Recognizing Indigenous Law as Law: The Reverse Side of Coloniality in the Anthropocene

Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik welcomes Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca, a legal ethnographer and the Director of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination Area at Dejusticia, Centre for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society in Bogotá, Colombia. Paulo’s research proposes the idea of indigenizing international law by following the anthropological turn in which indigenous cosmologies are direct to the framework of an international legal order. This displacement highlights the power of indigenous law to counteract international law’s colonial legacies. This episode covers the problem with conceptualizing legal subjects through the exclusion of indigenous people from legal orders. Paulo’s objective is to look at Western and indigenous jurisprudence by scrutinizing colonial enterprise and indigenous resistance and bridging the gap between indigenous and state-centric law.