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- Convenors:
-
Martyn Wemyss
(Goldsmiths)
Matthew Doyle (University College London)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This talk examines the AfCHPR and Oromo indigenous courts as complementary pathways to decolonising justice and jurisdiction. Drawing on fieldwork in Ethiopia and Tanzania, we suggest to rethink courts as sites of cultural recognition and places of peace for future reinventions.
Paper long abstract
This talk examines the role of transcontinental (the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights) and indigenous courts (Ethiopia) as two divergent but complementary judicial entities and pathways to decolonising justice and jurisdiction in (East) Africa. Based on recent fieldwork in Haramaya and Arusha, we analyse how decolonisation is taking place within and beyond the nation state, and interrogate how far a state-sponsored reinvention of tradition, such as the Oromo Gaddaa system in contemporary Ethiopia, intersects with other transformations needed for more transparent, just, and gender-equal access to and functioning of legal systems.
To engage these questions, we highlight how the Oromo peace courts and the AfCHPR contribute to new understandings of gendered discourses and women’s rights, and how they expand narratives of decolonisation, justice, and ownership. We suggest that legal activism transcends borders to challenge impunity and inspire new 'cultures of justice' that empower local ownership and meaningful processes beyond colonial heritage. Ultimately, we propose understanding these legal institutions not only as instruments of punishment but as sites of recognition, resistance, and visions of glocal justice beyond coloniality. We thus argue that judicial proceedings grounded in cultural heritage and future-oriented ideas can be transformative in restoring ownership, challenging established gender roles, and countering lingering colonial epistemologies.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli apartheid regime. It analyses the Palestinian search for justice and the use of civil disobedience and nonviolent strategies to contest the Israeli colonial system and to enforce international law.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates the discourses and practices of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the apartheid regime imposed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people. Palestinian civil society organizations initiated this movement in 2005, calling international solidarity groups to support their anti-colonial struggle, joining a campaign to sever international ties with Israel. This campaign tried to increase the political and economic costs of the colonial rule and force a change in the Israeli policies, which did not respect international law. This paper analyses the Palestinian search for justice and the use of civil disobedience and nonviolent strategies to contest the Israeli colonial system and to enforce international law. It examines the relations between indigenous resistance and international solidarity to transform colonial rule.
Paper short abstract
Grounded in historical-anthropological research on the inclusion and exclusion of “Scheduled Tribes”, this paper proposes a framework to research citizenship for indigenous people in India, from colonial schedules and constitutional debates, to analyses of recent amendments to citizenship law.
Paper long abstract
In the context of the co-opted visions of decoloniality, rapid digitalisation of citizenship and welfare access, and historical land alienation, adivasis across India largely persevere with the contradictory promise and paternalistic governmentality of the state’s Tribal welfare schemes and other forms of social security. This paper outlines a theoretical framework to navigate the state-society relationship obtaining across the vast heterogeneity of India’s “Scheduled Tribe” population. Drawing on theories of citizenship and historical research, and necessarily engaged with questions of comparison, representation, and identity-based competition for resources, I ask: how are India’s adivasi communities responding to new representations of their identity, constructed through an overtly Hindu lens, amidst the rapid digitalisation of citizenship? This paper will compare how adivasis are drawn into, and respond to, polarising ethno-religious discourse, that is shaping the contours of contemporary politics. Given the context of heated public debate on who is included or excluded from the Indian nation, adivasi communities are new frontiers for political parties and nationalist movements, who claim them as original Hindus. Historicising the construction of “Scheduled Tribes” and associated characteristics and criteria within the ethnographic state, I map regional histories across three adivasi territories (Adilabad, Telangana; Mandla, Madhya Pradesh; and Gadchiroli, Maharashtra). With these comparative trajectories of the governmentalisation of tribal identity, I propose conceptualising a longer fragmented understanding of how welfare provision recirculates identities, languages, and practices of citizenship, and has profoundly shaped contemporary politics for people belonging to groups classified as “Scheduled Tribes”.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the paradoxes of state-led decolonization via ethnography of the politics of a Bolivian Quechua speaking community, offering a grounded critique of the national government's project of constitutional reform, indigeneity, radical politics, and the colonial legacies of the state.
Paper long abstract
This paper outlines the central argument of the forthcoming monograph which examine what it means to ‘decolonize the state’ - the declared goal of the Bolivian Movement for Socialism (MAS) government - via long-term fieldwork of processes of state-building at the local level of a Quechua-speaking community. The MAS attempted to re-found the Bolivian nation through constitutional and legal reforms that aim to devolve power to local communities and fundamentally transform the state and its relationship to civil society. In doing so, it sought to overturn the legacies of colonialism in a nation whose indigenous majority have long been marginalized. Yet while regarded as the most radical example of parallel worldwide movements, the MAS dramatically lost power after twenty years in office. Bringing history and ethnography into conversation with European critical theory, decolonial and indigenous thought, this work argues that Bolivian indigenous politics were formed in struggle with colonial processes of state-making. The modern state is both the outcome of colonialism and a means through which colonialism was enacted in Bolivia and the rest of the world. This explains its central role in politics and the limitations of state-led recognition for addressing colonial legacies and enacting change.
Paper short abstract
This essay argues that Britain’s criminal legal system, shaped by colonial lawfare and reinforced in the neo‑colonial metropole, continues to reproduce racialised inequities through legislation, policing, and institutional logics rooted in empire.
Paper long abstract
This essay examines Britain’s criminal legal system through a decolonial lens and argues that its contemporary structures cannot be understood without recognising their entanglement with imperial domination, racialisation, and the violent logics of colonial lawfare. Tracing the genealogy of British jurisprudence from the era of British slavery and Empire to the present, it shows how practices of legal codification, racialisation, and disciplinary control were first tested in colonial “laboratories” across Africa and South East Asia, then imported back into the neo-colonial metropole. Situated in London and shaped by the authority of metropolitan elites, these legal instruments were redeployed to regulate and punish populations constructed as threatening and inherently criminal through myths of racial and cultural inferiority.
Drawing on anthropological scholarship, historical cases and lived experience, the essay offers a decolonial critique of contemporary populist narratives of “lawlessness” and crisis centred on immigration. It demonstrates how such rhetoric legitimises renewed forms of racialised governance that rely on coercive and punitive force. The argument advances the claim that British law continues to function as a bureaucratic system of social stratification, with policing practices that sustain a two-tiered system of justice grounded in a long-standing belief in white supremacy. Ultimately, the paper contends that Britain’s legal order remains a framework of coloniality that regulates racialised subjects not as equal citizens but as perpetual outsiders within the metropole. It calls for a reassessment of the presumed neutrality of law and a clearer recognition of its role in maintaining the ongoing production of racialised injustice.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the practice of citizenship revocation for terror in Europe, developed in response to the “foreign fighter” phenomenon where thousands of European citizens joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. This challenges how citizenship is legally constructed.
Paper long abstract
European states are stepping away from unwanted citizens. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been upholding member states’ determinations to revoke citizenship for citizens convicted of terror crimes. Due to international law prohibiting statelessness, citizenship revocation is only possible when citizens enjoy more than one citizenship. This has resulted in a deeply uneven juridical practice, where citizens with diverse heritage ties can be punished in ways that citizens with singular citizenship cannot and will not be. In practice, this is often racialized, such as when Denmark repatriated white Danish-only citizens from camps in Syria but not non white Danish plus citizens (as Denmark was able to revoke their Danish citizenship).
This paper examines the practice of citizenship revocation for terror in Europe through its framing by the ECtHR. This new practice was developed in response to the “foreign fighter” phenomenon where thousands of European citizens joined Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq prior to IS’ territorial defeat in 2019. The paper demonstrates that the emerging citizenship revocation jurisprudence from the ECtHR upends decades of rights constructions around citizenship and belonging, and represents a significant threat to human rights constructions in Europe. This represents a (re)colonialization through law, and the paper engages with decolonialization arguments to examine this emerging legal European practice.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research in Rome, I contend that diversification in the field of canon law has largely stabilized conservative Catholic doctrine. By juxtaposing conservative Global South canon lawyers with decolonizing anthropology, I highlight biases in contemporary decolonial discourse.
Paper long abstract
As the oldest continuously operating global bureaucracy, the Catholic Church has been held together by canon law. Catholicism, and canon law in particular, have been understood as vehicles of colonialism, whether through the entanglement of Christianization and colonization or through modeling political sovereignty on divine supremacy. Recent scholarship has called for closer scrutiny of the Eurocentric orientation of so-called global canon law and has begun to ask what it might mean to decolonize it.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in central institutions of the Holy See in Rome among canon lawyers, this paper argues that institutional diversification does not necessarily result in epistemic change. Today, more than sixty percent of canon law students in Rome come from the Global South. While this diversification might be expected to challenge or reshape conservative Catholic doctrine, I contend that internationalization has, in practice, largely reproduced and stabilized existing doctrinal positions.
This empirical observation is placed in dialogue with contemporary debates on decolonization in anthropology. In recent years, decolonization has frequently been framed as the inclusion of scholars, perspectives, and epistemologies from the Global South within curricula, bibliographies, institutional structures, and theoretical foundations to overcome colonial legacies and path dependencies. Such inclusion, however, tends to be selective. Perspectives that gain visibility often resonate with established anthropological orientations, such as critiques of Cartesian dualism or engagements with posthumanist thought. By juxtaposing conservative canon lawyers from the Global South with prevailing inclusionary practices in decolonizing anthropology, this paper highlights potential biases within contemporary decolonial discourse.
Paper short abstract
The paper draws together situated indigenous critiques of (neo)liberal teleology/eschatology with the theory of time implied by the concept of Pachakuti to analyse the role of law in the making and unmaking of (post)colonial worlds, and to rethink analyses of neoliberalism through this prism.
Paper long abstract
This paper takes as its point of departure two statements from Aymara interlocutors about political pasts and futures; one asserts that the European invaders brought the ‘Neoliberal Republican system’ to Bolivia in the 16th century. The other, referring to the New Political Constitution of the State of 2009, asserts a temporal break between the republican and plurinational states, arguing that the neoliberal republican system has been left behind. The paper reads these interventions as discourses which engage and imply a philosophy of history. The first implies a theory of Neoliberalism as an always-already present possibility awaiting activation within the original colonial formation, prompting us to rethink any teleological account of neoliberalism as a successive or ‘late’ form of developing capitalism, and forcing us to think of neoliberalism rather as a latent presence prefigured in colonialism and through the historical and ongoing formation of subjects, pushing us to rethink political time as geometric rather than processual. The second engages the philosophy of the event, and implies a qualitative rather then quantitative break in relation to political time, offering a theory of how subjects are formed in the light (or darkness) of political technologies such as constitutions. The paper draws together these situated indigenous critiques of liberal teleology with the theory of time implied by the concept of Pachakuti to construct an argument around the role of law in the making and unmaking of (post)colonial worlds, and to rethink analyses of neoliberalism through this prism.