Agency against authorities

How individuals and groups use the law to their own advantage

In 2025, we are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War, and the many exhibitions and conferences held on this occasion leave no doubt that this subject is of great public interest. Whether or not it is described as a revolution, the Peasants’ War was a mass movement that saw peasants, but also many smallholders and landless groups of the rural population, rebel against the burden of feudal dues and the restriction of their personal freedom that followed serfdom.

Historical anniversaries are often accompanied by new books, and the Peasants’ War is no exception, with the Kolleg inviting the public to a book launch at the city library in Münster in January 2025. Gerd Schwerhoff’s presentation of “Der Bauernkrieg. Eine wilde Handlung” was met with great interest from the audience, who filled every last seat in the hall and took the opportunity to ask the author questions. Since Lyndal Roper was presenting her book “Für die Freiheit. Der Bauernkrieg 1525”  in Bielefeld at the same time, both authors were invited to a masterclass in Münster the following day, where they discussed the historical event of the Peasants’ War with researchers and students from Münster and Bielefeld. Together, they explored the War’s connection with the Reformation movement and compared the different approaches taken by the two books.

For many, the Peasants’ War conjures up images of armed peasants using violence to defend themselves against their oppressors. However, violence was perpetrated primarily by the authorities, and was in any case only one side of the unrest: a development took place after the Peasants’ War that can be described as a process of ‘juridification’, with increasing efforts being made to resolve conflicts between the rural population and the authorities in court, and to reach peaceful agreements through negotiations before appointed commissions.

Such juridification can be observed not only in conflicts between serfs and authorities, but in almost all areas of people’s lives. In the area of present-day Germany, but also in the Netherlands, England and France, the number of court cases rose sharply from the mid-16th century onwards. People from almost all layers of society made increasing use of courts to resolve their conflicts.

The historian Martin Dinges has brought these observations together under the concept of Justiznutzung (uses of justice). In contrast to then dominant view of the judicial system as a feudal instrument of discipline and repression, he draws attention to the actors and their active use of the courts. We invited Martin Dinges to our fourth concept forum in February 2025 to discuss the concept from various disciplinary perspectives together with staff and fellows of the Kolleg and to explore how far such an actor-centred approach can explain the dynamics of legal pluralism and unity. The discussions were extremely stimulating, and we will be publishing the contributions in our Working Papers shortly.

What distinguishes the concept of Justiznutzung is its emphasis on the agency of individuals and groups, including those who seem at first glance to be powerless. Judicial system and courts helped such people to pursue their interests or to appeal against decisions of the ruling authorities at higher courts, and their chances were sometimes improved by the existence of legal and court diversity.

Interestingly, this historical constellation already anticipates phenomena and developments that are also of great interest for contemporary research on legal issues, including for the sociology of law. For example, different variants of the concept of ‘juridification’ have been used for many decades to understand the characteristic dynamics of modern society. However, this discourse in social theory is largely detached from how the discipline of history uses the concept of juridification, the latter linking it to a very specific historical period.

 But from a socio-legal perspective on the ‘mobilizations’ of law, the strategic invocation of courts in the present also holds considerable significance. Practices whereby institutions of the law are ‘used’ to draw attention to collective (political, social, etc.) concerns and to bring about social change are referred to as forms of ‘strategic litigation’. In these cases, the specific subject of the dispute and sometimes also the success of the individual claim recede behind the communicative effect of cases covered by the mass media; the generation of social attention for certain issues, the attempt to make specific concerns the subject of legal disputes in the first place, and the logic of the precedent – these often dominate the case.

It is no coincidence that this form of recourse to the judicial system should be much discussed within research on social movements or the sociology of human rights: here, too, collective strategies are employed to gain agency in the face of entrenched power relations, and attempts are made by people to rediscover the law or hybrid normative structures as forms of resistance, to mobilise them for their own purposes, and to turn them against ‘authorities’. In this respect, it is remarkable that the historical roots of strategic litigation are usually located in the 20th, or at best the late 19th, century, and typically not in the 16th century.

With regard to the present, though, phenomena can also be observed that go beyond both Dinges’ concept of Justiznutzung and the classical understanding of strategic litigation. When, for example, members of social movements (such as the ‘Last Generation’ climate activists) symbolically and performatively appropriate court buildings and criminal proceedings, deliberately cause disruptions in the courtroom by disturbing or interrupting the choreography of the law, or even stage fictitious criminal proceedings against ‘climate sinners’ – this expresses a critical and creative engagement with law and the justice system that is based culturally on specific late modern conditions – though its origins may also, at least in part, be traced back to the rebellious appropriation of legal procedures and institutions in the 16th century.

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Cite as:

Benjamin Seebröker/Daniel Witte: “Agency against authorities”. EViR Blog, 04.07.2025, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/agency

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​​This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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