Short Abstract

This panel interrogates discourses and practices of decolonisation through law. Addressing polarised debates around historical justice for excluded communities and state-led efforts to decolonise through law, we ask what role law can play in contesting colonial legal and moral orders across worlds.

Long Abstract

Responding to recent interventions in Anthropology (Doyle 2025, Rivera Cusicanqui 2020), and to contested and polarised debates around decoloniality’s possibilities, this panel addresses the proliferation of practices and discourses around decolonisation, and their relationship to ‘law’ broadly conceived. Where decolonisation has been invoked as a state project, as in Bolivia, Ecuador and India, outcomes have been contradictory, with legal changes sometimes undermining and sometimes reinforcing social, cultural and political inequalities rooted in the colonial order. We interrogate these efforts, and to use them as windows onto the more fundamental question of whether law can truly act as a force or instrument for or of decolonisation, or whether such efforts are doomed to fail – and whether this failure is intrinsic to the law as a form of social action. Where new constitutions have granted legal subjectivity to indigenous and historically excluded communities and other-than human entities, the material changes such populations demand have rarely emerged, and the constitutions themselves remain, in Olivia Harris’ words ‘simulacra of an ideal world’; law in the subjunctive tense. Likewise, in India for example, state-led decolonisation has been rhetorically and practically allied to a chauvinistic nationalism that persecutes Muslims, a model for and echo of political and religious polarisations across the globe. This panel interrogates the law of the state ‘at it’s best’ – with its promises of new eras and subjectivities which move beyond the colonial categories of the past, and invites contributions around:

How does constitutional change figure as a technology of decolonisation?

How do indigenous forms, practices and philosophies of justice challenge the coloniality of state-created law?

What decolonial possibilities inhere in legal technique, practice and mythology, if any?

Historically, how has law’s centrality to colonialism been challenged, reproduced or refracted in the present?

How can justice be made across worlds?

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