Events on Decolonial Comparative Law
Video: Decolonial Comparative Law Summer School, 4-8 July 2023
Upcoming event
Decolonial Comparative Law - International Conference on Decolonial Property Law –
Fall 2024 in Brazil
Call for Papers
Decolonial comparative property law
4-6 November 2024 in Brasília (Brazil)
Paper submission deadline: 14 January 2024
The DeCoLa project will be conducting its third Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop in Brazil. The event is expected to take place from 4-9 November 2024 for 70-100 legal scholars, professionals, and activists hailing from Brazil and around the world. Its theme will be 'Decolonial Comparative Property Law', thereby encompassing issues regarding land claims; access to ecological goods such as water; unequal distribution of resources at the domestic and global level; indigenous, traditional and customary intellectual property rights; the restitution of stolen objects and art works; and the notion of possession in law. The call for papers is open until 14 January 2024 and is taking place under the guidance of an International Scientific Advisory Board.
- Call for Papers - english 622.35 kB
- Call for Papers - español 487.66 kB
- Call for Papers - français 359.24 kB
- Call for Papers - português 438.07 kB
- Call for Papers - kiswahili 436.03 kB
For this edition of the Workshop, the Decolonial Comparative Law project of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg (MPIPRIV DeCoLa) is working jointly with the Decolonization and Comparing Legal Experiences Network (DECLEN). The Workshop is being hosted by the Universidade Católica de Brasília (Brazil).
This 2024 Workshop will feature two main elements:
- The Brasília workshop hosted at the Universidade Católica de Brasília from 4-6 November 2024;
- The Salvador spring school (escola de primavera) hosted at the Universidade Federal da Bahia from 7-9 November 2024.
Structure of the Brasília workshop
The workshop will comprise 12 sessions:
- 8 paper presentations co-run by their respective authors along with the peer reviewers (the peer reviewers being members of the International Scientific Advisory Board);
- 2 oficinas or sessions featuring civil society members presenting case studies;
- 2 interdisciplinary sessions involving scholars from different social science disciplines (geography, indigenous methodologies, critical race theory, etc.).
The International Scientific Advisory Board is composed of four professors and scholars specialized in land law and property law who work in the three languages of the conference, English, Portuguese, and French. They have been nominated to review the submissions resulting from the call for papers (peer review) and to select those papers to be discussed in November 2024. The International Scientific Advisory Board includes Ahmad Amara (NYU Tel Aviv; Ben Gurion University), Roberta Camineiro Baggio (Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS), Isidore Leopold Miendjiem (Université de Dschang), and Ambreena Manji (Cardiff University).
The call for papers is open until 14 January 2024. Individuals interested in participating in the oficinas or interdisciplinary sessions should contact the DeCoLa team or the organizing committee directly.
Structure of the Salvador spring school
The spring school will address specific issues of decolonial comparative law, especially property law issues and their impact on jurisprudence. Application for the spring school will open in 2024.
Organizing committee
The 2024 Workshop is being co-developed by a nine-person umbrella organizing committee composed of professors, legal professionals, and scholars from the Universidade do vale do rio dos sinos (UNISINOS), the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), the Universidade de Brasília (UnB), the Universidade Católica de Brasília (UCB), the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and the Real Estate Law Commission, together with MPIPRIV DeCoLa team. The organizing committee (or comitê organizador) will structure the different activities that are to be held in addition to the paper presentations, such as the oficinas and interdisciplinary sessions, and it will select and invite speakers. The committee will also be involved in the organization of the spring school taking place at the Universidade Federal do Bahia (UFBA), with its members participating as instructors.
Past events
Decolonial Comparative Law Summer School
4-8 July 2023, Hamburg, Germany
Decolonial comparative legal history: indigenous and Global South law prior to colonialism
Second Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop
9-10 September 2022, Oxford, United Kingdom
Held at Trinity College, University of Oxford, from 9 to 10 September 2022, this workshop dealt with decolonial comparative legal history, comparing indigenous law and pre-colonial law, both in settler-colonial regions of the Global North and in the area now often referred to as the Global South. The event was a follow-up to the first Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop, which took place in 2020 and focused on the general theme of decolonial comparative law.
The second Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop interwove several objectives: delinking from colonial notions of law; exploring decolonial (legal) historiography; comparing indigenous law in settler-colonized regions and pre-colonial law in colonized regions; offering decolonial translations of pre-colonial law. It was a platform for discussions of the following papers:
Territory, Yya (lords) and Commoners in Colonial Mixteca Alta: Politics and Religious Meanings
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano (National Institute for History and Anthropology, Mexico City)
Studying Pre-colonial Indigenous Ontologies to Decolonize Law: A Contradiction in Terms? The Example of Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Sandrine Brachotte (Sciences Po Law School, Paris)
Historicising the Legal Preferences for the Oldest in Pre-Colonial African States and Societies
Edward Erhagbe (University of Benin, Benin City) and Idahosa Osagie Ojo (Benson Idahosa University, Benin City)
The Nature of Igbo Indigenous Law
Judith N. Onwubiko (London South Bank University)
Property Regimes, Religious Power, and State Formation: Modern Transformation of the East Asian Region
Kentaro Matsubara (University of Tokyo)
Capacocha, praxis y saber: Los saberes normativos en un ritual inca en el valle del río Chillón prehispánico (ca. 1500–1520s)
Damian Gonzales Escudero (MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main)
Recognizing the Legal Personality of the Magpie River/Mutehekau Shipu in Canada
Uapukun Mestokosho and Yenny Vega Cardenas
Amerindian Perspectivism and Multinaturalism as Models for Rereading the Development of Indigenous Normative Contexts
Andrés Nunes Chaib (Maastricht University)
Decolonial Comparative Law
6-7 October 2020, Virtual workshop
The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law organized a virtual workshop on decolonial comparative law on 6-7 October 2020 (see program).
Co-organizers: Tshepo Madlingozi & Emile Zitzke (University of Witwatersrand) and Ralf Michaels & Lena Salaymeh (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law)