Law and the Epistemologies of the South
Law and the Epistemologies of the South

Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 823

ISBN-13: 100935356X

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Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.

The Challenge of Legal Pluralism
The Challenge of Legal Pluralism

Author: Marc Simon Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1317039181

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Within the Latin American context, legal pluralism is often depicted as a dichotomy between customary law and national law. In addition, the use of customary law alongside national law is frequently portrayed as a vehicle of resistance. This book argues that, because ordinary Indians are not positively biased in favor of customary law per se, a heterogeneity of legal practices can be observed on a daily basis, which consequently undermines the commonly held view of customary law as a "counter-hegemonic strategy", even if, on other socio-geographical levels, this thinking in terms of resistance holds true. Based on qualitative research, the work analyzes how internal conflicts among indigenous inhabitants of the Ecuadorian highlands are being settled in a situation of formal legal pluralism, and what can be learned from this in terms of Indian-state relationships. It is shown that, on a local level, the phenomenological dimension of legal pluralism can be termed "interlegality." On a macro level, ontological assumptions underscore that legal pluralism is still seen as a dichotomy between customary and national law. Multidisciplinary in nature, the book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal Pluralism, Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies.

New Constitutionalism in Latin America
New Constitutionalism in Latin America

Author: Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 131708862X

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Latin America has a long tradition of constitutional reform. Since the democratic transitions of the 1980s, most countries have amended their constitutions at least once, and some have even undergone constitutional reform several times. The global phenomenon of a new constitutionalism, with enhanced rights provisions, finds expression in the region, but the new constitutions, such as those of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, also have some peculiar characteristics which are discussed in this important book. Authors from a number of different disciplines offer a general overview of constitutional reforms in Latin America since 1990. They explore the historical, philosophical and doctrinal differences between traditional and new constitutionalism in Latin America and examine sources of inspiration. The book also covers sociopolitical settings, which factors and actors are relevant for the reform process, and analyzes the constitutional practices after reform, including the question of whether the recent constitutional reforms created new post-liberal democracies with an enhanced human and social rights record, or whether they primarily serve the ambitions of new political leaders.

Decolonizing Constitutionalism
Decolonizing Constitutionalism

Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1000914097

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The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.

Domesticating Democracy
Domesticating Democracy

Author: Susan Helen Ellison

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0822371782

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In Domesticating Democracy Susan Helen Ellison examines foreign-funded alternate dispute resolution (ADR) organizations that provide legal aid and conflict resolution to vulnerable citizens in El Alto, Bolivia. Advocates argue that these programs help residents cope with their interpersonal disputes and economic troubles while avoiding an overburdened legal system and cumbersome state bureaucracies. Ellison shows that ADR programs do more than that—they aim to change the ways Bolivians interact with the state and with global capitalism, making them into self-reliant citizens. ADR programs frequently encourage Bolivians to renounce confrontational expressions of discontent, turning away from courtrooms, physical violence, and street protest and coming to the negotiation table. Nevertheless, residents of El Alto find creative ways to take advantage of these micro-level resources while still seeking justice and a democratic system capable of redressing the structural violence and vulnerability that ADR fails to treat.

Violence Against Women in Legally Plural settings
Violence Against Women in Legally Plural settings

Author: Anna Barrera

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1317385934

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This book addresses a growing area of concern for scholars and development practitioners: discriminatory gender norms in legally plural settings. Focusing specifically on indigenous women, this book analyses how they, often in alliance with supporters and allies, have sought to improve their access to justice. Development practitioners working in the field of access to justice have tended to conceive indigenous legal systems as either inherently incompatible with women’s rights or, alternatively, they have emphasised customary law’s advantageous features, such as its greater accessibility, familiarity and effectiveness. Against this background – and based on a comparison of six thus far underexplored initiatives of legal and institutional change in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia – Anna Barrera Vivero provides a more nuanced, ethnographic, understanding of how women navigate through context-specific constellations of interlegality in their search for justice. In so doing, moreover, her account of ongoing political debates and local struggles for gender justice grounds the elaboration of a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the legally plural dynamics involved in the contestation of discriminatory gender norms.

Demodiversity
Demodiversity

Author: Boaventura Santos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-30

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1000081192

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We are living in a time when social and political authoritarianism appear to be gaining ground around the world. This book presents the democratic practices, spaces and processes that engage directly with the theoretical assumptions advanced by the epistemologies of the South, summoning other contexts and empirical realities that attest to the possibility of a renewal and deepening of democracy beyond the liberal and representative canon, which is embedded within a world capitalist system. The chapters in this book put forward the ideas of demodiversity, of high-intensity democracy, of the articulation between representative democracy and participatory democracy as well as, in certain contexts, between both these and other forms of democratic deliberation, such as the communitarian democracy of the indigenous and peasant communities of Africa, Latin America and Asia. The challenge undertaken in this book is to demand utopia, imagining a post-abyssal democracy that permits the democratizing, decolonizing, decommodifying and depatriarchalizing of social relations. This post-abyssal democracy obliges us to satisfy the maximum definition of democracy and not the minimum, transforming society into fields of democratization that permeate the structural spaces of contemporary societies.

Geopolitics and Decolonization
Geopolitics and Decolonization

Author: Fernanda Frizzo Bragato

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1786605139

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Gathering researchers from or towards Global South epistemologies, this book enriches the debate on crucial questions for liberation in the South and the improvement of South relations. It argues that coloniality and colonialism are not outdated phenomena of the historical past, but contemporary marks that remain repressed. The dominance of Eurocentric paradigm in the social sciences explains the long-lasting detachment between thinkers and politicians from the Global South, which have been historically presented according to their respective relations with the West (Europe and North America). The dialogue on common problems and challenges to people and societies in the South, largely derived from their colonial past and condition, is still sparing. This book actively promotes and demonstrates the value of intercultural dialogue and debate amongst voices from within the Global South on issues to do with decoloniality, cultural rights, law and politics.

Transcontinental Dialogues
Transcontinental Dialogues

Author: R. Aída Hernández Castillo

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0816539847

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Transcontinental Dialogues brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropologists from Mexico, Canada, and Australia who work at the intersections of Indigenous rights, advocacy, and action research. These engaged anthropologists explore how obligations manifest in differently situated alliances, how they respond to such obligations, and the consequences for anthropological practice and action. This volume presents a set of pieces that do not take the usual political or geographic paradigms as their starting point; instead, the particular dialogues from the margins presented in this book arise from a rejection of the geographic hierarchization of knowledge in which the Global South continues to be the space for fieldwork while the Global North is the place for its systematization and theorization. Instead, contributors in Transcontinental Dialogues delve into the interactions between anthropologists and the people they work with in Canada, Australia, and Mexico. This framework allows the contributors to explore the often unintended but sometimes devastating impacts of government policies (such as land rights legislation or justice initiatives for women) on Indigenous people’s lives. Each chapter’s author reflects critically on their own work as activist-scholars. They offer examples of the efforts and challenges that anthropologists—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—confront when producing knowledge in alliances with Indigenous peoples. Mi’kmaq land rights, pan-Maya social movements, and Aboriginal title claims in rural and urban areas are just some of the cases that provide useful ground for reflection on and critique of challenges and opportunities for scholars, policy-makers, activists, allies, and community members. This volume is timely and innovative for using the disparate anthropological traditions of three regions to explore how the interactions between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples in supporting Indigenous activism have the potential to transform the production of knowledge within the historical colonial traditions of anthropology.