2 Law, social justice and the world

In recent years, increasing attention to the concept of scholar-activism has given rise to a rich body of scholarship interrogating its methodological, political and ethical contours, its role within social movement struggles and the academic and political stakes involved in its practice (see, e.g. Bashiri Reference Bashiri, Mattsson, Vico and Salö2024; Borras and Franco Reference Borras and Franco2023; Choudry and Kapoor Reference Choudry and Kapoor2010; Choudry Reference Choudry2019; Hale Reference Hale2008; Lennox and Yildiz Reference Lennox and Yıldız2019b; Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey Reference Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey2009).

While many other fields of social inquiry have only recently begun to grapple with questions of activist scholarship – particularly in international contexts – law and society has engaged with them for decades, owing to its long-standing concern with issues of power and justice (see, e.g. Garth and Sarat Reference Garth and Sarat1998; Valverde et al. Reference Valverde, Clarke, Darian-Smith, Kotiswaran, Valverde, Clarke, Smith and Kotiswaran2021). From its inception, law and society scholarship has been animated by a commitment to engaging with social struggles and public debates – a commitment that has not only defined the field but, for many, constituted an existential imperative. Early scholars recognised that legal systems interact – often subtly and implicitly – with social norms, behaviours, power relations and conflict, and that these interactions frequently reproduce harm for marginalised communities. Accordingly, law and society research has long confronted issues such as access to justice, economic exploitation and the role of law enforcement (Garth and Sarat Reference Garth and Sarat1998). This orientation has also entailed a commitment to centring the voices and experiences of those most affected by legal processes – an ethos that continues to shape the field in our globalised present (Darian-Smith Reference Darian-Smith2013).

In this vein, law and society scholarship has often sought to support legal reform efforts aimed at addressing inequality and injustice, at times contributing directly to policy changes that benefit marginalised communities (Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024). Yet despite this shared orientation – and the field’s sustained commitment to interrogating law’s role in either deterring or advancing social justice – law and society scholarship remains divided into at least three distinct strands. These strands reflect a persistent separation between scholarship and political practice and, more fundamentally, between theory and action. As with any typology, such distinctions inevitably flatten certain complexities, but they remain analytically useful for tracing broad patterns in the field’s internal dynamics around questions of praxis.

Some scholars regard the ethos of law and society as rooted in a direct response to injustice and imbalances of power. They often locate, at the heart of social conflict, a persistent and evolving gap between law on the books and law in action (García-Villegas Reference García-Villegas, Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso2019; Levitsky Reference Levitsky, Sarat and Ewick2015; Valverde et al. Reference Valverde, Clarke, Darian-Smith, Kotiswaran, Valverde, Clarke, Smith and Kotiswaran2021). In his 2001 Presidential Address to the Law and Society Association (LSA), Frank Munger took this gap as a point of departure to reflect on the relationship between inquiry and activism within the field. At first glance, he observed, the commitment to activism may appear to conflict with the ideals of objectivity and impartiality traditionally expected of legal scholars. Yet this tension, Munger argued, need not be antagonistic. On the contrary, activism could enrich socio-legal inquiry by pushing it to become ‘an ally of progressive change’ (Munger Reference Munger2001, p. 9). Defining activism as a form of engagement, Munger emphasised the importance of cultivating ‘respect for the subjects of our research’ and ‘humility about our understanding of the needs and the goals of action’ (Munger Reference Munger2001, p. 10). For him, scholar-activism also entailed recognising the constitutive role of law and critically interrogating its authority (Munger Reference Munger2001, p. 11). Within this ‘transformational’ strand, as we would call it, law is approached as something that can and should be reformed – implying a normative and moral commitment for socio-legal scholars to contribute to progressive change.

A second, more radically critical strand offers a bleaker assessment of law’s capacity to produce meaningful social transformation. In this view, law is unable to fulfil its emancipatory promises – at least not on its own and certainly not without sustained, fundamental critique (Nesiah Reference Nesiah, Valverde, Clarke, Smith and Kotiswaran2021). This is because law is not merely insufficient but is often part of the problem – if not the problem. Law functions as an instrument that (re)produces and legitimates injustice and entrenched hierarchies of power; it cannot be presumed to align with virtue, progress or civilisation (Lecmaitre Reference Lemaitre, Sieder, Ansolabehere and Alfonso2019). From this standpoint, while law undoubtedly shapes social reality, it is structurally incapable of delivering greater inclusion, equality or justice. The task of the critical scholar, then, is not to reform law from within but to expose its operations and open up space for imagining and enacting social change beyond – and, at best, cautiously within – law’s normative economy (Borras and Franco Reference Borras and Franco2023; Speed Reference Speed2008). This ‘change-beyond-the-confines-of-law’ strand leaves little room for scholar-activism within legal institutions, precisely because those institutions are so often implicated in reproducing exclusionary forms of power.

In both of the above strands – the ‘transformational’ and the ‘change-beyond-the-law’ – the underlying dichotomy between scholarship and activism remains intact. In the first, the socio-legal scholar engages with concrete struggles and their facticity, even participating in them, only to ultimately return to law as the privileged medium for transforming reality. She must remain conscious of the persistent gap between the world as it is and law’s limited potential to effect structural change – whether socio-economic, environmental or political. In the second strand, law’s entanglement with domination and its role in reproducing exclusionary power hierarchies precludes the possibility of meaningful activism within its framework. As a result, scholarly contributions are largely confined to critique and to providing support for transformative efforts that take place outside – or in spite of – law.

There is yet a third strand that resists the binary between scholarship and activism altogether, spanning from the interpretive socio-legal tradition to more recent work on the materiality of law. Interpretive socio-legal scholars (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Merry Reference Merry1990, among others) have long challenged the idea of law as a fixed body of abstract rules, instead emphasising its embeddedness in everyday practices, material relations and social interpretation. Through carefully grounded empirical research, they have shown that law’s authority and meaning are constantly negotiated, experienced and remade through localised practices, everyday narratives and acts of reinterpretation. In this view, law is not a closed system external to social life but a living social phenomenon co-produced by those who live under it – including the socio-legal scholars who study and interact with these contested processes. Building on this tradition, scholars of the materiality of law (Brigham Reference Brigham1996; Pottage Reference Pottage2012; Eslava Reference Eslava2015, among others) have drawn attention to law’s existence in material forms – institutions, artefacts, technologies of governance, spatial arrangements and political struggles. Legal meaning emerges not only through discourse but also through these tangible infrastructures of power and social life. This approach further underscores the constitutive interplay between legal and sociomaterial transformation: hands-on political practices are inseparable from legal change and vice versa (Goldoni Reference Goldoni, Bellamy and King2023).

Even as interpretive socio-legal scholars and those working on law’s materiality acknowledge the scholar’s role in shaping law – and thus power relations – their engagement with movements, unions and parties is often marked by what we might call ‘engaged detachment’. Here, the intellectual’s role is to ‘interpret law to social movements’ (Brigham Reference Brigham1996, p. 131) rather than to act with them. This third approach – what we call the ‘situated-engagement’ strand – marks a significant advance in recognising law, politics, materiality and everyday life as deeply entangled. Yet it still tends to place the researcher outside political struggle, even while acknowledging her implication in structures of power. The result is a scholarship attuned to law’s complexities but removed from the ethical and political commitments that come with collective struggle.

As we argue in the next section, investigación militante rejects the residual separation between scholarly and political work, envisioning their relationship in a profoundly different – and, within the socio-legal field, innovative – way. From a legal perspective, it challenges the dichotomy between scholarship and activism by insisting that life is shaped by law and law by life. Studying law and society, in this view, requires conceptualising society as inseparable from law, such that confronting prevailing social conditions demands active engagement with the communities alongside whom we study, while remaining attuned to their understandings and lived experiences of law. By disrupting both the ontological split between law and society and the epistemological divide between theory and action, investigación militante re-imagines the law and society scholar’s role and object of inquiry. It calls on us to adopt a radically different ethical and political stance in our collaborations with the communities with whom we co-produce knowledge.

3 Three investigadores/as militantes

At its core, investigación militante is both a political stance and a methodological approach, one that fuses activism with scholarly research. Over the past decades, numerous intellectuals, including those we focus on in this section, have contributed to its development, each bringing distinct political struggles, lived experiences and theoretical perspectives. Yet a closer examination reveals that investigación militante is far more than a participatory, bottom-up approach to social research. It entails a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between reality and knowledge – what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is produced, and how it can be mobilised within collective struggles.

Substantively, investigación militante offers an epistemological and ethical invitation to reconfigure the relationship between – and the content of – theory and practice. It shifts the entry point for social inquiry from decontextualised concerns and abstract assumptions to the realities and knowledges of communities and peoples. In so doing, it challenges assumed-universal theoretical and methodological frameworks, as well as the still-prevalent expectation that researchers maintain intellectual and political disconnection from their subjects of inquiry. For investigadores/as militantes, thinking-doing-living is part of a single continuum.

In what follows, we offer a succinct overview of the diverse and heterogeneous contributions of Fals Borda, Gonzalez and Rivera Cusicanqui – three figures central to the tradition of militant research, each with markedly distinct trajectories. Fals Borda completed his doctorate in the United States, a formation that shaped both the visibility and institutional reach of his academic and policy work. In contrast, Gonzalez and Rivera Cusicanqui remained intellectually grounded in Latin America, developing scholarship deeply attuned to local epistemologies. González’s pioneering interventions in Black feminism and Afro-diasporic thought have only recently begun to gain the international recognition they merit, while Rivera Cusicanqui has long pursued a path outside conventional academic hierarchies, privileging activism and autonomous forms of intellectual production.

Despite their differences, all three share a critical stance toward mainstream academia, shaped by their experiences as Majority World intellectuals subject to epistemic extraction. Rivera Cusicanqui has explicitly denounced this extractivist ‘political economy of knowledge’ in her critique of decolonial theorising conducted from elite Minority World institutions – what she calls a ‘small empire within an empire’ (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010). Gonzalez, for her part, went largely unrecognised as a scholar during her lifetime, and her work has only recently begun to be translated into English. Although Fals Borda achieved global recognition during his lifetime, he too consistently critiqued and resisted the intellectual colonialism of his European and North American peers, denouncing a geopolitics of knowledge that produced a ‘one-sided worldwide political system organised to favour the richer countries, where southern realities and facts may be unknown, disregarded or unilaterally exploited’ (Fals Borda and Mora-Osejo Reference Fals Borda and Mora-Osejo2003). Rather than seeking to reclaim the academic centre, these thinkers instead focused on remapping political and intellectual terrains in close collaboration with the communities at the heart of their work.

Despite their differences, all three share a critical stance toward mainstream academia, shaped by their experiences as Majority World intellectuals subjected to epistemic extraction. Rivera Cusicanqui has explicitly denounced this extractivist ‘political economy of knowledge’ in her critique of decolonial theorising conducted from elite Minority World institutions – what she calls a ‘small empire within an empire’ (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010). Gonzalez, for her part, went largely unrecognised as a scholar during her lifetime, and her work has only recently begun to be translated into English. Although Fals Borda achieved global recognition during his career, he too consistently challenged the intellectual colonialism of his European and North American peers, denouncing a geopolitics of knowledge that sustained a ‘one-sided worldwide political system organised to favour the richer countries, where southern realities and facts may be unknown, disregarded or unilaterally exploited’ (Fals Borda and Mora-Osejo Reference Fals Borda and Mora-Osejo2003). Rather than seeking to reclaim the academic centre, these thinkers worked to remap political and intellectual terrains in close collaboration with the communities at the heart of their research.

It is this shared refusal to occupy the academic centre, combined with their insistence on grounding knowledge production in lived experience and collective struggle, that informs our interest in the ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ (Barad Reference Barad2007) implications of their work. Through research practices that take seriously the entanglement between knowing and being, they invite us to reconsider how we apprehend, understand and act in the world. This orientation is not merely biographical but reflects a deliberate methodological stance – one we take as the starting point for exploring how their work re-imagines knowledge-making as an entangled, ethical and political practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Fals Borda played a pivotal role in shaping a mode of engaged social research that moved beyond narrow political affiliations and standard theoretical frameworks. A highly influential Colombian sociologist, public intellectual and political actor, his work emphasised the analytical and political necessity for researchers to directly engage with the communities they studied (Robles Lomeli and Rappaport Reference Robles Lomeli and Rappaport2018). Trained in sociology and anthropology, Fals Borda had an appreciation of social dynamics and inequalities, and the role of different regimes of representation and ways of knowing in social analysis. His academic formation, his political convictions and the broader historical conjuncture in Latin America led him to immerse himself in the realities of peasant and riverine communities, prompting a sustained critique of dominant academic models. Central to this engagement was a dual commitment: to empirically document the lived conditions of marginalised groups, and to draw epistemological and analytical insights from these communities themselves.

Ethnographic in orientation, Fals Borda’s work challenged prevailing standards of scientific objectivity and neutrality, even for anthropologists and other social scientists at the time. Participant observation, the core method of ethnography, was still conceived, in his words, as the job of ‘an individual who observes but who does not want to get dirty; who does not want to get involved in the processes they observe’ (Fals Borda and Brandão Reference Fals Borda and Brandão1986, p. 15). For Fals Borda, such detachment masked underlying methodological and teleological commitments, particularly among researchers claiming neutrality and impartiality. These stances, he argued, were often grounded in Eurocentric epistemological frameworks and ontologies – assumptions about knowledge and being that privileged detached observation over relational engagement and positivist inquiry over dialogical knowledge production.

Blending academic rigour with a deep appreciation for popular wisdom laid the groundwork for Fals Borda’s development of investigación acción participativa, or participatory action research (Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda2009). This approach calls on researchers and community members to act as co-investigators, fostering more grounded and generative understandings of local realities, aspirations and knowledge systems. In his essay How to Research Reality in Order to Transform It (1986), Fals Borda contended that involving communities directly in the research process produces new forms of knowledge – forms that can serve as powerful instruments for social transformation. Conventional social science theories and methods, in his view, either projected the interests of dominant elites or abstracted from sites of power without attending to local conditions and alternative epistemologies. Instead, popular science was needed: one that addressed the needs of oppressed classes and incorporated their understandings of the world and their conditions – without romanticising communities or overlooking entrenched power asymmetries (Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda2009, p. 270).

Sentir-pensar, or thinking-feeling, is one of Fals Borda’s most influential concepts, emerging directly from his understanding of research as a deeply committed praxis (Moncayo Reference Moncayo2009). During his fieldwork along the Magdalena River in Colombia, Fals Borda observed how peasants and fishing folk in the region self-identified as ‘turtle-people’ (hombres/mujeres-hicotea), a reference to their amphibious existence. Having survived for generations in this flood-prone landscape, they had learned to live both on land and in water. But their amphibiousness was more than ecological – it was also epistemic and affective. It shaped how they thought and felt, suffered and resisted landowner oppression and lamented their hardships while embracing life’s pleasures. As seres senti-pensantes – thinking-feeling beings – they defied the categorical divisions of Western social science. Their lives, like those of many across Latin America, the Caribbean and the Majority World, refused the dichotomies that underpin dominant modes of knowledge production.

The concept of sentir-pensar, along with other theoretical insights emerging from Fals Borda’s fieldwork and historical research, deepened his commitment to honouring the self-understandings and struggles of peasant and fishing communities (Escobar Reference Escobar2016). It also underpinned his call for a research practice that brings personal and communal experiences – both affective and embodied – into a process of co-theorisation. For this reason – and even as he distanced himself from conventional forms of activist research aligned with party politics and their agendas (Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda2009, p. 255) – his work helped to pioneer a distinctive model of investigación militante: a form of inquiry rooted in the struggles, needs and knowledges of the communities it engages.

From the perspective advanced by Fals Borda, legal institutions and norms are not merely components of a societal superstructure. They are also woven into the emotional and intellectual economies of individuals and communities – integral to a complex social fabric that resists simplistic dichotomies. Struggling against repressive laws while simultaneously nurturing the enactment of community-based normativities became one of Fals Borda’s long-standing political commitments. He was eventually able to give concrete institutional form to this project through his role as an elected member of the Colombian Constitutional Assembly, which drafted the 1991 Constitution – widely regarded as the most democratic and progressive constitutional text in over two centuries of republican history. Fals Borda is still remembered for his defence of peasants’, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian collective rights in the Assembly, including his advocacy for legal pluralism and for communities’ territorial and political autonomy (Ángel Reference Ángel2008).

Echoing Fals Borda’s commitment to producing knowledge in support of social movements and struggles defined on their own terms, the philosopher, anthropologist and intellectual Lélia Gonzalez made groundbreaking contributions to both Black and feminist movements in Brazil and beyond. Early on, she exposed the entanglements of racism, sexism and classism (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1984), anticipating intersectional debates that would later become central to critical and feminist theory and praxis (Collins Reference Collins2019). Raised in poverty as one of eighteen children, with a mother of Indigenous descent and a Black father, Gonzalez was the only sibling to pursue education beyond primary school (Sindicato dos Escritores do Rio de Janeiro 1988/2023). Her personal experience of cultural whitening – particularly through formal education – deeply informed her critique of the gendered ideology of racial democracy, which remained dominant in Brazil and much of Latin America and the Caribbean. At the core of her intellectual and political work was a commitment to decolonising Black and Indigenous experiences, knowledges and histories across the Americas (Rios Reference Rios2019). Gonzalez pursued this project across academic, institutional and autonomous political spaces.

As a university professor who also taught in public parks and community spaces, Gonzalez consistently called for the decolonisation of the social sciences. In the 1980s, she co-founded the national Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement) and Nzinga – Coletivo de Mulheres Negras (Black Women’s Collective) in Rio de Janeiro, and was also an active member of the Escola de Samba Quilombo. Through these initiatives, Gonzalez disrupted conventional boundaries between politics and culture, insisting that cultural practices and artefacts are themselves instruments of political struggle. She also engaged in institutional politics, running twice for the House of Representatives (in 1982 and 1986) with leftist parties and collaborating with the Black caucus during the drafting of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution – an emblematic moment of democratic renewal following the end of a brutal military dictatorship (1964–85).

González’s activism and scholarship consistently crossed disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Deeply engaged in the transnational feminist mobilisations of the 1980s, she remained sharply critical of feminism’s Eurocentrism and what she termed a pervasive racism ‘by omission’. In response, Gonzalez called for an ‘afrolatinamerican feminism’ (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988b) grounded in the lived experiences of Afro-descendant and Indigenous women across the Americas. Drawing on psychoanalysis, anthropology and history, she developed the concept of Améfrica Ladina to describe the spaces of resistance, adaptation and reinterpretation forged by Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples in opposition to both European coloniality and US imperialism. As she explained, amefricanidade refers to ‘the possibility of rescuing a specific unit historically forged within different societies, which have formed in a certain part of the world … America, as an ethnographic reference system, is our creation, and our ancestors’ (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988a, p. 77).

One of González’s most enduring contributions to investigación militante – resonant with Fals Borda’s commitment to unearthing new onto-epistemic realities, and new ways of being and knowing that emerge when the boundary between theory and practice is dissolved – is her notion of amefricanidade. This politico-cultural category challenges the framing of the Americas as solely a legal-political invention of European colonial modernity. Instead, González’s amefricanidade situates the Afrocentric ‘creative explosion’ at the heart of the region, foregrounding the reinvention of life in the diaspora as a constitutive force. As she writes, ‘it was within the enslaved community that political-cultural forms of resistance developed, which today allow us to continue a centuries-long struggle for liberation’ (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez1988a, p. 78).

Speaking and writing in a language she called Pretuguês, an Africanised form of Portuguese, Gonzalez practised anticolonial and anti-racist resistance in both thought and action, never pausing to ask whether the two should be separated. Her scholarship was inseparable from her life: forged in the struggle against the military dictatorship, the emergence of new social movements, the transnational mobilisation of feminists and the fight against the myth of racial democracy and whitening ideology in Brazil and other post-colonial contexts. In this understanding, law was a permanent field of struggle where openings had to be created for alternative racial and gender realities – including amefricanidade – to emerge. And Pretuguês was the language to pursue this project, as Thula Pires reminds us: ‘In Pretuguês, what is contested is not the possibility of being included (always in a controlled manner) in the established notion of a legal subject, but rather the production of law, the State, and politics from the zone of non-being and on its own terms.’ (Pires Reference Pires2019, p. 71).

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s work has likewise sought to produce knowledge rooted in and emerging from, the processes of resistance of marginalised communities. A Bolivian sociologist, historian and activist of Aymara origin, Rivera Cusicanqui was imprisoned in Bolivia and later exiled to Mexico, Colombia and Argentina during the 1970s for her involvement in the Katarista Indigenous movement (Paige Reference Paige2020). During her imprisonment and exile, she wrote Oprimidos, pero no Vencidos: Luchas del Campesinado Aymara y Qhechwa de Bolivia: 1900–1980 (Reference Rivera Cusicanqui1984/2010), now regarded as a classic of Latin American political thought. In this work, she challenged traditional Left politics for their failure to recognise Indigenous peoples as full political actors. Drawing on her lived experience in Indigenous union organising and documenting the twentieth-century struggles of Aymara and Qhechwa peasants, Rivera Cusicanqui foregrounded ‘the propositions of sovereignty, and full and decolonised citizenship’ embedded in popular and Indigenous demands. Her aim was to trace the contours of a ‘nation from below’ emerging from Indigenous movements – one that resisted a political system intent on reducing them to a ‘minority’ (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, pp. 66–68).

In 1983, Rivera Cusicanqui co-founded the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA) (Criales and Condoreno Reference Criales and Condoreno2016), an initiative dedicated to documenting Indigenous participation in colonial-era revolts through decolonial methodologies, particularly oral tradition (Cacopardo Reference Cacopardo2018). The Taller’s collective approach to knowledge production endures today in El Colectivo, a self-organised group for cultural action and critique based in La Paz, Bolivia, co-founded with students at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.

Over the years, Rivera Cusicanqui has continued to interrogate the colonial encounter, turning to the Aymara language to articulate the enduring condition it has produced. Her concept of ch’ixi, meaning ‘grey’ in Aymara, captures a world marked by ambiguity and simultaneity. Ch’ixi names the co-existence of elements that remain distinct: it is to be and not be at the same time. In her reading, ch’ixi expresses the experience of Indigenous peoples as both traditional and modern, without collapsing into contradiction or the sense of being split. It describes a broader colonial condition that shapes societies formed by both ancestral and contemporary forces, particularly resonant in Latin America and the Caribbean, though not exclusive to them. Like Fals Borda’s senti-pensar and Gonzalez’s amefricanidade, ch’ixi is both an epistemological framework and an ontological stance: an invitation ‘to inhabit contradiction without succumbing to collective schizophrenia’ (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2018, p. 55).

Rivera Cusicanqui locates in mestizo identity – her own – a potent ambivalence, which she describes as the pä chuyma condition: ‘having the soul divided by two mandates that are impossible to fulfil’ (Bacca Reference Bacca2018). As mestizos, living with divided souls in a permanent ‘double bind’, suspended between two worlds that contradict yet sustain one another, ‘we, who are ch’ixis, exist’, she affirms. This is a claim to a place for those ‘who are neither Indigenous nor Europeans, and who are both at the same time’ (Cacopardo Reference Cacopardo2018, p. 183). Rejecting purist logics and all forms of essentialism, Rivera Cusicanqui situates her research in the service of constructing another ch’ixi world – one that draws from the best of both modernity and tradition, where opposites co-exist without hierarchy.

Deeply committed to the struggles of Aymara, Qhechwa and Amazonian Indigenous peoples, Rivera Cusicanqui’s historical and grass-roots work recovers memory and uncovers new sources of knowledge long silenced by colonial expansion and state-centric legal regimes (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2018). This is not a nostalgic effort to rescue a lost tradition. Rather, it is a collective endeavour to generate new political and legal spaces capable of assembling alternative futures – futures grounded in horizontality as a transversal principle. These emergent intellectual and material geographies aim to create meeting grounds between academic and other ways of knowing, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, women and men and humans and more-than-humans.

4 Thinking-doing-living law and society

Our account of Fals Borda, Gonzalez and Rivera Cusicanqui reveals the depth and scope of investigación militante, as illuminated by their distinct yet converging trajectories. Each engages different social groups, adopts varied modes of collaboration and articulates diverse horizons of empowerment – always grounded in the communities’ own understandings of themselves and the world. Their work also foregrounds the historical specificity of the social struggles they accompany. Taken together, their contributions underscore the inseparability of research and activism, showing how knowledge produced through these encounters can be both theoretically rigorous and practically transformative in the pursuit of social justice. Moreover, they point to the need for progressive, self-reflexive legal action – distinct from other activist legal practices yet resonant with contemporary efforts to decolonise knowledge and institutions – to be rooted not only in attentiveness to community interests but also in communities’ own epistemological and ontological frameworks.

Dismantling the recurring dichotomies that characterise Western thought and legality – and that continue to frame knowledge production as something external to, and detached from, lived realities – concepts such as sentir-pensar, amefricanidade and ch’ixi challenge entrenched configurations of power and the epistemological and ontological frameworks that sustain them. In this analysis, law is approached as structuring social relations from within. Still broadly aligned with a Marxist sensibility, while remaining sharply critical of the whiteness and Eurocentrism of that framework, law, viewed through these conceptual lenses, appears less as a neutral arbiter and more as an expression of power – frequently serving, as Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993) suggests, a bourgeois conception of history.

For Fals Borda, Gonzalez, Rivera Cusicanqui and other investigadores/as militantes, this positioning of law should not imply, again, its detached operation. Law is embedded in patterns of land maldistribution and exploitative labour relationships, racial disparities and erasures and in the historical marginalisation of peasant, Black, Indigenous and mestizo communities and their ways of knowing and being. Yet law can also be imagined and produced otherwise, by attending to the struggles of those historically placed in the ‘zone of non-being’ (Pires Reference Pires2019), articulated in Pretuguês and with an awareness of their inherent ch’ixi quality.

We now turn to how these ideas might inform a different way of thinking, doing and living law and society. Seeking epistemological, political and ethical lessons, this exploration leads us to articulate three ‘commitments’, as Fals Borda would describe them, to guide law and society scholarship (Fals Borda and Brandão Reference Fals Borda and Brandão1986, pp. 15–16). First, by centring subaltern people’s lived experiences within collective forms of knowledge production (a methodological commitment) and embracing the goal of building people’s power beyond the state (a political commitment), investigación militante invites us to attend to the transformative legalities that may emerge in this process. Following from this, it also calls for an ongoing examination of our complicity in sustaining hegemonic legalities and for active support for the emergence of alternative normativities – those attuned to the experiences and visions of communities on the ground (an ethical commitment). Together, these commitments distinguish investigación militante from other forms of legal activism, grounding legal action in community-driven epistemologies, ontologies and political horizons. They invite law and society scholarship to cultivate a form of critique rooted in co-constructed practices and knowledges, oriented toward transformative social change.