The ‘Global South’ as a relational category–global hierarchies in the production of law and legal pluralism

Abstract

The ‘Global South’ often functions as a shorthand for countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that differ significantly in terms of economic trajectories, institutional arrangements, and everyday political life. The significant diversity notwithstanding, I argue that the Global South constitutes a useful macro-category of high epistemological value. Rather than identifying a neat set of clearly demarcated properties that could be found everywhere in the Global South but nowhere else, I argue that ‘the Global South’ is a relational category that sensitises us for the historically grown marginalisations within international hierarchies and their epistemological implications. In this article, I focus on the role of law within global relationships of subjugation to show how legal developments in the Global North and South have historically been entangled in highly uneven ways. In the Global South, these entanglements have strongly affected the development of state and non-state law, giving rise to a particular kind of legal pluralism in which the state is only one among many possible sources of legal reasoning. Unequal entanglements notwithstanding, there is a persistent (though often unacknowledged) legal agency of actors in the Global South, as I illustrate with reference to one manifestation of such agency in Bangladesh.