Grounding legal geography: Conversations on law,space,and power across disparate geographies

This theme issue results from an interdisciplinary dialogue among legal geography scholars based in Colombia and Canada over the last five years, materialized in three workshops in Bogotá and Barranquilla in 2017 and one in Vancouver in 2019, followed by multiple online conversations. With the intention to build a much-needed symmetrical relation between disparate theoretical traditions and bodies of work, we refused the idea that Colombia (and the Global South in more general terms) only offered empirical information that could be explained from a theory produced by the Anglophone academy (or the Global North). Rather, our point of departure was a discussion of the uneven geopolitics of knowledge, the situated character of any knowledge production, and the authentic excitement about what we could learn with each other by putting our experiences and expertise into dialogue.

This is thus an attempt at grounding legal geography. Through our conversations, as reflected in this collection of articles, we explore how law is grounded, first, as a set of practices that situate us in particular places, or severs the connections we have with those places; and, second, as a form of knowledge, constituted in particular places, in distinctive ways. While these claims are central to legal geographic research, and for political geography more broadly, their implications for a broader engagement with scholarship beyond the Anglosphere have not been fully embraced. This collection offers one step toward such a critique, which recognizes that “theory is too often characterized by its disembodied voice and unremarked location” (Roy, 2016: 201).

The aim of grounding legal geography resonates with critical traditions of thought that refuse to universalize Anglospheric epistemologies of ‘law’ and ‘space’. Such universalization reinforces the “phallogocentric” version of the Modern subject as the bearer of rights (Butler, 1990; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Wynter, 2003). By “provincializing” (Chakrabarty, 2007) legal geography, we aim to open up its foundational concepts to lay bare the power-ridden processes of co-constitution of law and space. Law, as a prime vector of colonial domination, requires a careful critique of its assumptions, mechanics, and materializations (Blomley, 2014; Darian-Smith and Fitzpatrick, 1999; Hunt, 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Roy, 2008; Wynter, 1995). This includes a wider understanding of the relationship between law and space, that challenges liberal and Eurocentric traditions which continue to limit law and the legal to Western, modernist, state-bound, and individual-centered definitions. Central to this discussion is the different legal traditions of civil law vs. common law, their genealogies, and the corresponding legal formations across disparate geographies. ¹ Liberal conceptions of property law, for example, are inseparable from hegemonic productions of Whiteness and masculinity (Bhandar, 2018; Goffe, 2022; Harris, 1993; Ojeda, 2023; Roy, 2021; Wynter, 1995); which are, in turn, central to colonial capitalist formations. As shown by Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1993: 58), the “long horizon of colonial domination” relies on the continuous recreation of processes of dispossession, exclusion, and discipline to which law has been central.

In confronting universalism, the collection also aims to force legal geographers to acknowledge forms of knowledge and practice that have been historically ignored and precluded from Western forms of understanding. Twining’s (2009: 1) injunction remains urgent: a “just international order and a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law [including legal geography] need to include perspectives that take account of the standpoints, interests, concerns, and beliefs of non-Western people and traditions. Claims to universality sit uneasily with ignorance of other traditions and parochial or ethnocentric tendencies”. As Darian-Smith (2001: 11843) reminds us, “… there is no universal legal code” (cf. Ibarra Rojas, 2022). In the recognition of non-Western knowledges, the South should not be reduced to a source of raw data that are to be inserted or simply included into the Northern theory factories, sustaining one-way forms of knowledge production (dubbed epistemic colonialism by Rivera Cusicanqui, 1993). We reject the idea that the South is to be pillaged for useful ideas, in much the way as its material resources are diverted to the metropole. Instead, what is needed is a process of ongoing but constructive mutual learning and engaged pluralism, that comes from engaging across difference and recognizing the historical processes of co-constitution of disparate legal geographies. Following Leitner and Sheppard, this requires an openness and willingness of all participants to “revise or abandon their hardcore beliefs in light of critical scrutiny, empowering new loci of enunciation from which to contest knowledge claims” (2016: 231; cf. Radcliffe, 2017). It is this that allows us to “learn from each other”, looking for further engagement between socio-legal scholars in the North and South (Harrington and Ambreena, 2017), and not simply aim for legal geographic theories in the South to become legible to the North.

To do this requires that we attend to the distinctiveness of the legal geographies of/from/on the Global South and embrace their potential to unsettle the uneven geographies of knowledge production. Latin American and Caribbean legal geography is not only characterized by empirical and historical concerns, including the production of the colonial “Other”, extractivism, and dispossession, but by distinctive traditions of legal theorization and practice informed by a long history of colonial domination, evident in the work of scholars such as Sylvia Wynter (1995), Denisse Ferreira da Silva (2022), Michel Rolph-Trouillot (1995), Alcida Rita Ramos (2007), Lia Osorio Machado (1995), Cristina Rojas (2002) and Fernando Coronil (1996), to name a few. The universality of spatial concepts, the meaning of which is self-evident in the Anglosphere, does not hold in Latin American and Caribbean interpretations. One important example of this is the concept of ‘territory’, which has long been foundational within Northern legal geography, and which has been the subject of much theorization within the Anglosphere (Blomley, 2016, 2023). Yet as Clare et al. point out: “much Anglophone literature is too narrow, Eurocentric, and retains a residual statism caused by one-dimensional understandings of power. Such works risk missing the multiple ways in which territory is constructed and the role of non-state actors, and the myriad of alternative practices of territory developed by social movements around the world” (2018: 304).

Complicating Western models of territory, reliant on modernist notions of state sovereignty, territory is understood within different theoretical Latin American traditions as the “appropriation of space for political projects” (Halvorsen, 2018a: 2). As Halvorsen argues, Latin American conceptions of ‘land’, ‘terrain’, and ‘state’ all “contain diverse political projects that exceed that of modern sovereign power” (2018a: 14, see also 2018b). During the last decades, the notion of territory has become a fundamental site of political struggle, and the basis for contestation and resistance strategies across the region, as evidenced in the work of scholars such as Lorena Cabnal (2019), Arturo Escobar (2015), Carolina Olarte Olarte and Juliana Flórez (2023), Dianne Rocheleau (2015), Rogério Haesbaert (2020), CW Porto Gonçalves (2009) and Milton Santos (1994). Latin American conceptualizations of territory depart from totalizing views of state power, understanding the processes of the production of space as always contested. As such, territory refers to ongoing power struggles, disputes, and negotiations, and to the corresponding spatialization of both ‘poder’ (power over) and ‘potencia’ (the power to act), that are not made explicit in ‘power’, as Clare et al. (2017) rightly point out.

By taking Colombian legal geographies seriously, we have an entry point to narratives and practices of law and the way in which they shape localized forms of belonging and territorial defense, as well as dispossession and exclusion. While this is not at all exclusive to the Colombian context, the country’s history traversed by processes of land grabbing, forced displacement, extractivism, land restitution and peacebuilding brings to the front distinctive and instructive legal configurations that shape the relation between people and space, as well as violence. Colombian civil law is clearly marked by its colonial origins, evidenced in the ideological centrality given to the rule of law and the reduction of political struggles to legal ones. Indigenous and Afro-descendant claims to land and expressions of legality can also be found in colonial jurisdiction. Yet ‘law’ still has a geographic specificity in a Colombian context, that cannot and should not be read simply through Northern eyes (Castro, 2020). By attending to such grounded legal geographies, we gain a detailed comprehension of spatial productions of law, including those implicated in the complexities of use, exclusion, the afterlives of property, and the multiple mechanisms of dispossession.

When drawing the contours of contemporary legal geographic research in Colombia, it is evident that questions around land, state power, violence and environmental conflicts have played a central role. Legal geographies of the state have been extensively analyzed by authors such as Margarita Serje (2011, see also Serje et al., 2007), Martha Herrera Ángel (2002), María Clemencia Ramírez (2011) and Teo Ballvé (2020), whose work has examined the historical configurations of “frontier lands” and the violent state formations implicated in the process. In relation to this work, there is considerable research around the agrarian question and the legal geographies that produce and derive from processes of dispossession and landgrabbing in the country (Arias, under review; Camargo, 2022; Coronado, 2021; Grajales, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Meertens, 2016; Morris, 2017; Ojeda, 2016; Rivera Cediel, 2024), with particular attention to Indigenous and Black territories (Bejarano Martínez, 2023; Calle Alzate, 2017; Hernández Ospina, 2020; Herrera Arango, 2016; Pérez, under review). Environmental conflicts are also a key area of research in which Colombian legal geographic research has significantly contributed, as in the work of Ángela Castillo Ardila and Sebastián Rubiano Galvis (2019), Kiran Asher and Diana Ojeda (2009), Carolina Bejarano Martínez (2023), Kristina Dietz (2020, see also Dietz and Engels, 2017), Carolina Olarte Olarte (2019, 2021) and Irene Vélez-Torres (2014). Additionally, legal geographic work has led to relevant analyses of the contested processes of configuration of urban spaces as in the case of work on anti-Black police terror (Alves, 2019), gender and sexuality (Castro and Buchely, 2023), securitization (Peña, 2016), im/mobility (Ritterbusch, 2016) and the legal infrastructures of city planning (Pérez, 2016 see also Sotomayor et al., 2023).

This collection recognizes multiple ideas and practices of legal geography that can benefit legal geographers in both North and South (cf. Roy, 2016). What does the regulation of a city like Bogotá, or the racialized identities of legal subjects, or the specificities of forms of titling associated with the post-conflict Colombian land restitution process show about the mutual entanglement of law, space, and social power? What can academic legal geographers learn from the lived experiences of exclusion and criminalization in urban spaces in disparate geographies? What different forms of spatiality and territoriality result from processes of domination and resistance in Colombia?

In her article, Carolina Olarte Olarte examines the legal and judicial productions of the subsoil as public property in Colombia. Through a careful analysis of the process of banning the constitutional participation of consultas populares (local public consultations) against mining, she shows how the divide between soil as private property and subsoil as public property has contributed to the advancement of extractivist projects. Rather than a container of a set of discrete resources, Olarte Olarte argues for a relational comprehension of the subsoil, one that considers the power-ridden processes through which the subsoil comes to be. Olarte Olarte’s contribution is not only important for thinking about the legal, institutional, and material dimensions of extraction (the “right to destruction” as she calls it), it further delves into the legal mechanisms towards the expansion of police power against initiatives of territorial defense that hint to what a “radical politics of the underground” might look like.

Laura Porras offers an analysis of street vending as a set of processes of spatialization of contradicting legal mechanisms. Her examination of practices of use and control of public space speak directly to questions about legitimacy in space of workers and the arbitrariness of police power. Her work addresses the legal productions of informality and illegality, and thus of the production of legal and spatial boundaries through state interventions. By a detailed analysis of “el juego” (the game), as vendors and police agents describe the interaction dynamics between them and with state representatives in Bogotá, Porras explores the complex configurations of both space, law, and politics in relation to complaints, evictions, fines and other strategies towards the control of public space, and the ways in which street vendors negotiate and resist them.

Valentina Montoya et al. analyze the implications of urban transportation regulation in the everyday life and health of domestic workers in Bogotá, mostly impoverished racialized women. They show how housing and transportation policies in place end up perpetuating exploitation, segregation, and patriarchy. In analyzing the daily experiences of commute of domestic workers, the authors argue for a radical reconfiguration of what they refer to as a “death-delivering transportation infrastructure”. They contribute to the analysis of the environmental and health dimensions of grounded legal geographies in relation to the question of state action or omission, and their implications on the production of women’s disposability in urban spaces.

Yenny Carolina Ramírez Suárez’s critical analysis of citizenship and territoriality in Medellín is an important contribution to legal geographic research on contested urban spaces. In studying hip hop collectives in Comuna 13 in Medellín, what she refers to as “divergent citizenships”, her work connects artistic action with a long history of resistance to military operations and police terror. She shows how urban collectives challenge the state for their rights to justice, truth, and reparation through space-making political practices of music, dance, and graffiti. She looks carefully into the idea of Medellin as the “miracle” city for the ways in which it has tackled organized crime (associated with drug dealing and paramilitary groups) through social urbanism that rests on the production of public space as a space of supposedly non-conflictive interactions, pointing to larger dynamics resulting in the stigmatization of marginalized and impoverished inhabitants. In her work, Ramírez Suárez complicates the notion of state presence (or absence) and the violence of producing the assumedly ‘rational’ and ‘civilized citizen’.

Lastly, Sergio Latorre explores the capitalist state in relation to the notary public as a site of legal practice, with its own geographies, as it is generative of practices of property and legitimacy of the law. He pays attention to the materiality of the notary public, drawing attention to its capacity to blurry the distinction between the private and the public. In his article, he contests the idea of “public faith” and the associated notions of certainty, authority and security that derive from the notary public as a legal institution.

In bringing together these different articles, we seek to animate debate about what grounded legal geographies might look like. Put together, the articles ask “[c]an we promote theory cultures which are alert to their own locatedness and sources of inspiration, open to learning from elsewhere, respectful of different scholarly traditions and committed to the revisability of theoretical ideas?” (Robinson and Roy, 2016: 188). They invite us not simply to ‘learn from the South’, but to participate in learning from and with each other, in generative and symmetrical ways. As a whole, the theme issue offers an entry point to discussions of the relation between space and law, paying close attention to the workings of power -both as poder and potencia- in the ways in which contested legal geographies are configured against, within and beyond particular state formations by narratives and practices of the law, legality and legitimacy in space.