Introduction

The concept ‘epistemologies of the South’ was coined in a special issue of the Revista Critica de Ciencias Sociais in 2008, but the background to the proposal dates back to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ethnographic experience of legal pluralism in a Rio de Janeiro favela in the 1970s. The tension between regulation and emancipation is relevant where the social contract is valid. The modern-Western hegemonic project identifies the constitution as a set of basic elements that establish and regulate political and legal agreements in the social life of a given community and sees it as the legal scale par excellence for political unity within Western modernity: the nation state. Constitutionalism, which establishes the limits and form of the state, is based on the ideas of unity, uniformity and homogeneity: one state, one nation, one law. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.