1st Edition

Law and Resistance Toward a Performative Epistemology of Law

By Awol Allo Copyright 2026
208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

Introduction

1. Law and Resistance: A Genealogy of Silencing and Erasure

2. Toward a Performative Epistemology of Law: Sovereignty, Law, and the Subject

3. Toward a Performative Conception of the Political Trial

4. The Courtroom as a Site of Performative Resistance: Nelson Mandela at Rivonia

5. Marwan Barghouti in Tel Aviv: Occupation, Terrorism, and Resistance in the Courtroom

6. The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in the Courtroom: Slavery, Founding Fathers, and Black Power in the Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial 

7. Conclusion: The Traces of Law in Resistance and the Traces of Resistance in Law

Biography

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.

"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 FarmerUniversity of Glasgow, UK.