The Legal Pluralism Lab is an online forum for debate and exchange among scholars and practitioners interested in legal pluralism hosted by the Commission on Legal Pluralism (CLP).

A platform to test new ideas, experiment with new formats of knowledge-sharing and learning and forge cross-regional and crossthematic networks and collaborations.

Connect with a CLP member to propose and convene sessions. Sessions should ideally bring together speakers from different regional and academic contexts, career stages, and professional background.

UPCOMING SESSION

DECOLONIZING LEGAL PLURALISM, DECENTERING EPISTEMOLOGICAL PARADIGMS

PANEL DISCUSSION

16 June 2026, 14:30 (CET)

With: Katrin Seidel and Martin Ramstead (Martin Luther University, Halle /Saale), Ana Maria Vargas Falla (Lund University), Anthony Diala (University of the Western Cape), Kalindi Kokal (Kotak School of Sustainability Studies, IIT Kanpur)

In this session, the editors will introduce a recently published special issue of the Oñati Socio-Legal Series(open new window) that advocates for critically examining the epistemological foundations of legal pluralism, particularly “classical” culture-or custom-based legal pluralism. The session proposes to jointly assess legal pluralism’s potential for fostering pluriversal approaches to law. 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. Challenging attempts to essentialise or racialise subject or identity positions, the discussants 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. Participants are invited to jointly discuss the potential and limits of legal pluralism for fostering the decolonisation of justice in our world today.

Join Teams Meeting(open new window)

PAST SESSION

LEGAL PLURALISM IN LIVED MIGRATION ORDERS

Roundtable

17 November 2025, 8:30 a.m. (CET)

With: Sophie Andreetta (ULiége), Iker Barbero (University of the Basque Country), Ellen Desmet (Ghent University), Gulseren Kozak-Isik (Sciences Po), Kirsten McConnachie (University of East Anglia), Sophie Nakueira (University of Cape Town / University of Duisburg Essen) and Larissa Vetters (MPI for Social Anthropology)

This roundtable will explore how the empirical and doctrinal study of migration law and lived migration orders can benefit from an analytical perspective of legal pluralism. It aims to create a conversation between two strands of research: one focusing on how migrants navigate state and non-state legal systems to obtain access to justice and realize their rights, and one focusing on how state actors implement and develop (migration) law and how they take into account plural normative constellations in their interactions with migrants.

Contributions will cover a broad range of migration trajectories, experiences and encounters, questioning established paradigms and categorizations of migration law and aiming for an empirically-informed new conceptual vocabulary to speak to and intervene in current debates about migration governance. Audience participation and dialogue is welcomed.

Here is a list of introductory readings(open new window) mentioned during the discussion.

Want to become an active member of the Lab or propose a session?

Write to us at lab@commission-on-legal-pluralism.com(open new window)
Registering as a member of the CLP is mandatory in order to join the lab as a member.