Programme

10h00-12h30
Rebuilding roots and decolonising realities: the indigenous struggle in Brazil today by Gabriela de Freitas Figueiredo Rocha
Abstract: In the context of the struggle for the decolonisation of knowledges, identities, justices and sociabilities, Brazilian indigenous peoples today face challenges that are too complex, ranging from the difficulties of guaranteeing, through traditional democratic paths, effectively autonomous and intercultural relations, policies that impose setbacks to the context of internal colonialism. Apart from real alternatives of plurinationality, the collectives find in a monocultural and individualist legal political matrix possibilities of dispute that keep them in a space of residuality, by the continuity of the tutelage and assimilation traces of the indigenist apparatus, which reserve the indigenous a fixed place in the national project. I try to comprehend the indigenous struggle and resistance in this scenario, based on a sociology of absences and emergencies, especially in the re-emergence of “new” ethnic identities, which activate original cultural roots as radically open future projects in contexts considered “acculturated”, where the indigenous presence reveals the full historical weight of its apparent absence.   

Advocacies in the Global South and territorial struggles: an approach to the debate on legal pluralism by Flávia Carlet
Abstract: The work of advocacy groups committed to using hegemonic state law as an instrument for guaranteeing and enforcing human rights is a phenomenon present in different contexts of the Global South. Based on two case studies, one in Ecuador and another in Brazil, on conflicts over territories by rural black communities, I analyse the legal work carried out by the Corporación Ecolex and Mariana Criola law firms in the defence of these groups. Through an analysis of the practices and legal and community knowledges emerging within each of these contexts, I seek to reflect how these collectives have mobilised law in favour of communities and to what extent these legal experiences dialogue with the debates on legal pluralism.

Post-abyssal cartographies: mapping legal plurality in Lisbon and Maputo by Sara Araújo
Abstract: Modern Eurocentric law, as a doppelganger of modern science, is a powerful instrument of reproduction of colonialism and capitalism, promoting abyssal exclusions and circumscribing the horizon of possibilities to the linear narrative of progress. The abyssal line is, therefore, both epistemological and judicial. The recognition of legal pluralism does not involve an exercise in legal decolonisation when it reproduces colonial hierarchies, invisibilizing what does not fit into modern categories, and analyses diversity as opposed to the Eurocentric canon. This paper proposes the reconfiguration of the concept of legal pluralism as an instrument to expand the present as part of an exercise in the ecology of rights and justices. Based on studies carried out in the cities of Lisbon and Maputo, it discusses the process of construction of legal cartographies in the urban centres of Lisbon and Maputo, illustrating the methodology, challenges and outcomes of an ecology of rights and justices. 

Moderator: João Paulo Dias

14h30-17h00

El caleidoscopio se complejiza: jurisdicción indígena y otras jurisdicciones en Colombia by Begoña Dorronsoro
Abstract: La reciente firma de los acuerdos de paz entre el gobierno colombiano y las Farc ha complejizado aún más "El caleidoscopio de las justicias en Colombia" (Santos y García Villegas, 2001). La constitución colombiana de 1991 comenzó el camino hacia el pluralismo jurídico al menos sobre el papel, reconociendo el derecho a que las comunidades indígenas y afrocolombianas puedan ejercer sus jurisdicciones especiales en sus territorios. El desarrollo y la convivencia de dicha jurisdicciones con el derecho ordinario no se ha alcanzado y existen carencias y problemas debidos a la falta de recursos, problemas de articulación y coordinaciones. A ello hay que sumar ahora la necesaria convivencia con dos nuevas jurisdicciones transicionales para la paz, una para las Farc y otra para el ejército. Desde una perspectiva de género y étnica racial quiero aproximarme a dicha complejidad de gramáticas del derecho en base a algunos casos concretos que afectan a los hombres y mujeres indígenas colombianos.

Xch’ayel Ot’anil, Reivindicando la fuerza del perdón: Dos casos de intento de homicidio por la herencia de la tierra a mujeres tseltales by Laura Edith Saavedra Hernández
Abstract: El objetivo de esta presentación será analizar al perdón que las mujeres indígenas les otorgan a sus agresores como una forma alternativa de acceso a la justicia. Desde la filosofía tseltal el corazón es un punto, un espacio importante en la forma de vida de los mayas-tseltales. Todo tiene corazón, “el ser humano, las plantas, animales, minerales, cerros, ríos y todo lo que existe en el universo, tiene ch’ulel- chulelal (espíritu). Todo es parte de lo viviente y de lo sagrado” (López Intzín, 2013: 97). Filosofar a la “griega”, nos lleva a pensar el mundo desde la razón y cabeza, en la cosmovisión tseltal, vemos una filosofía “corazonada”, no intelectualizada, aunque sin rechazar el pensar (Lenkersdof, 2002:28). Así en las comunidades tseltales la armonía es importante para el o’tan (corazón). Mientras que para el Estado la justicia para las mujeres siempre estará plasmada en la Ley General de Acceso de las Mujeres a una Vida Libre de Violencia, la cual de alguna manera hegemoniza el discurso del feminismo sobre las diferentes formas de pensar de las mujeres indígenas. En esta presentación hago una comparación de ambas posturas y doy cuenta de que la justicia para las mujeres puede estar más allá de la Ley.

Justices and reconciliations: how to remake humanity in contexts marked by multiple violence? by Maria Paula Meneses
Abstract: The ‘new values’ of a culture of human rights have been conveyed mainly by intellectuals and jurists, symbol of a political elite that tries to overlap the various semi-autonomous social fields that resolve conflicts (local and national). These values engender new spaces for discursive and institutional struggles, although their impact is uneven and emerging, raising fundamental questions for current work on justice and reconciliation in contexts of profound normative diversity. From the contexts of Mozambique and Angola, this presentation seeks to discuss possibilities to deal with the violence that characterises the recent past-present, wagering on a conceptualisation that goes beyond the abyssal fractures that insist on separating a ‘hegemonic’ version of reconciliation and human rights and other normative processes of reconciliation and forgiveness. The theories about (in)justices.

Moderator: Cristiano Gianolla