Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South

The “Global South” is the imagined and real geographic space from which the contributions to this issue of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies draw their inspiration and information. The Global South includes nations in Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia, comprising more than 150 of the world’s 184 recognized countries.¹ This fact alone would suggest that there should be almost no conference, symposium, or conversation about world affairs that is not dominated by considerations of the Global South. However, this is not the case. The Global South, even in a restrictive geographic sense, remains in the bulk of these discussions as peripheral rather than central, and reactive rather than protagonistic. By some accounts, the Global South is the successor to the Third World. However, the Third World may have been more appropriately geographically confined to countries south of the equator than the imaginary, nominally geographic Global South seems to be. Rather than actually being confined to the countries south of the equator, the concept of the Global South has emerged from the contemporary iteration of economic globalization and its effects on subaltern communities, wherever they may be located. These effects bespeak disaffected communities, as they are carted forth, robed in a multitude of undesirable characteristics: “political, social, and economic upheaval . . . poverty, displacement and diaspora, environmental degradation, human and civil rights abuses, war, hunger and disease.”² Notably each of these characteristics can be eroded through more careful investigation, revealing that this manner of thinking about the Global South is itself polemical and overly simple.

The organizers of this symposium agree that imagery of, and discourse about, the Global South demand nuance and context, especially with regard to the substantive questions addressed by this symposium. The contributors to this issue largely echo this orientation. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given that the substantive questions this issue addresses are fundamentally about the active engagement of communities in the Global South with a range of legal and quasi-legal mechanisms that may serve them in clarifying status, advancing claims, or seeking redress for harms. The contents of this issue are thus much less about victimhood than they are about agency and power—about the routes for exit and the tools for voice.

As a general matter, this symposium is about the engagement of the Global South with legal mechanisms at all scales with a special focus on Africa and Latin America, and on human rights as the concept is shaped, adapted, rejected, or contested in various locations. Social groups commonly operate within multiple legal systems that generally include an official state system of law and other systems based on indigenous legal practices, customary law, and nonsecular law. Scholars have used the term “legal pluralism” to analyze these complex legal situations, but their work has only begun to analyze how human rights discourse is articulated within these various legal systems. Among the challenges of this work is the conjunction of human rights with indigenous rights and women’s rights, all currently forceful movements across the Global South and on the international plane.

New waves of legal discourse are moving across the Global South, often employing the rhetoric of human rights and engaging with relatively novel domestic, regional, and international institutions created for the purpose of advancing the law of human rights. The spread of human rights may easily be characterized as part of the package of globalization, but the contents of this issue demonstrate that this view reflects incomplete and sometimes inaccurate thinking about communities in the Global South in relation to legal systems and human rights. Whether as part of a hegemonic or counterhegemonic project, the authors observe that each location they address serves as a space for the appropriation of selected elements of the global-homogenous version of human rights and the production of original, often unique hybrids that are shaped by local histories, social structures, and power relations within particular societies and among different social groups. This symposium contributes to and advances the existing literatures in law and the social sciences...