Law and the Epistemologies of the South

Offers a radical critique of exclusionary state law and proposes an epistemic, theoretical and political alternative.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Author)

9781316610466, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 June 2023

400 pages
27 x 18 x 2.5 cm, 1.168 kg

'The book offers a clear-eyed account of the possibility of progressive transformation. Drawing on his incomparable experience across multiple continents, nation-states, and political stakes, this is classic Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Encyclopaedic in scope and detail, it is magisterial in reach. A reference book for our times.' David Theo Goldberg, University of California - Irvine

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.

Part I. The Tragic Optimism of the Law: The End of a Story: 1. Unsettling times
2. The end of legal reformism? Lineages of legal reformism
3. The early demise of legal reformism: my journey through the Law and Modernization Program at Yale University
4. Room for manoeuvre: Paradox, programme, or Pandora's Box?
Part II. Epistemologies of the South and the Law: 5. Introducing the epistemologies of the South
6. The epistemologies of the South and law: towards a post-abyssal law
7. Is post-abyssal law possible? Part III. The Abyssal Law under the Mode of Abyssal Exclusion: 8. Lawfare: a long history
9. Colonial law and imperial law
10. Colonial legal duality: the creation of legal codes for indigenous populations
Part IV. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the State: 11. The heterogeneous state, legal plurality and traditional authorities in Africa: the case of Mozambique
12. The rise of a micro dual state: a case of highly politicised legal pluralism
13. The refoundation of the state in Bolivia and Ecuador?
Part V. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the Law: 14. Law and revolution in Portugal: experiences of popular justice after the carnation revolution of 1974
15. Popular justice in cape verde
16. The landless rural workers' movement in Brazil and its struggles for access to law and justice
17. The law of the excluded: indigenous justice and plurinationality in Bolivia and Ecuador
18. Decolonising justice and democratic peace in Colombia
Part VI. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting Hegemonic Human Rights: 19. Human rights in a post-secular age: counter-hegemony and progressive theologies
20. Towards an insurgent, intercultural and cosmopolitan declaration of human rights and duties
21. Rights of nature.

Subject Areas: Comparative law [LAM]