The Plural Turn: Legal Pluralism and Multipluralism
Research Project
Legal pluralism is one of the most important expressions for non-state law. The term originated in legal anthropology in the 1970s and was initially used to describe indigenous legal orders – legal orders that existed without any doctrinal, judicial or state recognition or enforcement. Their distance to and from the modern state has attracted the interest of various legal disciplines since the 1990s – from legal theory to international law and legal history. However, since its very beginnings legal pluralism has suffered from numerous semantic ambiguities. Its widespread definition as the ‘coexistence of different legal systems in one social field’ conceals challenges at the conceptual level. Legal pluralism describes highly divergent phenomena: indigenous legal traditions, religious commandments with the force of law, historical legal concepts or utopian hopes for legal ideas, state legal systems, transnational and international legal orders or global legal regimes – legal pluralism recognizes them all equally as genuine law.
This concept of legal pluralism has recently been joined by new terms such as legal variety, fragmentation, multinormativity or diversity, all of which highlight different aspects of the plurality of law. They can be summarised by the neologism ‘multipluralism’ or characterised as a ‘plural turn’. These multipluralisms raise fundamental questions about (historical) law, its practice and knowledge, its sources and methods, its legitimacy and ideology, its object and scholarship, and finally its relationship to other modes of normativity. The research project ‘The Plural turn: Legal Pluralism and Multipluralism’ aims to achieve more than just a mapping of this conceptual and disciplinary diversity. It is guided by an assumption that is simultaneously epistemic and practical: the plural turn transcends the academic field. Its epistemic power not only changes the conceptual description of the legal world; these descriptive concepts also generate new legal realities and thereby change social facts.