Paper short abstract:

This paper will address the issue of legal pluralism and scales of law, focusing on the relation between law and place. I will analyze how legal orders (local, national, global) are actively engaged in the production of place and delimitation of rights, being important components of the cityscape.

Paper long abstract:

Legal pluralism is one of the most recurrent topics of legal anthropology, especially when referring to the African continent. However, if in its early moments legal pluralism was focused in rural and colonial contexts and was constructed over the binary opposition between "tradition" and "modernity", currently it also involves the urban space and processes of globalization of the legal field, accounting to analyze the "clash" between "local" and "global" scales of law, both of which are taken as commonly taken as "given" categories. In this paper, I will take this discussion further, arguing that the spaces and places (of law) are not natural, but constantly produced, invented, and appropriated by social actors. Under this view, "law" and "legal orders" are so much about social regulation as they are about identity and place making, since they are categories deeply embedded in and productive of these same constructed notions of social spatiality and political territory. Focusing in Luanda, capital city of Angola, I will be particularly interested in understanding how non-essentialist notions of "locality" and "globality" are mediated, reshaped, negotiated, rescaled, hybridized and sculpted in the (plural) legal architecture operating in the urban space. Relying on journalistic material collected from 2007 and 2010, I will argue that this plural urban legalscape is subject to the same power relations inherent to processes of uneven globalization, and therefore becomes a privilege sphere for social and legal struggles over the delimitation of urban borders and the extension of rights to the city.