Reflexive Globalisation and the Law Archives

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Reflexive Globalisation and the Law

In October 2025, a new Centre for Advanced Studies was established at the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Law Faculty. Named “Reflexive Globalisation and the Law: Colonial Legacies and their Implications in the 21st Century” (RefLex), the Centre explores the premise that the globalisation of law and legal discourse has entered a reflexive phase: one in which law and knowledge production about law are less and less one-directional exports from or within the Global North but rather dynamic, multidirectional exchanges that confront colonial legacies, epistemic hierarchies, and enduring asymmetries of power. This blog symposium, co-edited by Philipp Dann, Florian Jeßberger, and Kalika Mehta, aims to present and extend these interactions to a broader, accessible dialogue with a wider community beyond the university setting. Featuring contributions from a range of different disciplines and regions, the symposium serves as a public prelude to its official launch, which can be watched live here.

13 February 2026

Julia Eckert

Reflexive Law as Anti-Colonial Practice

The adoption of the discourse of decoloniality by the Hindu right in India, as well as by other ethnonationalist governments around the world, points to the problem that any decolonial project faces: Who is to define which normative alternatives we should appeal to when seeking to rid concepts and institutions of their colonial legacies? This brings us to the underlying question: What is the purpose of reflecting on colonial legacies in law?

Peer Zumbansen

Disaster Law as Methodology

The pandemic’s disruption of offline commerce revealed how global value chains are bound up with learnt dependency, instant gratification, and an extractivist, always-on economic culture. Recent modern slavery and global value chains legislation signals political awareness, yet its legal impact remains largely symbolic, prioritising disclosure over change. The real crisis is not disruption but the normalisation of persistent exploitation inherent to global value chains. Lawyers must expose law’s role in rendering this ongoing violence as normal.

12 February 2026

Johannes Socher, Satang Nabaneh, Abdou Khadre Diop, Adem Abebe, Sami Abdelhalim Saeed

Towards an Endogenous African Constitutionalism

African constitutionalism stands at a pivotal moment in its evolution. After more than six decades of independence for most African countries, it has become imperative to examine the nature, foundations, legitimacy, and institutional architecture of the constitutional systems governing the countries making up the continent. Drawing on our different fields of research, we propose to explore pathways towards a truly endogenous constitutionalism, rooted in Africa’s socio-political, cultural, economic, and historical realities.

Theunis Roux

Liberal Constitutionalism in the Post-Colony

Liberal constitutionalism is much maligned today as, at best, a culturally contingent approach to governance, and, at worst, epistemically hubristic. Concepts like the rule of law and the separation of powers, far from expressing universal truths, are said to be inseparably tied to the European Enlightenment. Their continued presence in constitutions around the world is less an indication of their durability and more a reflection of their current status as conceptual driftwood deposited at the high-water mark of Western hegemony. But is this an accurate account of liberal constitutionalism and does it really square with our understanding of the way legal concepts are recycled between North and South?

11 February 2026

RefLex

Launch Event of the RefLex Centre for Advanced Studies

Join us for the launch of the RefLex Centre, exploring how globalisation reshapes law, justice, and core legal concepts across disciplines. The event will feature an introduction by RefLex Directors Philipp Dann and Florian Jeßberger, a keynote lecture by Dipesh Chakrabarty, and a panel discussion with Isabella Aboderin (University of Bristol), Natalia Ángel Cabo (Constitutional Court of Colombia), Sebastian Conrad (FU Berlin), John-Mark Iyi (University of the Western Cape), and Kalika Mehta (RefLex). The event will be broadcast live here.

Kalika Mehta

International Criminal Law of “the West”?

The critique of international criminal law as “Eurocentric” or “Western-dominated,” however historically, politically, and analytically valid and necessary, may have reached the limits of its explanatory power. The following passages reflect on the question of whether continuing to frame the problems of international criminal law primarily through a Eurocentrism/West-dominated lens obscures more than it reveals, and whether we should move towards extending our critical analytical frameworks in the interests of the global majority.

Oumar Ba

International Law and the Imperial Ordering of the International

International law is an ordering language. It is predicated upon an imperial, western-centric, and hierarchical structure. It is a language of domination, of exclusion, of differentiated inclusion, but also of promise. The language of international law, which the Global South uses and appeals to, does not simply hold the promise of rectification; it also reproduces the problems it is supposed to help solve. This short reflection addresses such contradictions and how reflexivity in international law could help mitigate them.

10 February 2026

Miriam Saage-Maaß

(Il)legalising the Destruction of the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is vital for the ecology and agriculture of the South American continent as well as for the world’s climate. At the same time, deforestation in the Amazon is so severe that some scientists see the world’s largest rainforest as close to irreversible “tipping points”. This article will look at cattle supply chains from the Amazon to global markets and will show how law plays an ambiguous role with respect to the Amazon.

Alejandra Ancheita

Who Decides, Who Pays, Who is Sacrificed

The energy transition has become a central normative axis of global climate action. However, the acceleration of renewable energy, frequently presented as inherently positive, is not politically neutral. On the contrary, it unfolds asymmetrically across territories marked by deep historical power imbalances, particularly in the Global South. This article puts forward the proposition that a truly reflexive energy transition necessarily requires not only recognising harms and measuring impacts but also dismantling entrenched forms of control, authority, and epistemic hierarchy within the governance of the transition itself.

09 February 2026

Amadou Korbinian Sow

Method in the Madness

In this article, I will critique the project of a general theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry using the figure of reflexivity. I understand critique here as a procedure that seeks to ceaselessly subdivide its object and thereby complicate it. This specific conception of critique is restless and – crucially – self-reflexive. It must carry on endlessly and thereby be brought to bear against every distinction it has itself drawn. Against a generalised theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry, I will contrast an historically unsettled concept of epistemology.

Sebastian Conrad

On Eurocentrism

Over roughly the past decade and a half, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have undergone what is often described as a “global turn.” This shift starts from a historical insight into the disciplines themselves. As they are institutionalized today across universities worldwide, the modern disciplines largely took shape in nineteenth-century Europe and continue to bear the imprint of that moment of origin. Two features are particularly consequential. First, their close entanglement with the nation-state has fostered a predominantly national framing of research questions, archives, and narratives. Second, they have been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions that were deeply embedded in an age marked by imperial expansion and European global hegemony.

06 February 2026

Isabella Aboderin

RefLex and the Possibility of Transformative “North-South” Research Collaborations

On 20 November 2024, Humboldt University of Berlin became a signatory to the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations. This piece introduces the key argument of the Africa Charter, posits its relevance as a benchmark for RefLex, a new Centre for Advanced Studies at HU, and proposes a set of queries to guide its operationalisation within the Institute and possibly beyond in similar “North-South” initiatives. I offer these reflections drawing on my close involvement in the development of the intellectual underpinnings of the Africa Charter.

Jeanette Ehrmann

The Code Noir as an Archive of Resistance

What does it mean to examine political modernity from below, specifically from the position of the enslaved person – not as a metaphor or a footnote, but as a lens for analyzing foundational political and legal concepts? I argue that foregrounding the position of the enslaved provides a productive point of departure for understanding how colonial and racial epistemologies, imaginaries, and institutions have shaped core Western concepts, such as democracy and the rule of law.

05 February 2026

Philipp Dann, Florian Jeßberger

Reflexive Globalisation, Law and Placemaking

Students demand the decolonization of curricula. Civil society debates the presentation of Non-Western artefacts and entangled histories in museums across the world. European governments apologize for slavery and genocidal killings, while former colonies request reparations, and the Indian legislature decolonizes the Indian Penal Code. The legacies of colonialism and empire are debated everywhere these days. We propose that these developments signal a new phase in the dynamics of globalisation.

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