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Introduction to dossier. Mining extractivism in Latin America: The juridification of environmental conflicts

While teachers are obliged to report and investigate incidents of bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment in Swedish schools, research suggests that they sometimes struggle to decide which incidents to report. In this study, we investigate Swedish schoolteachers' reflections on dealing with bullying, harassment, and degrading treatment, and on balancing their pedagogical work with juridical demands to report. The study is based on qualitative interviews conducted with teachers at three comprehensive schools in Sweden, which were analysed in relation to Bronfenbrenner's social-ecological framework. The findings demonstrate that teachers make judgement calls regarding which incidents to report and that these influence and are influenced by micro-, meso-, exo-, macro- and chronosystem factors. The findings also suggest that increasing demands for professional accountability negatively affect the professional responsibility of teachers and may lead to them making judgement calls that are not always in the best interests of the children for whom they have responsibility.

The social licence to operate (SLO) concept is little developed in the academic literature so far. Deployment of the term was made by the United National (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the UN 'Protect, Respect and Remedy' Framework, which apply SLO as an argument for responsible business conduct, connecting to social expectations and bridging to public regulation. This UN guidance has had a significant bearing on how public regulators seek to influence business conduct beyond Human Rights to broader Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concerns. Drawing on examples of such public regulatory governance, this article explores and explains developments towards a juridification of CSR entailing efforts by public regulators to reach beyond jurisdictional and territorial limitations of conventional public law to address adverse effects of transnational economic activity. Through analysis of an expansion of law into the normative framing of what constitutes responsible business conduct, we demonstrate a process of juridification entailing a legal framing of social expectations of companies, a proliferation of law into the field of business ethics, and an increased regulation by law of social actors or processes.

PurposeThis paper aims to propose a research agenda towards a holistic, grounded and flexible approach to cultural heritage that can address social challenges and transformations in the context of place. It critiques the dominant/hegemonic cultural heritage narratives, deriving from juridification and calls for a grounded approach in the way cultural heritage is framed and experienced.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is conceptual, focusing on the need to open a line of enquiry into the relationship between legal texts, cultural heritage narratives and social challenges and transformations. It follows the letter of the international conventions on cultural heritage against the worked example of the medieval town of Rhodes in Greece.FindingsThe paper sets the relevant research priorities for the investigation of the effective relationship between cultural heritage and social challenges in the context of place, and further stretches the need to evaluate the role of legal and regulatory texts to that effect.Originality/valueThe paper identifies new priorities for thinking about the effects of juridification/the law, cultural heritage and social challenges/transformations in a place-specific context. It seeks to open new avenues of scientific explorations and new interdisciplinary dialogues between a variety of disciplines that are relevant to the way a place engages and addresses social challenges and transformations.

In 2016, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as the first water body in Latin America to have its own rights. This article interrogates the historical roots of the judicial decision declaring the river a rights holder. Drawing on my long-term engagement with social organizations as an activist, lawyer, and then researcher, I illuminate the influence of Black people from the Atrato River in the transformation of law in at least three areas: ethnic territorial rights, transitional justice, and river rights. To do so, I combine interdisciplinary theoretical critique with socio-legal research using community-based and autoethnographic approaches to trace the community methods and historical practices of political contestation deployed along the rivers. Thus, I conceptualize how an organic and distinctive style of claiming and creating rights has been constructed in the basin. Moreover, by listening to the voices of the riverine representatives, I argue that the river is a nonhuman existence that has participated in the processes of rights-making in conjunction with local communities and a broader mosaic of allied actors. However, I also outline how legal systems still function to overlook crucial socio-legal claims of marginalized and resistant communities.

This article analyzes how the indigenous community of Capulálpam defended its territorial rights by filing an injunction before a federal court to invalidate the mining concessions that the government authorized without free, prior and informed consultation. The mining companies, the court and the federal government sought to undermine rights to indigenous community identity; the mining companies argued that they had private property and land concessions, whereas the government defended the nation's sovereignty over the subsoil. For its part, the community relied on ancestral institutions, community law and its status as an indigenous Zapotec agrarian community with communal ownership and possession of land. While there has been a process of juridification of politics globally, in Capulálpam a process of community juridification took place that allowed it to reconstruct its own law, creating principles, norms and rights in relation to the colonialism and capitalism that impacted it. Methodologically, participant observation and the mapping of the injunction trial through information compiled in the community's archive stand out. It is concluded that community legal arguments undermined the federal laws of access to the subsoil as the injunction became based on the domestication of multiple legal regimes and on concepts and symbols of legal representation, territory, communal property and the subsoil itself.

Abstract Juridification of maternal health care is on the rise globally, but little is known about its manifestations in resource constrained settings in sub-Saharan Africa. The Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response (MPDSR) system is implemented in Ethiopia to record and review all maternal and perinatal deaths, but underreporting of deaths remains a major implementation challenge. Fear of blame and malpractice litigation among health workers are important factors in underreporting, suggestive of an increased juridification of birth care. By taking MPDSR implementation as an entry point, this article aims to explore the manifestations of juridification of birth care in Ethiopia. Based on multi-sited fieldwork involving interviews, document analysis and observations at different levels of the Ethiopian health system, we explore responses to maternal deaths at various levels of the health system. We found an increasing public notion of maternal deaths being caused by malpractice, and a tendency to perceive the juridical system as the only channel to claim accountability for maternal deaths. Conflicts over legal responsibility for deaths influenced birth care provision. Both health workers and health bureaucrats strived to balance conflicting concerns related to the MPDSR system: reporting all deaths vs revealing failures in service provision. This dilemma encouraged the development of strategies to avoid personalized accountability for deaths. In this context, increased juridification impacted both care and reporting practices. Our study demonstrates the need to create a system that secures legal protection of health professionals reporting maternal deaths as prescribed and provides the public with mechanisms to claim accountability and high-quality birth care services.

In the 1970s, both Denmark and Norway passed abortion legislation that is still the basis for the regulation of abortion in these countries. The legislation was fairly liberal with abortion on demand until 12 weeks of gestation and a permission system for later abortions. This article provides a brief history of the developments leading up to these political compromises and an analysis of the reasons why they have proved remarkably stable. It ends by looking at some factors that may now destabilize 50 years of stable compromise about abortion.

In Argentina, lithium mining areas coincide mostly with ancestral territories inhabited by indigenous peoples. The presence of such communities involves rights to autonomy and self-determination that easily come into tension with the interests of the state and the various companies operating in the territory. In this article, we analyze the strategies deployed by indigenous actors in the face of non-compliance with constitutionally-recognized rights. Based on a study conducted in the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc between 2009 and 2019, we show that in the face of unfulfilled constitutional rights, indigenous communities have deployed a cumulative and complementary strategy based on their right to self-determination. The analysis and information presented in this paper is derived from two data collection techniques: the analysis and systematization of primary and secondary documents and in-depth interviews with actors in the territory. It is concluded that in a clear context of juridification, the indigenous communities used a combination of judicial-legal action, direct action and community reinterpretation in order to demand their rights to decide respect for their territory, their ways of life and production, and their own subsistence as a community.

Globalization has been made responsible for a variety of (re)invented traditions with a trend toward a new religious foundation in and of societies. With Islamic proselytism having gone global, it may resemble religious resistance to the status quo, when pious Muslims instigate homogenizing daʿwa activities and attempt to endow them with moral obligations and normative superstructure. The proliferation of standards and fledgling processes of ideological framing are traceable in what is called fiqh al-daʿwa, which includes general theorizing and ostensibly legal reasoning on daʿwa. In reality, it is more of a missionary ideology given weight by being clothed in Islamic legal terminology. This paper investigates the fiqh of daʿwa in its global setting, with an emphasis on its radical Islamist articulations. It does so by examining fiqh al-daʿwa's legally, or rather ideologically and morally, charged treatises. In this way, the article reconstructs the genealogy of this rather new genre, as well as its social composition, its ideational grounding, and its normative potential. The condensed forms and derivatives of fiqh of daʿwa will be documented by means of certain rules, methods, and strategies of Islamist ideologues and organizations, particularly the post-Huḍaybī Muslim Brotherhood.1