Keynote lecture SLAS2024 by Rachel Sieder

Monday, 1 July, 17.00 - 18.30 - University of Amsterdam
Room A0.01 (Roeterseiland Campus)
 

Law’s Ambiguity: Social movements, judicialization and lawfare in Latin America

 

Law has long been a recourse for social movements across Latin America. In this keynote lecture I ask to what extent the mobilization of human rights norms in sociolegal struggles continues to have emancipatory potential. Diverse social movements have judicialized their struggles to pursue transitional and post-transitional justice, fight for indigenous and afro descendant rights, combat gender-based violence and claim sexual and reproductive rights, resist extractive development and territorial dispossession, and challenge corruption. Important gains have been made and rightly celebrated.

But in a period when governments across the world increasingly disregard the global human rights system, Latin American elites too have begun capturing judicial institutions and weaponizing the law to criminalize activism. I will reflect on recent trends in scholarly analysis of law and society in Latin America with reference to my work on indigenous mobilization and law in Guatemala, and ask how we should understand the relationship between law and social transformation today. 

Rachel Sieder is Senior Research Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She is also a research associate at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and a global researcher at LawTransform, the Center for Law and Social Transformation, both in Bergen, Norway.  

Her research interests include judicialization, human rights, indigenous rights, social movements, indigenous law, legal anthropology, the state, and violence. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals including Latin American Research Review, PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Íconos, the Journal of Legal Anthropology, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Sieder’s books include Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America (2017); Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives, edited with John-Andrew McNeish (2012); and Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America (2010), edited with Javier Couso and Alex Huneeus.