In this session, the editors, Katrin Seidel and Martin Ramstedt, will introduce a recently published special issue of the Oñati Socio-Legal Series that advocates for critically examining the epistemological foundations of legal pluralism, particularly “classical” culture-or custom-based legal pluralism.  The special issue addresses conceptual colonial legacies and path-dependencies with the goal to decentre the epistemological underpinnings of contemporary plural legal arrangements in different regions around the globe. The session proposes to jointly assess legal pluralism’s potential for fostering pluriversal approaches to law. Challenging attempts to essentialise or racialise subject or identity positions, the editors and invited discussants, Ana Maria Vargas Falla and Anthony Diala, will highlight the rigidification of collective identities, entrenched in binary logics reaching back to the European enlightenment, and other dimensions of coloniality embedded in hegemonic, modernist, and Anglo-Eurocentric legal frameworks.  All participants are invited to jointly discuss the potential and limits of legal pluralism for fostering the decolonisation of justice in our world today. 

You are warmly invited to join us here(open new window).

Further information on the format of the Legal Pluralism Lab is available here(open new window).