Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility

Citation

Adébísí, F. (2023). Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility. Bristol University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

This is a short theoretical book of about 200 pages on how law, as a discipline and as a body of knowledge, is bound up with colonialism. Its starting point, in the publisher's description, is that law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining and reproducing racialised hierarchies that produce and preserve sharp global disparities. Adébísí examines what decolonisation means and what the answer implies for teaching, researching and practising law. The book argues that the foundations of law are entangled with colonial thought, including its treatment of bodies and of space and time as things to be commodified, and it draws on theories and practices of decolonisation to imagine legal knowledge for "flourishing futures". Its setting is the law school, especially in the United Kingdom, and its audience is mainly people who study or teach law, though the argument draws on wider decolonial and critical race scholarship.

The structure is an introduction, six chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 sets out the theory, Chapter 2 turns to the discipline of law, Chapters 3 to 5 form a trilogy on the "subject" that law defines, and Chapter 6 and the conclusion return to the law school and the university.

Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline

The introduction places the law school in its wider context and prepares the questions the book will take up about legal education and the role of the discipline in sustaining inequality.

Chapter 1: Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive

The chapter surveys theories of decolonisation and asks what the term means. It treats decolonisation as a political project and not a metaphor, one that concerns both the colony and the metropole, and it prepares the vocabulary used in the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology

The chapter examines the colonial foundations of modern legal knowledge and education, which it calls Euro-modern, and the ways in which legal thinking carries colonial assumptions about what the world and the human being are. It argues that these assumptions have to be examined before the discipline can change.

Chapter 3: Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth

The first of three chapters on the law's subject asks how law makes and unmakes persons and groups, with a title that echoes Fanon. It looks at how legal categories have been used to define who counts as a full legal subject and who does not.

Chapter 4: Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism

The second chapter looks at "sacrifice zones", places and communities that are treated as expendable, and at the part law plays in producing and maintaining them.

Chapter 5: Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence

The third chapter adds the dimension of time. It treats slow violence, harm that accumulates gradually and is often not recognised as violence, as a feature of colonial legal arrangements and asks what decolonial work must address.

Chapter 6: The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time

The chapter returns to the law school, which it calls a point where colonial ideas about the human and about space and time converge. It argues that the law school reproduces them through teaching and institutional practice, and so is a place where change has to be pursued.

Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds

The conclusion proposes that universities need to be reimagined as places for plural, decolonial knowledge production. The aim is a "pluriversal" world in which many ways of knowing and being are recognised.

Key Concepts

Introduction to Chapter 2

• Decolonisation as a political project: change in material and institutional relations, not only a figure of speech.
• Euro-modern legal knowledge: the dominant legal tradition that grew from European colonial powers and presents itself as universal.
• Colonial ontology of law: the view of the world and the human that the foundations of law assume.

Chapters 3–6 and Conclusion

• Legal subjectivity: how law defines who counts as a person with standing.
• Sacrifice zones: places and communities treated as expendable.
• Slow violence: gradual harm that accumulates over time.
• Pluriversal worlds: a world that holds many worlds, where more than one way of knowing is valued.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A specific object. Because the book focuses on law and legal education, it gives the general idea of decolonising knowledge a concrete site and shows how it could apply in one discipline.
• A clear sequence. The chapters move from theory to law's foundations, to the figure of the legal subject, to the institution of the law school, and then to the university, which gives the argument a visible order.
• Reading across traditions. The book draws on authors in decolonial thought, such as Fanon, Mignolo and Escobar, and in critical race and legal scholarship, so it can serve as an entry point to that literature.

Limitations

• Dense theoretical register. The book uses specialised terms (colonial ontology, Euro-modern, abyssal line, necropolitical) that readers new to decolonial theory may find hard to follow.
• Law-school focus. The detail concerns legal education and law as a discipline, so readers in other fields will need to translate the argument to their own settings.
• Practical guidance is limited. The book presents itself as reflections on power and possibility, and offers a direction and set of concepts rather than a step-by-step programme for changing a curriculum.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this course on postcolonial and decolonial thought, the book is an advanced, discipline-specific work. Young's Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction and Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks give the background in postcolonial thought, and Bhambra and Holmwood's Colonialism and Modern Social Theory and Bhambra's Rethinking Modernity show the argument at work in sociology. Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies and Harrison's Decolonizing Anthropology do similar work for research methods and anthropology, so Adébísí's book is a natural comparison from the side of law.

How to Use This Book

It suits graduate students and advanced undergraduates in law, sociology and related fields. Prior reading in decolonial or postcolonial theory is very helpful. A sensible order is the introduction, Chapter 1 for the framework, then Chapter 2; Chapters 3 to 5 can be read as a group or selected by interest, and Chapter 6 and the conclusion bring the argument to the institution.

As you read, keep a short glossary of the book's key terms and note where each is introduced. After each chapter, ask what it would mean for a course you have taken: which assumptions about the law, the person or time does it question? The references (pages 158 to 189) are a route into the literature the book draws on.