Nordic Critical Legal Scholarship and Global North/South Encounters

The aim of this think piece is to contribute to an ethical and methodological debate about the challenges that Nordic “critical” legal scholars who embark on studies on the relationship between law and society in the Global South encounter in different areas of life and law. Even though scholarship on methodological universalism and methodological nationalism has drawn ample attention, there still seems to be a epistemological lacuna in regards to how we, as Nordic “critical” legal scholars, engage with the Global South in socio-legal research. How can Nordic “critical” legal scholarship be locally situated in the Nordic context and in contact and dialogue with the global dimension at the same time? Responding to this gap in the contemporary research, this think piece seeks to add to and develop the existing body of Nordic “critical” legal research by asking: How should we construct a cogent theoretical base for further research deployed in the Global North/South encounter? It argues that there is an ethical obligation to seek an understanding that is embedded in a grounded, bottom-up and multi-sited approach as opposed to a simplistic, legalistic top-down approach. It concludes with suggesting that there is a need to engage in this type of scholarship with a commitment to the politics of the Global South and with the acceptance of the challenge and dilemma of taking sides in the knowledge production process and that this logic may contribute to the production of legal knowledge that is sensitive to the complex socio-legal realities on the ground. Keywords multisited ethnography Nordic critical legal scholarship methodological nationalism method ological universalism