Introduction
On 3 April 2026, within the framework of the Séminaires Boussoles at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Université catholique de Louvain, Nina Bries Silva and I reflected on decolonial approaches to law and on what it means to “decentre” legal research. The seminar invited us to revisit the epistemological compasses that orient legal scholarship and to ask whether the dominant coordinates of legal knowledge still suffice. This reflection draws from my intervention that focused on the politics of legal knowledge and on the methodological implications of taking the margins as sites of theory rather than merely a field of observation, drawing on my fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on interactions between actors involved in the litigation of mass atrocities.
Where does legal knowledge speak?
In its ordinary meaning, to decentre is to shift the centre, to move away from a central point of view to adopt other perspectives. It means refusing to allow a single logic or a single framework to occupy the core of the analysis. Dominant legal scholarship still too often speaks from a “centre” that presents itself as universal while remaining historically, geographically, and politically situated.[1] To decentre legal research is therefore to ask a more unsettling question: from where does legal knowledge speak when it claims to define what counts as law, what qualifies as a source, which categories are valid, and what may be presented as universal?
This is the starting point of a decolonial critique of law. The problem is not universality as such. The problem is the historical “universalization” of a particular legal experience shaped by the modern European state, by formal hierarchies of sources, by statist understandings of norm production, and by distinctions between law and society too often treated as natural rather than contingent.
Decolonial approaches matter because they show that the modern legal order cannot be detached from the history of colonial domination and its epistemic afterlives. Some regions of the world have long been treated as places where concepts are produced, while others were assigned the role of supplying facts, cases, crises, or raw empirical material. In that unequal division of intellectual legal labour, theory remained concentrated in the “centre” while the “periphery” was expected to provide experience.
Furthermore, decentring legal research is not exhausted by citing more African authors or including more “African case studies” in existing frameworks, necessary as that may be. The deeper task is to question why some legal experiences have been elevated into models of general validity while others have been framed as deviations, delays, or deficient versions of law. Decentring, then, does not merely add margins to the centre.[2] It displaces the very site from which the general is defined.
Decentring legal categories, sources, and temporalities
First, dominant legal categories do not always capture how injustice is lived, named, and contested in socially plural contexts. Concepts such as victimhood, responsibility, evidence, legitimacy, reparation, or even justice itself may carry very different practical meanings depending on the actors involved and the institutional setting in which they are invoked. My fieldwork in eastern DRC shows that trajectories of justice in relation to mass crimes do not emerge from a simple encounter between state law and facts. They are shaped through interactions among magistrates, military auditors, lawyers, victims’ groups, civil society organisations, community intermediaries, local authorities, and international actors. Justice appears there as a negotiated and contested social-legal process rather than as the mechanical application of pre-existing norms.
Second, decentring requires an expanded understanding of legal sources. Texts, judgments, and doctrinal materials remain indispensable. But they do not exhaust the intelligibility of law, especially in contexts marked by institutional fragmentation and normative pluralism.[3] Such contexts require to take into account other materials such as narratives, community practices, and socially situated understandings of harm, sanction, and repair. The point is not to dissolve law into the social. It is to recognise that law can only be fully understood if one also studies the sites where it is translated, mediated, appropriated, and resisted.
Third, decentring also means breaking with homogeneous understandings of legal time (temporalities). Postcolonial and post-conflict societies do not inhabit a single linear temporality moving neatly from rupture to transition to institutional stabilisation. In the Congolese case, contemporary violence is entangled with colonial legacies, unfinished reforms, repeated conflict, competing normative orders, and enduring institutional fragility. The legal present is shaped by overlapping colonial, postcolonial, customary, international, state, and transitional temporalities. A decentred legal method must therefore take seriously these layered and non-linear times of law.
Reflexivity and epistemic justice
No serious discussion of decentring can avoid the issue of positionality.[4] No researcher speaks from nowhere. Every legal inquiry is situated within languages, institutions, disciplinary traditions, and structures of validation. What has differed historically is not whether scholarship is situated, but which positions have been allowed to pass as universal and which have been reduced to particularity. Reflexivity, on this view, is not autobiographical indulgence. It is a methodological obligation.
This leads directly to the question of epistemic justice. Too often, actors on the ground are asked to provide data but not concepts. Victims, community intermediaries, local practitioners, and scholars from the contexts under study often produce sophisticated distinctions and diagnoses,[5] yet their contributions are absorbed as information rather than recognised as theory. This is a central form of epistemic injustice: here, experience; there, theory. Here, terrain; there, legitimate interpretation. A truly decolonial legal method must break that hierarchy and accept that those who live law are also capable of producing theory about it.
Beyond inclusion
Ultimately, the aim of decentring legal research is not to render the centre merely more accommodating. Rather, it is to challenge the epistemic monopoly through which certain sites of knowledge production have claimed the authority to define what counts as law, science, and universality. In this sense, decentring calls into question the privilege of the centre to set the very terms of legality and legitimate knowledge. It therefore entails a reconfiguration of the centre of gravity of legal scholarship itself. Such a transformation begins when places long treated as peripheral are recognised not simply as objects of inquiry, but as sites from which law may be conceptualised, critiqued, and reconstructed.
[1] See Thomas Duve, ‘What Is Global Legal History?’ (2020) 8 Comparative Legal History 73 <https://doi.org/10.1080/2049677X.2020.1830488>.
[2] See Daha Chérif Ba, El Hadji Amadou Ba Ndiaye and Mamadou Yéro Baldé, Problématique des marges ou actualité du décentrement dans la production des savoirs scientifiques: Mélanges offerts au Professeur titulaire Ousseynou Faye – Tome 1 : Savoirs, cultures et identités au miroir de l’histoire d’Afrique (l’Harmattan 2026).
[3] See David Arbulu Collazos, ‘IX. Le décentrement juridique au Pérou. Une approche transculturelle du pluralisme juridique’ Décentrement(s) (Hermann 2024) 119-120 <https://doi.org/10.3917/herm.galle.2024.01.0119>.
[4] On positionality, see Sarah MH Nouwen, ‘’As You Set out for Ithaka’ : Practical, Epistemological, Ethical, and Existential Questions about Socio-Legal Empirical Research in Conflict’ (2014) 27 Leiden Journal of International Law 227, 226–260 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S092215651300071X>.
[5] See Aymar Nyenyezi and others, ‘Les Invisibles Dans La Production Du Savoir Scientifique’ in Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka and others (eds), La Série Bukavu: Vers une décolonisation de la recherche (Presses Universitaires de Louvain (Louvain la Neuve), 2019).
