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h old e r s.
The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism
Social and Legal Studies and Third World Scholarship
John Harrington
1
and Ambreena Manji
2
Abstract
In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies, 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 UK 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
Socio-legal studies; Legal Education; Anti-imperialism; Law and Development; Law and
Postcolonialism.
Now and Then: Introduction and Overview
At its foundation in 1992 Social and Legal Studies committed to publish work on the Third
World and by scholars from outside the Western academy.
3
The journal’s 25
th
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.
1
Professor of Global Health Law, Centre for Law and Global Justice, Cardiff University, Wales, UK.
2
Professor of Land Law and Development, Centre for Law and Global Justice, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. We
are grateful to Christina Adelakun, Josephine Hebestreit and Elizabeth Willmington for their invaluable
assistance in the preparation of this review.
3
We follow Sundhya Pahuja in preferring ‘Third World’ to such commonly used terms as ‘Developing’ or ‘Non-
Industrialized’ countries. Unlike them it connotes a political relationship, not a set of demographic or economic
facts. We share her view that ‘the Third World was not a place. It was a project … [and the vehicle through
which the] peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America dreamed of a new world’ (Pahuja 2011: 261 quoting
Prashad 2007: xv).
Our paper is organised as follows. First, we consider the historical moment in which the
journal was brought into being and explore how this affected the intellectual perspective of
its first editors and their founding commitments. We argue that the place occupied by Social
and Legal Studies 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 promoting third world
perspectives over the past twenty-five 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 25
th
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 engagement, political internationalism and
cosmopolitan scholarship can be refurbished and mobilized for new times.
Conjunctures and Founding Commitments
In the first issue of Social and Legal Studies the editors set out their reasons for founding a
new journal. Included among their four main ambitions was ’the promotion of non-Western
perspectives 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.’ (1: 1992, 5-6)
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 independence of Ghana
in 1957, the first of a wave of decolonisation that ended formal imperialism on the African
continent. The creation of new law schools had played a part in the 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 independence. 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.
4
With university staff dependent on private practice and
consultancies to scrape a living, legal scholarship became increasingly oriented to the
priorities of the IFIs (Majamba 2011; Adelman and Paliwala 1993). 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 defensive, but also a defiant gesture.
4
For a socio-legal review of the impact of adjustment on Tanzania’s health sector, see Harrington
(1998).
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 UK 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 elsewhere. 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 independence. 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 (Sugarman 2011; Krishnan 2012). 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 important vector of
political struggle both within and beyond the universities. Harsh official responses called