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.

Contents

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives, Rachel Sieder and John McNeish; 1. Gender, Human rights and legal pluralities: experiences from Southern and Eastern Africa, Anne Hellum; 2. Indigenous women fight for justice: Gender rights and legal pluralism in Mexico, María Teresa Sierra; 3. The gender of law: politics, memory and agency in Mozambican community courts, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen; 4. Sexual Violence and gendered subjectivities: indigenous women’s search for justice in Guatemala, Rachel Sieder; 5. Between sharia and CEDAW in Sudan: Islamist women negotiating gender equity, Liv Tönnessen; 6. Indigenous rights and violent state construction: the struggle of Triqui women in Oaxaca, Natalia De Marinis; 7. Opening the Pandora’s Box: human rights, customary law, and the "communal liberal self" in Tanzania, Natalie J.Bourdon; 8. An Accumulated Ral pluralism and gender justice in Bolivia, John-Andrew McNeish andAna Cecilia Arteaga Böhrt

Author Bio

Rachel Sieder is senior research professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Educación Superior en Antropología 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 Chr.Michelsens Institute.