Law and the Epistemologies of the South
Jun 2023 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
823
Pages
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About this ebook
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.
About the author
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He has written and published widely in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Arabic and Polish. His current research interests are epistemology, sociology of law, post-colonial theory, democracy, interculturality, globalization, social movements and human rights. One of his most recent publications is The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018).
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