Cooptation justice: how litigation weakened the position of married-out women in China

Abstract This article examines how litigation reshapes civil rights mobilization under authoritarianism through a study of married-out women’s struggles for land rights in rural China over more than three decades. Drawing on in-depth empirical observations, it develops the concept of cooptation justice to explain how litigation shifted from a pressure-building tactic within a broader repertoire of contention to a mechanism of institutional closure. In the earlier period, litigation operated alongside petitioning, protest, media exposure, and support from lawyers and civic actors to generate leverage over local authorities. In the later period, however, shrinking political opportunities and the promotion of formally accessible but politically bounded legal opportunities redirected grievances into courts. Under these conditions, judicial proceedings did not simply fail to remedy discrimination. They absorbed contentious claims into authoritative processes that validated exclusion, weakened alternative avenues of mobilization, and increased the costs of continued contention. The article argues that cooptation justice is a mode of authoritarian governance in which law functions not only as an instrument of legitimacy and dispute management but also as a mechanism for containing civil rights mobilization.