Announcement Calenda 1 367 625
Announcement Calenda 1 367 625 (extracts)
In May 2027, the DeCoLa program of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law will hold the fourth edition of its decolonial comparative law workshop series in Cameroon. Organized in partnership with the Afric'Avenir Foundation, this edition aims to rethink the divide between the formal and informal economy through a decolonial comparative legal approach. It also aims to contribute to the consolidation of a decolonial comparative law community across the African continent and beyond.
This call is part of a series of workshops on decolonial comparative law. Following workshops on methodology (Johannesburg/online 2020), pre-colonial law (Oxford 2022) and property (Brasília 2024), this fourth workshop will examine decolonial comparative approaches to the informal and formal economy.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Informal cross-border trade, including trade carried out by peoples transcending state borders, regardless of its legality under national legislation.
- Local and digital currencies created or used for non-colonial purposes.
- Indigenous and customary economies, both urban and rural, including their own non-colonial value systems, exchange practices and monetary forms.
- Ecofeminist, pastoralist and intentional communities (e.g. ZADs in France), as well as pre-colonial or other traditional modes of value creation (regardless of the actual historical roots of the practice).
- Labor rights in informal work, including economic dependence within and beyond the employer-employee relationship, conflict resolution practices and collective organization (e.g. unions, associations, cooperatives).
- Microcredit, alternative securities and property rights as mechanisms for accessing capital.
- The (non-)legal recognition of informal workers.
- Migration and the (in)formal economy.
- Informal work at the heart of globalization.
- Digital businesses and the linking of informal workers via digital platforms (e.g. Instagram/TikTok, Yango/Uber).
- State-imposed constraints on local economic sovereignty, including the spatial distribution and regulation of formal and informal economic activities.
- The blurred boundaries between formal and informal economies: workers operating in both contexts (e.g. secondary jobs for civil servants; 'entrepreneurs' or 'débrouillard.e.s').
If your research does not fit any of these themes, we still encourage you to submit a proposal. Generally speaking, we invite authors to analyze and destabilize coloniality by examining, in a comparative way, the economic and legal imaginaries through which communities (generally, but not necessarily, in the South) define, practice or refuse to practice an economy beyond (or in spite of) coloniality.
