularly those with major resources like Gulf states, have balanced religious and secular tropes around law to underscore technocratic and transnational mediational legal features so as to claim fealty to the rule of law, while avoiding pressures for greater legal accountability or political rights. This effort helps account for the extensive public diplomacy that countries like Qatar and the UAE maintain around the rule of law. Explicating the process of skirting judicial review by hyping law as a technology of growth and globalization links the paper to both panel themes. Specifically, the paper illustrates its argument based on overall legal growth in the post-2011 Arab world, and the recent case of Qatar’s legal management of the 2022 World Cup.