Post-colonial Theories and Law

This special issue on „Post-colonial Theories and Law“ is the result of a cooperation between the journals „Kritische Justiz“ and „Verfassung und Recht in Übersee / Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America“. Parallel issues of the two journals inquire into the implications of post-colonial theories for law and jurisprudence. These theories have their disciplinary roots mostly in the Cultural Studies of Anglo-Saxon countries, from whence they only recently and only slowly permeated into German science as a transdisciplinary field of literature, cultural studies, social sciences and history. 1 To date, however, they have received little attention in German legal scholarship. This special issue hopes to help rectify this situation.

implication of colonial knowledge, and thus also the role sciences played in colonial expansion. Specifically, analysis focuses on the epistemology, philosophy, ethnology, geography, anthropology, linguistics and the jurisprudence which has developed around the colonial centre and which formed an integral part of colonial conquest and rule.
Secondly, post-colonial theories investigate the construction of individual and collective identities under conditions of colonial inequality. The "objects of investigation" are by no means only the colonized people, to whom the colonizers ascribe negative or exotic attributes. Particularly in colonial constellations, which by definition assume there are those who govern and those who are governed, attributions are always binary in structure. Thus, the colonizers always simultaneously define their own identity as the reverse characteristic when labelling the "others" as foreign (civilized/barbaric, hardworking/lazy, rational/emotional, feminine/masculine, progressive/primitive, cultivated/savage, developed/undeveloped etc.). The attendant consequences for the self-perception of the colonial centre are the third focus of post-colonial theories. This focus is not confined to the construction of identities alone, but covers the general repercussions of colonialism on the colonial centre. As opposed to earlier approaches which concentrated on the dominating influence of colonizers over colonized people, colonialism is not understood as a "one-way street", but as a process of interdependent relationships and mutual transformations which take place in the centre and on the periphery. Fourthly and finally, post-colonial theories not only look backwards to the past, but pay particular attention to the -seemingly innocuous -guise in which elements of colonial discourse and structures have outlived the formal end of colonial rule and continue to exert strong influence today in politics, culture, economics, art, science and law.
It is precisely here, in our opinion, that the emancipating potential of post-colonial theories in practice lies, as they provide a means of identifying and scandalizing forms of rule, influence, control, exploitation, exclusion, inequality or violence which obscure colonial structures, all the while enabling their continuing propagation and consolidation. If it is the case that, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have written in their book Empire, the "geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially" 2 , then there is currently an enormous need for analyzing post-or even neo-colonial mechanisms of rule and exclusion.

III.
Law was and is a central instrument of colonial domination. At the same time, it is also an important means to combat re-colonization. Colonialism was not only inextricably linked to the concepts of race, gender, civilization or hygiene, whose understanding -shaped by the colonial situation -is in turn reflected in jurisprudence, but colonialism also had a direct impact on legal terms such as sovereignty, legal personality, property, state and people. The fact that post-colonial theories which have been the subject of intensive discussion in Anglo-Saxon countries for some time now have been poorly received to date particularly by the German jurisprudence, is doubtless due in part to the marginal role ascribed to German colonialism in Germany's collective consciousness. Germany's colonialism may indeed have been of "negligible quantity" 3 in comparison to other colonial powers, such as Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France or the Netherlands. However, it does not seem wholly convincing to judge the significance of colonialism in political, social and scientific life solely on the basis of quantitative criteria, such as the size of the territory occupied by the colonizers or the number of people living there. Part of the reason for the low awareness may also be that German legal scholarship has a certain euro-centric fixation on western forms of law and concepts or justice, state, individuals or organizations. Whatever the reasons for the low significance might be, our aim is to complement German perspectives by a less national and less westernized outlook and join the discussions which are ongoing elsewhere. Examples are plenty: The works of Martti Koskenniemi 4 , Antony Anghie 5 or the Third World Approaches to International Law 6 have the force to profoundly change the perception of international law. They have not only shown that ideas, concepts and categories of public international law were born within colonial constellations or were substantially shaped in reaction to colonial encounters. They have also intimated where continued colonial rule may be found in modern guise. Justification narratives typical of historic colonialism have been identified in appeals to protect the weak and oppressed, solicitous discourses on human rights or paternal offers of technical and economic cooperation. Particularly the figure of the subordinate woman is frequently con-  In all this, Eurocentric perspectives are revealed, from which legal studies also naturally cannot claim to be free. The creation of terms, concepts, ideas, forms and criteria -which are supposedly universal, but might also be seen as particularistic due to their western bias -and the almost inevitably ensuing "realization" of the deficiencies of non-western countries was an additional central characteristic of colonialism. For this reason, the question of one's own situatedness and the consideration of non-western perspectives assume particular importance in de-colonizing legal thinking.

IV.
With this in mind, our collection of articles endeavors to broaden the perspectives of Ger