Legal pluralism and critical social analysis: “what’s in a name”?
While the last issue of 2021 celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, in this first issue of 2022 we say goodbye to this name and introduce a new name for the journal: Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis. Our readers may wonder: what is happening here, and why? As communicated in earlier editorials, this name change is part of a larger number of changes introduced into the journal from this issue onwards, including changes in the editorial board and the possibility of publishing a greater variety of article types (see also a below). This editorial provides further explanations of these changes and what we hope they will do for the journal in the future.
Stressing “the social”
Why the name change of the journal? Despite the suggestion that names do not matter, as expressed by the famous Shakespearean quote, there is a deeper meaning in this case. Earlier in the journal´s history, the broadening of its geographical scope and the growing interest in legal pluralism led to the name change from African Law Studies (established in 1969) to Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law in 1980. This broadening of geographical scope and theoretical orientation, especially the focus on legal pluralism, have become the foundations of the current journal, which is still leading internationally in the field of anthropology of law and socio-legal studies. However, the second part of its name—unofficial law—was rooted in debates about legal pluralism. At a time when the scientific position that there are more legal orders than state law was marginal and widely rejected, “unofficial law” may have added to confusion rather than providing clarity: what is unofficial, and what official? Are these the same as informal and formal? “Non-state” and state? Is the official/unofficial dichotomy (or any dichotomy, for that matter) an analytically relevant distinction anyway? And is it not implicitly included in the concept of legal pluralism already?
But why then replace “unofficial law” with “critical social analysis”? There are several reasons for specifically stressing “the social” in the new title, which go beyond our foundation in the anthropology of law. First, it emphatically restates the journal’s longstanding interdisciplinary ambitions, inviting contributions on legal history, theory, philosophy, or legal analysis. Studying the meaning, use, interpretation, contestation and transformation of law in specific social processes and societal settings is a basic requirement for understanding it. As clearly expressed by Sally Falk-Moore in Law as Process (p. 214): “I assume that others find it as difficult as I do to make sociological sense of disembodied legal rules floating on their own, cut off from the social body of which they were once a part.”
A second reason for stressing the social is that, despite these foundations, authors, often with a legal academic background, tend to take a narrow disciplinary (and often also normative) understanding of law as their starting point. As editors, we regularly experience this through the many manuscripts submitted to the journal that we have to reject because they lack even the most basic connection to “the social,” to a clear context: what is the issue? In which societal (social, cultural, political, etc.) context does it occur? Why is it a problem, and for whom? Which actors are involved, which relations between normative orders play a role? As editors we also have to ask other kinds of questions: what makes an article relevant for (international) readers interested in anthropology of law and legal pluralism? Does the author show sufficient awareness of writing for an international public that needs a good explanation why the article is worth reading? What does the article contribute to our understanding of the role and meaning given to law, the interactions between multiple normative orders as they become visible in a diversity of forms and practices of ordering in society? What does it contribute to our understanding of a wide variety of socio-political and other issues with such a normative-legal component?
Third, and related to the foregoing point, despite the social-scientific ambitions of the journal, we still receive relatively few articles that take social science rather than law as their point of departure. This journal has been extremely successful in stimulating social-scientific approaches to law and legal pluralism. As a concept and a social phenomenon deserving scientific attention, legal pluralism has long since become “mainstream” in a positive sense: it has found its way into a wide variety of social-scientific, political ecology, political science, and other studies on a diversity of topics. In such studies, legal pluralism is often not the main conceptual-theoretical focus but one among several approaches that can be used to make scientific sense of an “assemblage” in which law and legal pluralism are one element only in a wider socio-cultural, political and institutional landscape.
Much of such interesting work and the debates generated on key issues including the role of law, however, does not reach the journal, as the latter often seems to be regarded as primarily “legal” rather than “social.” It is our ambition for the future of this journal to more explicitly attract such contributions. This means that the journal specifically invites:
contributions that, starting from a social-scientific approach to law, further current debate in the anthropology of law, socio-legal studies, and legal pluralism;
contributions that, rooted in other academic fields but with a scientific interest in the role of law and legal pluralism, yield important insights from such an interdisciplinary perspective.
The journal welcomes papers that make such original contributions based on research anywhere in the world, both in historic and contemporary contexts. Such work may include both theoretical papers and empirically-based contributions to disseminate new and emerging scientific findings from ethnographic fieldwork or other forms of engagement such as activism and advocacy, in the fields of human rights, conflict, migration and mobility, culture and religion, the state, policy and bureaucracy, environmental movements, and other rights-based movements including indigenous rights, gender, minority rights, and rights to (or of) nature.
What is it that makes social-scientific analysis in such contributions “critical”? First, whether starting from law or any other field, it should approach the role of law (and normativity more broadly) itself as an important object of critical social-scientific inquiry rather than taking it for granted as separated from social processes and networks, from the practices and behaviour that it attempts to steer and control. Second, it is important that such analysis is attentive to the wider power relations through which law is created, given meaning, contested, and transformed, and the consequences of these for (groups of) people positioned differently in society.
This does not mean, however, that there will no longer be a place for more theoretical work on law and legal pluralism; quite the contrary. The study of legal pluralism has considerably developed in focus and scope since the early years of this journal. From an initial agenda that stressed the need for serious scientific attention to “non-state” legal orders against a then widespread bias towards state law, it has broadened towards new questions related to globalization, changing interactions between normative orders between the local and the global in a rapidly changing global political arena, and a renewed interest in the state as normative order or the seat of normative pluralism itself. Theorizing legal pluralism is and remains a crucial point of entry for understanding these processes from a social-scientific perspective. In addition, debates on the concept of legal pluralism itself are ongoing. Approaches to legal pluralism still differ widely in how the concept is defined, the degree to which they are normative or analytical, and treat legal pluralism either as a fact of life that is not “good” or “bad” in itself, or as a “solution” to a problem.
Editorial board
From this year, editor and former Editor-in-Chief Melanie Wiber has decided to leave the core editorial team and to remain involved with the journal as Associate Editor. Thanks, Melanie, for your long-time involvement with the journal, as Editor-in-Chief between 2010 and 2014 and then as editor until 2021.
Further, as announced earlier, we have decided to work with an enlarged and (regionally, thematically, and otherwise) more diverse group of Associate Editors that better reflects the global scientific interest in law, legal anthropology and legal pluralism, as well as the global scope of the journal. Thus, we are creating a group of Associate Editors who are actively involved in the journal through publication, reviewing, promoting the journal, etc. This is an ongoing process through which we hope to reach a more complete global coverage represented in the journal. For now, a warm welcome to those who have joined the Associate Editors!
Finally, from this year onwards the journal no longer has a separate Advisory Board, as announced in 2021. Thanks to all former members of the Advisory Board for their often long standing involvement!
Types of publication accepted in the journal
The journal now accepts more types of publications than before. In earlier issues, the main types of publication (aside from the editorials and obituaries) were full research articles, book reviews and review articles, and special issues or special sections. We hope that the addition of new publication types stimulates debate, creates more interaction between readers and authors, provides opportunities for authors who want to communicate field experiences or give shorter research updates, and that this will make the journal more diverse. The following types of publication will be accepted:
Original research:
Research articles (full articles; internally pre-reviewed and then, if deemed relevant for the journal, externally peer-reviewed)
Special issues or sections (proposals are first internally reviewed and commented on; individual papers are externally peer-reviewed)
Other types of publication:
Book reviews or review articles (internally reviewed)
Brief reports (case reports, reports on ongoing field research, developments in a specific country, etc.; internally reviewed)
Discussion (reactions to articles, discussion about significant new developments, etc.; internally reviewed)
Editorial for each issue (written either by one or more core editors or by special issue editors)
Essays (internally reviewed)
Interviews (internally reviewed)
Meeting reports (internally reviewed)
Obituaries (internally reviewed)
For more information on these publication options we refer interested contributors to the journal’s website.