Decolonial Comparative Property Law

A Workshop

4-5 November 2024, Universidade Católica de Brasília

The workshop is a core component of the DeCoLa programme, offering the opportunity for authors and their peer reviewers to challenge themselves and the limitations of our field. This year’s workshop gathered 33 scientists, activists, and artists from Brazil and around the world, all interested in land and property matters in the Global South and North. Fully funded by Max-Planck-Förderstiftung, the event was run simultaneously in four languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French.

The workshop started strongly by examining the principles underlying the exercise at hand: comparing decolonial approaches to property law. Legal definitions of property remain extractivist by being resource-focused. Such a focus on land prevents a simultaneous consideration of water and other natural resources (bens/biens in Portuguese/French).

Property was identified as the entry point to wider concepts, extending beyond land and natural resources and allowing us to approach the role of memory and perception in producing, reinforcing, and overturning norms.

Methodology of the workshop

This two-day event featured eight paper discussions, an artistic intervention, and an interdisciplinary panel, together with a critical tour of the city of Brasília. The workshop’s unconventional methodology featured five central elements:

• Simultaneous translation
• Early dissemination of peer-reviewed papers
• Paper discussions led by a person other than the author and commented on by both jurists and non-jurists
• A blank check to non-jurists to challenge legal scholars
• Pre-event interaction and focus on informal interactions

Developed over the span of two years by an interdisciplinary team made up of Brazilian researchers and MPI staff, the workshop programme was well-received by participants.

Findings

The workshop provided room for hope for the future of comparative law. First, it allowed for an appreciation of the divergence across Indigenous legal systems within the same country or region. Indigenous legal systems are diverse, and scholarship can reflect this fact. Second, studying colonial legal instruments can benefit both the South and the North, as they have affected the entire world. European scholarship could thus be decolonial by documenting European law (decolonising from within).

The articles discussed spanned from comparisons of Indigenous land tenures in the Caribbean and South America to comparisons of traditional and non-state land law with state law in Indonesia, Congo, and Cameroon, Ecuador. Understandings of property and land law were very extensive, thereby including water law in Indonesia and the disruption of development patterns through predatory oil behaviour in Guyana and Suriname.

What to expect next

These eight articles and a joint editorial reflecting on the workshop's significant contributions to the field will be published in the Brazilian open access journal Revista Direito e Praxis in December 2025.

Photo credits: © Lorenna de Oliveira Kuroda/UCB

Header image: © Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law / Johanna Detering