Abstract
Modern Eurocentric law is a powerful instrument for the reproduction of colonialism, promoting abyssal exclusions and circumscribing the horizon of possibilities to the modern linear narrative of progress. The abyssal line is, consequently, as much epistemological as it is legal. Across the line, a multiplicity of legal universes is wasted, invisibilised and classified as inferior, primitive, local, residual or unproductive. This paper takes on the challenge of crossing Epistemologies of the South and sociology of law. In particular, it recovers the concept of legal pluralism, reconfiguring it as an instrument of expansion of the present as part of an ecology of law and justices. I begin by showing how the global imposition of the rule of law is a mechanism of expansion of the capitalist and colonial project, arguing that legal coloniality mimics coloniality of knowledge. Subsequently, I demonstrate how the recognition of legal pluralism does not necessarily mean overcoming the expansionist model. In conclusion, I argue for the broadening of the legal canon with the extension of the range of known legal experiences, a process that requires the recognition of rights claimed as cosmopolitan subaltern legality and a sociology of absences of the law of the most silenced oppressed which are expressed in more invisible dimensions, voiced outside of the legal struggles formulated in the modern terms of law and politics.
Keywords:
Epistemologies of the South; Legal coloniality; Legal pluralism; Ecology of law and justice