René Urueña, Professor of International Law at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, is one of our first wave of Max Planck Law Fellows, bringing together researchers from and under the direction of Professors Armin von Bogdandy and Thomas Duve. With a distinguished background that includes academic roles at, among others, Harvard and NYU, his work focuses on the ways in which complex social challenges can be understood, and tackled, as distinctively legal problems.
Professor Urueña’s Max Planck Law Fellow Group is centred on the project ‘Communities of Practice and the Transnational Production of Human Rights Knowledge in Latin America’. Launched three years ago, the project interrogates assumptions about human rights in the region, moving beyond the conventional view that only central institutions like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights can produce meaning in human rights norms. Instead, the project focuses on the decentralized and dynamic communities that generate legal meaning through practice, a perspective that emphasizes the interplay of wider historical, cultural, colonial, and intellectual influences in Latin America.
In a nutshell, the project’s hypothesis is that ‘the production of human rights knowledge in the region is not controlled by a centralized system of decision makers’. Findings have largely supported this hypothesis, revealing complex networks of meaning-making that extend beyond traditional power structures. However, these insights also unveiled new challenges. ‘Once we realized the extent of decentralization, the question became: how do we create normative criteria to decide who gets to participate in this knowledge-making process, whose arguments should count?’
Looking ahead, the project remains active, with two significant workshops planned for December 2024 at MPI-Heidelberg. The first, on 10–11 December, titled ‘Knowledge Production and Decolonial Approaches to Transformative Constitutionalism,’ will examine how colonial critiques can enrich transformative constitutionalism. The second workshop, on 12–13 December, explores ‘Gender-Based Distributions and Transformative Constitutionalism,’ seeking innovative approaches to gender equity within legal frameworks. Urueña emphasizes that these workshops are not isolated efforts but part of a broader iterative process: ‘They build on insights from earlier incubators and intensive schools, creating continuity and space for young scholars to contribute’.
On whether the insights gained about the division and decentralization of legal knowledge in Latin America might translate to the European context, Professor Urueña expressed cautious optimism but emphasized that any proper answer to such a question would require a dedicated comparative study. Nevertheless, he remarked, ‘I think Europe can learn a lot from Latin America, particularly in terms of the role of law—how it can be used to frame and address extreme challenges to democracy. There is much to be learned in areas such as armed conflict, inequality, and migration. There’s no doubt about that’.