The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism
| Author | John Harrington,Ambreena Manji |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917729874 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2017, Vol. 26(6) 700–715
The Limits of Socio-
ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917729874
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Third World
Scholarship
John Harrington and Ambreena Manji
Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies (SLS), we offer an
assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to
locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in
the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World
scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first
editorial board to non-western perspectives on law and locate this commitment both
historically and biographically. We explore a number of important interventions
concerned with socio-legal studies in the Third World, but also point to significant gaps
and omissions since 1992. To end, we argue for a reassertion of SLS’s founding
commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non-
western perspectives.
Keywords
Anti-imperialism, legal education, law and development, law and postcolonialism, socio-
legal studies
Corresponding author:
Ambreena Manji, Centre for Law and Global Justice, Cardiff University, Wales, Cardiff CF10 3XQ, UK.
Email: manjia1@cardiff.ac.uk
Harrington and Manji
701
Now and Then: Introduction and Overview
At its foundation in 1992, Social and Legal Studies (SLS) committed to publish work on
the Third World and by scholars from outside the Western academy.1 The journal’s 25th
anniversary is a good time to review this commitment, to think about the circumstances
in which it was made, the extent to which it was honoured and the manner of its
reinterpretation since then. Where did it come from and what has been made of it?
We ask this not in the abstract, but in a new conjuncture when race, exploitation and
empire again frame urgent questions for citizens, students and scholars.
Our article is organized as follows. First, we consider the historical moment in which
the journal was brought into being and explore how this affected the intellectual per-
spective of its first editors and their founding commitments. We argue that the place
occupied by SLS must be understood by exploring the biographies and especially the
mobility of legal academics in the preceding decades, their own self-understanding and
the considerable personal and political influences of Third World scholars and anti-
imperialist ideas on their thinking. Then we examine the journal’s contribution to pro-
moting Third World perspectives over the past 25 years and trace the main areas in which
it has published interventions. We consider the extent to which it has succeeded in
realizing its early objectives and also note the significant gaps, areas of Third World
scholarship which we might have expected to see represented in the archive, but don’t. In
accounting for these gaps, we are drawn to a 1986 volume edited by Issa Shivji on the
25th anniversary of the Law Faculty at Dar es Salaam whose title we have adapted for
our own review. Contributors were called on to document but also to probe the limits of
the legal radicalism which the Faculty had nurtured and which, as we shall see, played an
essential if neglected role in the emergence of British socio-legal studies (Shivji, 1986:
11). In conclusion, we consider how the journal’s founding values of critical engage-
ment, political internationalism and cosmopolitan scholarship can be refurbished and
mobilized for new times.
Conjunctures and Founding Commitments
In the first issue of SLS, the editors set out their reasons for founding a new journal.
Included among their four main ambitions was ‘the promotion of non-Western perspec-
tives on law, regulation and criminology’. The journal would, they said,
promote a greater knowledge and understanding of work being carried out in developing
countries, Eastern Europe, and the less dominant Western countries. We are of the firm
belief that exciting and innovating work is being produced yet remains at risk of invisibility
on the international scene, leaving dominant western traditions and perspectives unmoved
by their potential challenge. (Editorial Board, 1992: 5–6, issue 1)
This was more than a plea for generic diversity, a simple demand to refresh the stock
of socio-legal knowledge in European and North American academies. It needs to be
read in its time; 1992 roughly marks the halfway point between today and the indepen-
dence of Ghana in 1957, the first of a wave of decolonization that ended formal imperi-
alism on the African continent. The creation of new law schools had played a part in the
702
Social & Legal Studies 26(6)
contested project of building new nations which took place over that period. But by 1992,
the aspiration to sustain independent centres of knowledge production in and about the
countries of the Third World had been thwarted by the reassertion of the economic and
political supremacy of the Western powers and the international financial institutions
(IFIs) which they dominated (Paliwala, 2017). An insurgent alliance of states across the
global south, seeking to achieve a New International Economic Order, had been defeated
and pushed back. Domestically nationalist movements based on top-down state control
had run out of the popular legitimacy which many enjoyed in the early years of inde-
pendence. Unsustainable debt forced the capitulation of formerly assertive regimes to the
World Bank and IMF. Hegemonic neo-liberalism worked its way out from the central
banks and finance ministries reshaping social sectors including higher education.2 With
university staff dependent on private practice and consultancies to scrape a living, legal
scholarship became increasingly oriented to the priorities of the IFIs (Adelman and
Paliwala, 1994; Majamba, 2011). As a result of this material transformation, distinctive
voices in and about the Third World were marginalized by the new orthodoxy. With the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, non-aligned states lost the strategic capacity to operate
between East and West. The founding of the journal was an act of hope, then, a defen-
sive, but also a defiant gesture.
Who and Where? Some Origins
Context explains the founding commitment, but so does biography. Among the journal’s
first editors were Sol Picciotto and Peter Fitzpatrick, who had spent a significant part
their early careers in Dar es Salaam and Papua New Guinea, respectively. Both this
choice of starting point and their subsequent moves to the United Kingdom were part of a
broader pattern of academic mobility which had challenged the parochialism of British
legal education (Harrington and Manji, 2003a). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, staff
for newly founded universities across the Commonwealth were recruited in Britain by
the Inter-University Council (Harrington and Manji, 2003b). Young scholars took up
their first posts at law schools in Sudan, Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and else-
where. They found themselves in countries marked by wide and deep legal pluralism,
insecure political leaderships and a popular desire for development as the fruit of inde-
pendence. But the insular doctrinal focus and magisterial lecturing style of English law
schools were clearly inappropriate for teaching and research in this setting. As William
Twining put it
One did not have to be very alert or sensitive to realize that, despite British influence, law in
East Africa . . . was radically different from law in England and Wales and that many of the
differences can only be explained by reference to what is vaguely labelled ‘context’ –
history, culture, economic conditions and politics. (Twining interview: Atienza and Gama,
2015: 5)
They rebelled against the constraints of their own legal education, seeking alliances
first with ex-patriate American colleagues, themselves inspired by legal realism, who
were working overseas with Ford Foundation support (Krishnan, 2012; Sugarman,
Harrington and Manji
703
2011). Deeper engagement also followed with local colleagues and particularly students
(Fimbo, 2011). Undergraduate campaigns at Dar es Salaam and Accra, in the mid-1960s,
challenging government authoritarianism and enduring neo-colonialism, were an impor-
tant vector of political struggle both within and beyond the universities. Harsh official
responses called forth the active sympathy of some expatriate law teachers. They also
provided the impetus for a radical reform of the law school curriculum in the name of
social relevance and critical awareness. At Dar es Salaam, an interdisciplinary first-year
foundation course on ‘Economic and Social Problems of East Africa’ was developed first
in the Law Faculty, and then taught across the university (Picciotto, 1986; Twining,
2017).
Expatriate scholars returned to the United Kingdom to play a significant part in the
founding of a ‘radical generation’ of law schools in the 1970s. They were subsequently
joined for longer or shorter periods by former colleagues and students from East Africa
and elsewhere, sustaining a web of exchange and influence which has endured notwith-
standing the depredations of the intervening decades. The new British law schools were
nodes in this network, some of them succeeding in breaking with the black letter outlook
associated predominantly with Oxford and...
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