We should think of our age as a time for a wager and bet on the possibility of a civilisatory alternative. To maximise our chances, an alternative thinking of alternatives is required: the epistemologies of the South. In this chapter, I discuss what such an epistemological move entails for a socio-legal theory of law presenting a blueprint for a new possible way of theorising law in society from the perspective of the epistemologies of the South. Under modern domination, two contradictory legal worlds were born: metropolitan law and colonial law. The most remarkable characteristic of Western-centric domination is that this contradiction, however radical, was (and is) invisible. The specific operations of this dualistic liberal legal order made these two systems incommensurable legal realities and, as such, incapable of being contradictory. After historical colonialism ended, abyssal and non-abyssal forms of social exclusion became different sociabilities, structured by different types and styles of social relations and social interaction. The legal inexistence of abyssal exclusion became both the cause and the effect of the massive impunity afforded to exclusionary behaviour which targeted ontologically degraded populations and robbed them of their basic human dignity. The epistemologies of the South conceive of modern science, including legal science, anthropology, and the sociology of law, as important but incomplete bodies of knowledge whose relevance depends on their contribution to denouncing and eliminating the abyssal lines of exclusion and legal non-being. This contribution in turn depends on linking scientific knowledge with other non-scientific legal and non-legal knowledges, which will often involve intercultural translation. Ecologies of legal knowledges will emerge from this linking and, with them, post-abyssal legal thinking.

In this chapter, I briefly analyse the fate of legal reformism. The global financial crisis of 2008 which reverberated in Europe in 2011, the crises of progressive governments in Latin America in the second decade of the millennium, and the economic and social meltdown caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus are all signs of a deeper malaise in the development model that sustained legal reformism for the past hundred years. The end of legal reformism started when the ideal of democracy and the rule of law ceased to be a progressive objective which progressive forces had struggled for in many countries, often at great personal risk, and became an international imposition, a condition of development assistance and structural adjustment policies demanded by the World Bank and the IMF. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, political science invested a great deal of research in identifying conditions for the sustained adoption of liberal democracy in the developing world, which included agrarian reform, a sizeable middle class, and a certain balance between urban and rural areas. From one day to the next, all of this research was consigned to the dustbin of history. Rather than focusing on the conditions for democracy and the rule of law, the “international community” converted democracy and the rule of law into the conditions for everything else, and most importantly for receiving development assistance and financing. Liberal democracy became the most legitimate regime of a weak state confronted with neoliberal global impositions. Under these conditions there was no room for progressive legal reformism. Conversely, there was plenty of room for conservative authoritarian reformism or counter-reformism.