The transformative power of legal pluralism? Planetary challenges in a diverse and multi-polar world

International conference of the Commission on Legal Pluralism, in cooperation with Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia, 13-15 January 2025, Jakarta, Indonesia. Preceded by an International Course on Legal Pluralism, 8-11 January 2025.

The conference takes as its point of departure the relational character of law and legal pluralism and will critically examine the role plural configurations of normative orders and their entanglements play across the globe. The increasing demand for legal intervention to regulate the most serious challenges humanity is facing at multiple scales, raises crucial questions about the role of law in a world threatened by climate change, environmental destruction, geo-political tensions and violent conflict, and of legal pluralism beyond its understanding as an analytical concept. Current responses to environmental challenges are, for instance, multispecies normativities, legal personhood and rights of nature, and extending the scope of human rights to attend to humans’ planetary embeddedness, intergenerational equity and a healthy environment. Other important developments are the decolonial critique of international law as a hegemonic imposition and critical approaches to the normative effects of technoscience and the digital transformation of society, cyberlaw, and especially the role of artificial intelligence. These and other issues have increasingly transformed ‘classical’ fields of legal pluralism scholarship. Ashift in emphasis from social security to an extended notion of care that encompasses power, normativity and responsibility, from gender to intersectionality, or from natural resources to ‘nature’ may be mentioned here. At the same time, the more classical themes of legal anthropology have not lost their importance: for millions of people nature is (also) a ‘resource’, diverse forms of social security are crucial, while issues of family law, personal law and the often problematic relationships between state law, customary law and religious law continue to deeply influence their daily lives.

Thus, the conference situates legal pluralism between pluriversality and everyday lived experiences in coping with the planetary challenges we are facing today. In this vein, the call for panels is open to discussions from a whole range of topics, debates and arenas. In exploring these dimensions, the conference aims both to broaden and deepen academic legal debates, and to engage with practitioners and activists who have first-hand experience in dealing with law in practice. Socio-legally, Indonesia and Southeast Asia are pluriverses themselves, representing a wide variety of complexly interacting legal orders acting upon both the more classical fields of legal anthropology as well as new ones dealing with the challenges of the 21st century. Therefore, we especially invite voices from Southeast Asia to highlight at the conference the innovative impulses they have recently given to legal pluralism scholarship in dealing with environmental, social and other challenges in the region. We request interested parties to submit proposals for panels in the 2025 Jakarta conference. The panels may be ‘populated’ (including names of at least 3-4 presenters and titles of papers per panel) or ‘empty’ (without names of paper presenters). A proposal should include (a) title, (b) name of panel organizer, (c) email address of panel organizer, and (d) panel description of not more than 250 words. If the panel is populated, the proposal should also have (e) a list of presenters and – preferably the titles of their papers. Please send your paper proposals to [email protected] (for the attention of Janine Ubink) by no later than April 1, 2024. This call for PANELS will be followed by a call for individual PAPERS in April / May.