Thandiwe Matthews presented a paper entitled “Interrogating `lawfare` and `legal mobilisation`: a literature review” at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, May 2021. J.D. Handmaker & T. Matthews (2019) “Analysis of the potential for legal mobilization to ensure equal access to socio-economic justice in South Africa” Development Southern Africa, 36 (6), 889-904. According to Lisa Vanhala (November 2011), legal mobilization in the narrow sense can refer to high-profile litigation efforts for (or arguably against) social change, or more generally the term legal mobilization has been used to describe any type of process in which an individual or collective actor invokes legal norms, discourses or symbols to influence policy or behavior. [3] This usually means that there are guidelines or regulations around which to mobilize and a mechanism to do so. [4] Legislative activity creates an opportunity for legal mobilization. Courts become particularly relevant when applicants have means. [4] But who can make such claims? How can legal mobilization make the issues more visible? How to protect human rights defenders from backlash against legal mobilization? Another example is legal mobilization to protect academics, students and social justice activists who defend the rights and freedom of the Palestinian people.
J.D. Handmaker (2021) (ed) Special issue on class actions from the South African Journal on Human Rights. Legal mobilisation should be a legitimate means of resolving conflicts, addressing deficiencies in the rule of law and justice, and resolving other governance issues. Legal mobilization is not the same as lawfare, in which corporations and governments exploit the law in some sort of dubious legitimacy. While lawfare is used to intimidate, attempt to bankrupt or harm advocates, organizations and even government agencies for social justice, organizations and even government agencies or social justice, legal mobilization can serve as a form of resistance or counter-power. Like Makau Mutua (2016), who was one of the leading figures in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement, we consider a critical approach to legal mobilization to be essential. In addition, groundbreaking research by the late legal anthropologist (2020) Sally Engle Merry has created a framework for explaining how human rights are translated into locally relevant environments. In addition, Lisa Vanhala`s research on legal mobilization has explained the key roles and justifications of social movements in mobilizing law to address environmental harm, promote the rights of persons with disabilities, and other issues. In 2020 and 2021, a NIAS thematic group will complete the project.
In this final phase of the project, we challenge both the existing literature on legal mobilization and the core and liberal values that underpin most governmental and intergovernmental systems of human rights and environmental standardization and enforcement. We analyse case studies, for example in South Africa and Suriname and the global human rights instrument, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, within UN agencies and elsewhere, and on a variety of topics, from climate change and migration to international criminal justice and social inequalities. In practice, legal mobilization aims to promote social justice. Therefore, it is of considerable social importance, for example for interest groups who want to better understand the strategic value of law mobilization. One of our partners, Greenpeace, characterizes this in its contemporary work on mitigating climate change and other environmental damage like the use of law as a sword, shield and armor. Debates about the role and power of law, legal actors and legal institutions in movements for social change and in politics more broadly will continue as long as political science is a discipline. One of the main areas of research in the literature on the role of “legal things” in political systems and society concerns legal mobilization. The term embodies a controversial academic terrain, as there is no clearly defined or universally accepted meaning. One of the oldest and most frequently cited formulations in the political science literature is: “The law is. when a desire or need translates into a demand as the affirmation of one`s own rights” (cf.
Zemans 1983, cited in Early Works, p. 700). In its narrowest applications, the term refers to high-profile process efforts for (or arguably against) social change. In a broader sense, it has been used to describe any type of process in which individual or collective actors invoke legal norms, discourses or symbols to influence politics, culture or behaviour. Research on legal mobilization tended to be divided into two axes: individual quarrels and group campaigns for social reform. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, there was a general tendency for political scientists to focus on legal advocacy by group actors, while anthropologists and sociologists, particularly those who embraced interpretive change in the 1980s, focused on the micropolitics of disputes between individuals. However, this changed in the early 21st century with a growing interdisciplinary commitment to theory, methodology and epistemology. Until the beginning of the 21st.
In the nineteenth century, the literature on legal mobilization largely focused on the United States and on the implicit (or explicit) assumptions of domestic legal exceptionalism: the belief that the American legal and regulatory style and heightened legal awareness are unprecedented elsewhere in the world. In the first two decades of the 21st century, there has been a sharp increase in research to mobilize law beyond the United States, with a growing interest in the ideas that comparative work can generate, as well as research on legal mobilization in authoritarian or hard-to-study environments. There is also a growing interest in transnational and international legal mobilization. This flowering of work has stimulated the hypotheses of the American experience and thus improved our theoretical and empirical understanding of mobilization in different contexts. Starting from legal, political, sociological and socio-legal concepts and methodological approaches, we pursue a critical approach and examine law and its mobilization from different and interdisciplinary perspectives. We examine rights-based interventions in developing and/or transitional justice countries, as well as in relation to sustainable development issues, both in the North and South and transnationally.