3 - Legal Plurality and the Time-Spaces of Law: The Local, the National, and the Global

Summary

I start from a conventional conception of anthropology and sociology of law - legal pluralism - to construct a new legal landscape capable of encompassing different scales of law, be they local, national, or global. I have been calling for an epistemological turn for a long time. And I have found it in my conception of the epistemologies of the South that refuses the abstract universalism of modern law and propose the recognition of legal plurality and the transformation of vertical differences into horizontal ones. The nation-state has been the most central time-space of law for the last two hundred years, particularly in the core countries of the world system. However, its centrality only became possible because the other two time-spaces, the local and the global, were formally declared non-existent by the hegemonic liberal political theory. My purpose is, first, to show that the legal field in contemporary societies and in the world system as a whole is a more complex and richer landscape than has been assumed by liberal political theory. Second, I set out to show that such a legal field is a constellation of different legalities (and illegalities) operating in local, national and global time-spaces, displaying a variety of configurations, making it increasingly hard to identify their limits. The way law’s potential evolves, whether towards regulation or emancipation, has nothing to do with the autonomy or self-reflexivity of the law, but rather with the political mobilization of competing social forces.