ABSTRACT
Legal pluralism research is faced with new challenges deriving from the accelerated and intensifying mobility of people and law. Taking this assumption as a starting point, the organizers of the workshop Mobile people, mobile law: Expanding legal relations in a contracting world in Halle (7-9 November 2002) asked participants to investigate whether and how former boundaries between internal and external law are becoming increasingly effaced and consequently create new forms of inclusion and exclusion.1 This goes against the grain of a common Euro-centric perspective which only considers mobility (of people and law) towards ‘the West’ as a problem and indeed a danger for its own integrity (and uniformity), whether within national boundaries or within the larger confines of the European Union: flows of law over national and even continental boundaries take many directions and are not bound to the North-South axis, as an ever-increasing literature on the globalization/mobility of law clearly demonstrates.2 However, mobility that does not involve the West (or the North) as destinations for migrants appears to receive much less attention.
