Decolonising Legal Pluralism, Decentring Epistemological Paradigms

This special issue advocates for critically examining the epistemological foundations of different arrangements of legal pluralism, particularly “classical” culture- or custom-based legal pluralism. It addresses conceptual colonial legacies and path-dependencies to further “epistemological disobedience” and socio-political decolonisation. The individual contributions highlight and challenge the rigidification of collective identities entrenched in binary logics reaching back to the European Enlightenment, and other dimensions of coloniality embedded in hegemonic modernist, Anglo-Eurocentric legal frameworks. Decentring dominant normative and identitarian paradigms and emphasising dialogical engagement with diverse normative rationalities, all six contributions to the special issue examine the potential of legal pluralism to foster pluriversal approaches to law. They foreground various kinds of interplay between plural legal orders and illustrate distinct colonial power dynamics in different locales that have continued until the present day. Collectively, they call for reimagining legal pluralism as a tool for emancipation, transcending (post)colonial statist epistemologies to advance decolonial, pluriversal futures.