CHALLENGES OF LAW IN THE AMERICAS: PUBLIC POLICY, JUSTICE AND PEACEBUILDING IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE
Law in the Americas demands a serious and thorough study of the role it plays in the construction of public policy, justice and peace in contemporary societies. This implies a deep examination of its real effects on overcoming or reproducing violence in American territories, from a critical, transdisciplinary, pluralistic and comparative perspective. This symposium is proposed as an academic space to review law as a field in dispute, deeply implicated in the apparatuses of power, marginality and socio-political resistance.
To achieve this purpose, the symposium calls for a transdisciplinary dialogue on law from legal pluralism, moving beyond monist, positivist and formalist views that reduce it to a mere normative dimension under a set of neutral rules isolated from their social context, which ignore local legal practices and their real effectiveness. Instead, it invites thinking about it through a broader lens that moves from dogmatic approaches toward an understanding of the legal phenomenon in its political and social dimension, assessing its real effects on public policy, justice and peace. In this way, the gathering opens itself to socio-legal, critical, decolonial, cultural and Latin American perspectives, prompting a rethinking of legal tools in the face of the challenges of territories in crisis in the Americas.
Through this lens, the academic and social community is called to debate the challenges of law in the region in the face of the most urgent problems of contemporary legal and social thought, structured around the following three thematic axes:
1. Law, State Violence and Institutional Capture
* Law as a device of violence, oppression and marginalization of local populations.
* Political and economic elites, power struggles and institutional capture.
* Hate policies and discourses in contexts of social polarization.
* Technopolitics, algorithmic bias, digital violence and cyberbullying.
* Authoritarianism, state violence and the crisis of democracy and human rights.
* Territories under chronic states of exception and geographies of violent exclusion.
2. Public Policy, Justice and Structural Inequalities
* Injustices, inequalities, discrimination and social vulnerabilities.
* Public policies aimed at vulnerable groups and those with special constitutional protection.
* Territorial development and geographic exclusions.
* Social reforms, governmental dynamics and the role of the administration of justice in the face of social demands.
* Climate justice, public policy and strategic litigation.
* Gender justice, care policies and intersectionality.
* Law as lived, narrated and applied in the realities of peripheries and territories.
3. Social Conflict, Resistances, Mobilizations and Peacebuilding from Below
* Collective protests, social movements and narratives of resistance.
* Management of social conflicts and alternative resolution experiences.
* Criminal governance, illicit economies and disputes over normative control in territories.
* Community and pluralist mechanisms for the defense of territory.
* Formal peace processes: assessments, advances and setbacks.
* A cartography of successful cases of emancipatory justice, peacebuilding and social development.
