[Call for papers] Dossier "Latin American Critical Legal Thought: reflections on the State, power and popular struggles”

1 Presentation

InSURgência: revista de direitos e movimentos sociais (ISSN: 2447-6684), linked to the Institute for Research, Rights and Social Movements - IPDMS, aims at disseminating original theoretical production concerning the theme "rights and social movements".

With the purpose of promoting research developed with, by, and for social movements, mobilizing researchers from Brazil and other countries in several fields of knowledge, the Institute for Research, Rights and Social Movements - IPDMS has founded InSURgência: Revista de Direitos e Movimentos Sociais (ISSN: 2447-6684), an international journal that promotes unpublished theoretical and/or empirical productions committed to critical and liberating knowledge on the theme of rights and social movements in the Brazilian, Latin American and international contexts.

For the next edition of InSURgência (v. 10, n. 1, jan/jun. 2023), the Dossier's organizing committee invites the academic community, researchers, and social movement activists to send their contributions in the form of scientific articles with the theme "Latin American Critical Legal Thought: reflections on the State, power, and popular struggles," according to the guidelines below.

 

2 Dossier "Latin American Critical Legal Thought: reflections on the State, power, and popular struggles”

Democratic systems in Latin America and the Caribbean are under pressure. Coups d'état, in their most diverse forms, disputes over power and governability have constituted episodes of instability, sparking a series of popular uprisings. Many of these mobilizations question democracies and political systems. We observe recent episodes in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Colombia.

The growth of various forms of popular struggles has revived a multiplicity of persistent demands from the past but has also led to the emergence of other needs, desires, and initiatives that directly challenge the state, democracy, and the capitalist mode of production, forged throughout modernity in the boundless exploitation of the peoples and common goods of Abya Yala. The unmet expectations and demands have reignited an already existing trend in the region, now deepened in the context of the negative effects on health, nature, and ways of life, which have been aggravated by the economic and social effects of the pandemic.

Behind this scenario of global crisis effervescence, aggravated by the pandemic, the imperialist advance in our region has deepened. The geopolitical place of commodities exporters, and the advance of predatory extractivism, have caused socio-environmental conflicts to erupt. In this scenario, the relations between state, control, and power are permeated by the local, national, and global scale, involving non-state actors such as the presence of multilateral organizations and transnational companies in the construction of decisions.

Based on these elements, in several Latin American and Caribbean countries, different types of questioning have advanced, which feeds a terrain in which the meaning, value, and representation of existing democracies are being questioned. In this scenario, recalling the trajectory of the construction of Latin American critical legal thought, marked by a plural strand that questions the role of law and ideology in the production and reproduction of inequalities in the region, is still a theoretical task for the construction of a liberating praxis. Given that these challenges are not always met by political systems and institutions, are often posed by popular movements and protests, and need to be addressed by situated and rigorous research.

Based on these analyses, InSURgência: Revista de Direitos e Movimentos Sociais invites the academic community, researchers, and social movement activists to produce reflections, in the format of a scientific article, an entry, an artistic manifestation, or a review, that contemplate the doings, the learnings, and the future challenges for the theme "Latin American critical legal thought: Reflections about the State, power and popular struggles", having as axes: (i) socio-environmental conflicts; (ii) Latin American constitutionalism; (iii) struggles, social movements and human rights.

This call promotes the application of researchers from different disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences that approach the problems outlined here from a critical perspective and with the will to contribute with ideas to face the challenges posed by overcoming the proposals.

 

3 Conditions for submission

To send your contribution, you must register on the InSURgencia website. The contribution must be original and unpublished, and not under evaluation by another journal; otherwise, you must justify it in "Comments to editor". The submission file must be in editable format (Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or RTF), without any kind of authorship identification.

The article must contain the title, abstract, and keywords in two languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, or English). The content of the article should contain an introduction, development, conclusion, and references (not necessarily with such titles), written in only one language of the author's preference, among Portuguese, Spanish, French, or English. The formatting of the article should follow the model made available on the journal's website.

As for authorship, there are no restrictions as to quantity or titles. The same author may send up to 2 (two) contributions to the "Dossier" and "In defense of research" sections (free articles section). Contributions to the other sections are unlimited: "Generating themes" (entry section); "Political poetics" (section of texts and artistic manifestations) and "Return notebook" (section of text reviews).

All submissions must follow the style standards and bibliographic requirements described in "Submission and Guidelines for Authors".

Deadline for submission of papers to the dossier: September 15, 2022.

Organization: Emiliano Maldonado; Lucas Machado; José Jaime Freitas Macedo; Tchenna Fernandes Maso