Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are 'good' or 'bad' for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women's rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.

Rachel Sieder is Senior Research Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Educatin Superior en Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City, visiting professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen and research fellow at the institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London. John-Andrew McNeish is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.