Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
Summary
Our strategy should be not only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories.
Arundhati Roy (2003: 112)To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.
Gabriel García Márquez (1982)Decolonisation within disciplines must be driven by its much wider utility to the flourishing of life in all its dynamism, thus Márquez and Roy ask us to lay siege and respond to colonial conditions with everything we are. So, I want to conclude this book by briefly reflecting on the context of the overarching structures within which law schools find themselves – the university and the world. I reiterate here my earlier suggestion that it may be impossible to effectively ‘decolonise our teaching/research’, if this ambition fails to acknowledge how colonial logics have ordered the university sector and the world in which we live. Understanding the limitations of the structures within which we work allows us to be simultaneously intentional and honest about our endeavours. So, we must ask ourselves from within the law school, what outcomes we want our actions in decolonisation to produce, not just in our schools, but in the university and the world beyond. What does it mean to work in a university and live in a world where colonial logics are ceased?
Decolonisation for law schools, as I have argued in the previous chapters, is a means to produce a jurisprudence for a different future, a different university, and a different world, that breaks from the logics of the past. Consequently, it should be noted that this future cannot be attained without addressing and repairing the wider harms introduced by the intellectual misuse of bodies, life, and space–time. In other words, actualising decolonisation as the complete cessation of the operation of colonial logics, envisions other meanings of justice, which would include, for example, reparative justice. ‘Reparative justice’ in this sense, entails the repair of the colonial conditions of the past 500 years – including the devaluing of life, the commodification of everything and the destruction of the planet.
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- Decolonisation and Legal KnowledgeReflections on Power and Possibility, pp. 148 - 157Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023