Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in Counter-hegemonic Globalization

Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in Counter-hegemonic Globalization

Description

This book arose from our puzzlement at the paradoxical state of socio-legal knowledge on globalization. The beginning of the new millennium has witnessed a groundswell of proposals for the transformation or replacement of the national and international legal institutions underpinning hegemonic, neoliberal globalization. Put forth by variegated counter-hegemonic movements and organizations and articulated through transnational networks, these proposals challenge our sociological and legal imagination and belie the fatalistic ideology that ‘‘there is no alternative’’ to neoliberal institutions. The initiatives are as diverse as the organizations and networks advocating them, as the case studies in this book lay bare. Impoverished women in Tanzania as well as marginalized communities and progressive parties in Brazil mobilize to change and democratize the national and international regulatory frameworks that effectively exclude them from key political arenas such as the process of allocating public budgets (see Rusimbi and Mbilinyi’s and Santos’ chapters on participatory budgeting). NGOs, unions, consumers, workers, and other actors in the global North and South organize to challenge the market-friendly regulation of labor conditions, corporate accountability, intellectual property rights, and the environment which fuels the spread of sweatshops in the Americas, the African AIDS pandemic, and environmental degradation in Europe (see Rodríguez-Garavito’s, Shamir’s, Klug’s, and Arriscado, Matias, and Costa’s chapters). Progressive activist-researchers, people of faith, and members of marginalized communities in the US—the ‘‘inner Third World’’ of laid-off industrial workers, migrants, and informal laborers—come together to collectively conceive cosmopolitan identities and legal rules in opposition to the exclusionary ideologies and laws of immigration (see Ansley’s and Larson’s chapters). Social movements involving some of the most marginalized classes in the global South—landless peasants, subsistence farmers, and indigenous peoples—strategically mobilize national courts and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) to assert their rights to the land, their culture, and the environment (see Houtzager’s, Rajagopal’s, Visvanathan and Parmar’s, and Rodríguez-Garavito and Arenas’ chapters). Articulated through now well-established regional and global mechanisms such as the World Social Forum (see Santos’ chapter), these and myriad other initiatives have shown not only that ‘‘another world is possible,’’ but have spurred an unprecedented effervescence of debate and experimentation in bottom-up legal reform and new international legal regimes (see Pureza’s chapter). Against the background of such fervent experimentation and institutional creativity at the grassroots level, the paradox lies in that theories and empirical studies on law and globalization have multiplied apace while missing almost entirely this most intellectually challenging and politically compelling aspect of globalization. Indeed, the existing literature draws on a rather conventional account of globalization and global legal transformations as top-down processes of diffusion of economic and legal models from the global North to the global South. Thus, the literature overwhelmingly focuses on the globalization of legal fields involving the most visible, hegemonic actors (whose visibility is thereby further enhanced) such as transnational corporations (TNCs) and Northern states. The result is a wide array of studies on such topics as the global spread of corporation-made lex mercatoria, the expansion of the interstate human rights regime and international law at large, the exacerbation of legal pluralism brought about by the globalization of production and new communication technologies, and the export and import of rule of law and judicial reform programs. Therefore, law and society studies have largely failed to register the growing grassroots contestation of the spread of neoliberal institutions and the formulation of alternative legal frameworks by TANs and the populations most harmed by hegemonic globalization. Thus, despite a strong tradition of studies on the use of law by domestic social movements and a growing literature on transnational social movements, the role of law in counter-hegemonic globalization and the challenges that the latter poses to legal theory and practice have yet to be tackled. Aware that the diagnosis of the insufficiencies of this approach was shared by numerous social scientists and legal scholars based in or deeply involved with the South (either the global South or the ‘‘inner South’’ in the core countries), who have themselves been participants in the global justice movement, in 2000 we decided to launch a collaborative research network (CRN) on law and counter-hegemonic globalization. The CRN was meant to serve as a meeting and discussion space for scholars and scholars/activists from around the world engaged in critical sociolegal research and legal advocacy across borders. Emphasizing the participation of researchers and activists from the global South, it brought together a core group of participants (including several of the contributors to this volume) in meetings in Miami (2000), Budapest (2001), and Oxford (2001). The group rapidly expanded as we took the project to the sites of our own work in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the US. It thus became a broad, loose circle that partially overlapped with other networks of sociolegal research and transnational advocacy in which the CRN members were involved. The effort to bridge the divides between South and North and between academic work and political engagement made the process of producing this book an exceptionally challenging and stimulating transnational endeavor. Further conversations and debates among contributors to this volume took place in such venues as the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (2003, 2005) and Mumbai (2004), the Latin American Conference on Justice and Society organized by the Latin American Institute for Alternative Legal Services (ILSA) in Bogotá (2003), the International Conference on Law and Justice at the University of Coimbra (2003), and the Conference on Global Democracy and the Search for Justice at the University of Sheffield (2003). Moreover, several of the case studies were written in the field as the authors worked closely with the movements, state agencies, and NGOs they analyze in their chapters. Thus, like the movements themselves, the contributors combined local engagement with transnational dialogue. While the complications associated with this type of enterprise—from language barriers to the hectic pace of grassroots activism—made the editorial process all the more difficult, they also give this book its distinctive character. Indeed, in our view, the specific contribution of this volume and the common thread running through all its chapters lies in the particular, bottom-up perspective on law and globalization that it advances and empirically illustrates. This perspective has both an analytic and a political dimension. From an analytic viewpoint, it entails the detailed empirical study of legal orders as they operate on the ground. This includes not only the official law of courts and legislatures but also the myriad legal rules created and enforced by such disparate social actors as civil society organizations, corporations, and marginalized communities. This staple analytic strategy of sociolegal research tends to exhaust the meaning of the ‘‘bottom-up’’ approach in the US law and society tradition (see, for instance, Munger 1998). When applied to global social and legal processes, this research strategy calls for the type of approach that Marcus (1995) has dubbed ‘‘multi-sited ethnography’’: a combination of qualitative methods applied to the study of different locales that aims to examine the operation of global sociolegal processes shaping events in such sites. To our mind, the bottom-up perspective illustrated by the case studies in this book also has a distinctly political dimension that goes hand in hand with its analytic counterpart. As we explain in more detail below, the purpose driving the analysis is to expose the potential and the limitations of law-centered strategies for the advancement of counter-hegemonic political struggles in the context of globalization. This entails amplifying the voice of those who have been victimized by neoliberal globalization, be they indigenous peoples, landless peasants, impoverished women, squatter settlers, sweatshop workers, or undocumented immigrants. Including those at the bottom, therefore, is a key part of our bottom-up approach. This is indeed how this approach is overwhelmingly understood in the global South, as the longstanding ‘‘alternative law’’ movement in Latin America and ‘‘social action litigation’’ in India bear witness. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we further characterize this approach in three steps. First, in order to locate this book in the context of the literature on law and globalization, we look more closely into the dominant sociolegal approaches and inquire into the reasons why they have rendered invisible grassroots resistance to neoliberal institutions and initiatives for alternative legal forms. Secondly, we elaborate on the tenets of our bottom-up approach to law and globalization, which we call subaltern cosmopolitan legality. We argue that subaltern cosmopolitan legality is a mode of sociolegal theory and practice suitable to comprehend and further the mode of political thought and action embodied by counter-hegemonic globalization. Finally, we explain the selection of topics and the organization of the book. Throughout the chapter, we describe, as we go along, the case studies contained in the remainder of the book and point to the ways in which, in our view, they illustrate subaltern cosmopolitan legality in action.

Source Publication

Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality

Source Editors/Authors

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, César A. Rodríguez-Garavito

Publication Date

2005

Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in Counter-hegemonic Globalization

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