LOLA: Levels of Legal Pluralism in Abya Yala. Decolonizing Constitutional Narratives in the New Latin American Constitutionalism

Chairs:

• Alejandro Santamaria Ortiz alejandro.santamaria@uexternado.edu.co
• Maria Francesca Cavalcanti m.f.cavalcanti@tilburguniversity.edu

In a context of growing request of recognition of alternative legal paradigms Latin America has garnered growing interest as a living laboratory for legal pluralism and Intercultural Constitutional Engineering. These innovations stem from the need to depart from the Western legal tradition, seek a more efficient response to the demands of indigenous peoples, made more urgent by the climate crisis, and introducing pioneering innovative measures that align with ecological ethnicity. Such measures are aimed at supplanting the legal frameworks of colonial heritage, safeguarding the traditional modus vivendi of indigenous communities, and offering a counterbalance to the pervasive effects of neoliberal globalization. However, it is precisely in relation to the necessary responses to the identity demands of indigenous peoples and the recognition of the Rights of Nature that these constitutional systems fall into a legal and political short-circuit: these demands find acceptance at the constitutional level, but their concrete implementation has encountered considerable difficulties, undermining the circulation of a transformative Andean constitutional model, as exemplified by the failure of the Chilean constitutional revision project. This theme lies at the heart of the project LOLA: Levels of Legal Pluralism in Abya Yala, developed by Tilburg University in collaboration with the Latin American Studies Centre at the University of Bologna, Universidad Externado de Colombia and Universidad Domingo Savio. This workshop builds on the project’s agenda with the aim of fostering a critical and comparative reflection on three levels of pluralism and their concrete implementation within the constitutional systems of the Andean region.