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NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner

Women and Law in Latin America: Justice, Security and Legal Pluralism

Awarded: NOK 3.9 mill.

There has been a wealth of new research on complex legal pluralism in Latin America, much of it linked to recent multicultural reforms which recognise the right of indigenous communities to exercise their own forms of law (part of the regional turn Van Co tt has termed multicultural constitutionalism). In addition, the issues of security and access to justice in Latin America have become a hot topic, both for donors and academics. However, surprisingly little of this research on legal pluralism has focuse d on the gendered dimensions of law and women´s access to justice and security. Through a combination of desk-based study and qualitative, collaborative research in a number of countries in Latin America, this project will analyze the strategies adopted by indigenous social movements, and particularly by organized indigenous women to secure greater gender justice within contexts of complex legal pluralism. Through a range of specific, grounded studies focused on and in collaboration with particular soci al movements it will explore how contemporary legal pluralism affects gender justice and specifically womens access to justice and security. Our proposed research perspective involves engaging with a normative human rights framework with a descriptive a nalysis of its interaction with official and unofficial national and local norms in different contexts. We propose that such a relational and contextual gender perspective can help reveal the complex, ambiguous and often contentious relationship between h uman rights, access to justice and security, gender, and legal pluralism. Our focus is on the relationship between formal and informal norms and institutions and shifting practices and their outcomes. Such an approach necessarily involves analysis of the ways in which social actors understand, reframe, appropriate and use human rights and alternative legal orders in order to improve their well-being. The project seeks to adopt an interdisciplinary approach.

Funding scheme:

NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner