In this chapter, I argue that during the period of historical colonialism, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law separated by an abyssal line. When speaking of colonial law, one has to have in mind the law issued or accepted by the colonial power to apply in the colonies and govern their relations with the metropolitan centre. In this sense, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law. The first was the set of legislation (court decisions and administrative measures) emanating from the metropolitan government or colonial administration, to be applied in the colonies and in their relations with the metropolitan government. The second referred to laws and regulations that specifically applied to those sectors of native populations that were not “civilised” (the vast majority) or, in other words, those that had not been assimilated into European values, culture, manners and tastes. Both offered striking contrasts with the body of law that applied on metropolitan soil. The crucial topics that separated metropolitan and colonial law: a racial property regime; labour as a branch of criminal law; extreme punitive justice; formal or informal systems of apartheid grounded in settler or white supremacy; suppression or instrumental manipulative recognition of indigenous law. These topics show that metropolitan and colonial legality were (are) the two sides of modern abyssal law.

This chapter focusses on legal pluralism and restorative justice in Colombia since 2016. It is a period defined by the agreement reached between the Colombian Government and the most important guerrilla group (FARC), namely the La Habana Agreements which brought to an end a period of political violence that had lasted for more than fifty years. The law of ethnic peoples is one of the forms of collective organisation through which subalternized communities have sought to strengthen their identities, languages, territories, legal systems, and authorities in order to resist old and new colonialisms. The intercultural framework for transitional justice seeks to formulate a concept of justice that responds to the need to heal the wounds associated with past wrongdoings and counteract contemporary forms of injustice directed against various ethnically differentiated victims. Intercultural dialogue must be based on the capacity to listen in such a way as to understand and grant full credibility to the ways in which the silenced voices are intended to be heard. The role of transitional justice is a catalyst in the search for strategies to combat systematic human rights abuses and violations, due to the ravages of historical and existing colonialism. The limitations of JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) may be a factor that prevents it from fully complying with its historical mission, especially if this is compounded by a lack of political will, both on the part of the government in power and the more conservative and extremist sectors of Colombian society.

This chapter addresses two theoretical issues of importance to this book. The first involves ‘Southern theory’ in the social sciences, discussing the extent to which the author’s research may contribute in this emerging area. It argues that, by presenting concrete suggestions for how we may learn ‘from the South’ (not simply ‘about the South’), it may help to provide the foundations for what might be called ‘practical Southern theory’ in the social sciences. Example constructs and terms are offered for how this may be achieved, both from this study and others. The second area of theoretical interest involves how teacher expertise studies may contribute to a wider systematic and sustainable framework for building context-specific understandings of teacher expertise. The proposed framework is oriented around collaborative inquiry and practitioner research and may contribute both to the identification of appropriate good practices for a given context, and to supporting and encouraging practitioner-led (bottom up) teacher professional development within the wider educational system.

In this and the following chapters I introduce the epistemologies of the South and analyse how they have changed my sociological approach to law. In the first decades of the new millennium, we need to create a distance in relation to Western-centric critical social and legal thinking and, more generally, the epistemologies on which it is grounded. The new coronavirus pandemic has only made this need all the more visible and urgent. This century has begun with the pandemic inscribing itself in peoples’ lives in a new way, regardless of which part of the globe they happen to inhabit even though with glaring differences in losses of human life. Dominant epistemologies and theories do not adequately account for the specific “moment of danger” we are entering and consequently will not offer much help with the challenges we will face in the coming decades. The aim of creating a distance in relation to the Western-centric tradition is to open up analytical spaces for realities that have been ignored or made invisible for many centuries. Such realities can only be retrieved by the epistemologies of the South. Two basic ideas sustain the epistemologies of the South: the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world; the cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse and the monopoly of rigorous knowledge granted to modern science has entailed a massive epistemicide (the destruction of rival knowledges deemed to be non-scientific) that now calls for reparation. As a result, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.

Modern law is abyssal law, meaning that there is a law of the oppressors and a law of the oppressed. The abyssal line both produces (and is a product of) the incommensurability between the two social orders and the invisibility of this duality. From the point of view of the epistemologies of the South, modern law operates as a juridical barbarism that remains invisible due to the false universality of the legal order of metropolitan sociability (regulation/emancipation). Contemporary theories of justice are as abyssal as the law they found. They rely on fictions that take the absence of the abyssal line to be reality. Their universality is as false as the universality of metropolitan sociability. Post-abyssal law is possible, on condition that the regulation/emancipation and appropriation/violence duality is overcome and, with it, the coexistence of the law of the oppressors and the law of the oppressed. In sum, post-abyssal law is possible once the abyssal line has been eliminated. In keeping with the preceding analysis, this will only be possible if capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy vanish as modes of domination and are not replaced by other, milder or harsher, modes of domination. This conception refers to a theoretical possibility, but is it a real-life possibility? Can we imagine such a society or the social struggles that would accomplish it? What would this society look like?

I start from a conventional conception of anthropology and sociology of law - legal pluralism - to construct a new legal landscape capable of encompassing different scales of law, be they local, national, or global. I have been calling for an epistemological turn for a long time. And I have found it in my conception of the epistemologies of the South that refuses the abstract universalism of modern law and propose the recognition of legal plurality and the transformation of vertical differences into horizontal ones. The nation-state has been the most central time-space of law for the last two hundred years, particularly in the core countries of the world system. However, its centrality only became possible because the other two time-spaces, the local and the global, were formally declared non-existent by the hegemonic liberal political theory. My purpose is, first, to show that the legal field in contemporary societies and in the world system as a whole is a more complex and richer landscape than has been assumed by liberal political theory. Second, I set out to show that such a legal field is a constellation of different legalities (and illegalities) operating in local, national and global time-spaces, displaying a variety of configurations, making it increasingly hard to identify their limits. The way law’s potential evolves, whether towards regulation or emancipation, has nothing to do with the autonomy or self-reflexivity of the law, but rather with the political mobilization of competing social forces.