Decolonization, Race, and Legal Research

Since 2015 and the South African Rhodes Must Fall student movement, universities in the Global North have included decolonization into their pedagogy. Specific to law schools, these moves to ‘decolonize knowledge’ recognize that Euro-modern colonial enterprises have not only impacted the socio-political realities of indigenous, colonized, and racialized peoples, but also the fundamentals of legal knowledge. Nevertheless, to the detriment of theory and research, much of this decolonization discourse has focused on administrative practice and teaching. This failure to link decolonization to research-informed teaching suggests a fundamental failure of decolonization in knowledge, which must extend beyond the taught curriculum to deep intellectual enquiry as to its history, thought, and possibilities. In legal research, we must respond to questions about colonially-derived and global entanglements of power in the knowledge bases, theoretical frameworks, methods, ethics, and transmission of legal knowledge. Relying on a broad range of academic traditions, Professor Adebisi’s talk will be of great interest to Max Planck Law researchers looking to examine the questions and approaches relevant to embedding decolonization in legal research, both practically and theoretically.

Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol whose scholarship focuses on decolonial thought in legal education and its intersection with a history of changing ideas of the ‘human’.