ABSTRACT
Rebel courts have been a frequent phenomenon in the Syrian insurgency. After conquering territory, Islamist and jihadist groups established all-encompassing bodies combining administrative and legal functions. With this the groups tried to maintain the symbolic elements of the Islamic state even though (with the exception of IS) they did not announce it. Hence, they delegated services to civilian governance structures only as long as these were not considered as essential to the symbolic order of Dar al-Islam. However, in order for these courts to establish a predictable, consistent and situationally stable normative system of control, there needs to be at least a minimum degree of functional differentiation between the military and the legal domains. In the contribution we analyse the relationship between the most important insurgent courts and the dominant armed groups based on a multi-sited ethnography and an analysis of primary documents. This topic is of great relevance despite the by-and-large failure of the judicial experience, both for social dynamics on the ground during and after the period of opposition control and for the wider trajectories of the Syrian conflict.
