The MeToo movement in India and human rights and punitivism in Colombia

Birmingham Law School's Global Legal Studies and Equality, Gender, and Feminist Legal Studies research themes are organising a seminar with two invited speakers, Dr Mónica Arango-Oyala (Oxford) and Dr Valeria Luis Pérez (LSE), who will present their work on the MeToo movement in India and on human rights and punitivism in Colombia respectively.

These are the abstracts of their papers:

 Can we never escape the law? Digital Feminism and Collective Legal Consciousness in India

Traditionally, legal consciousness studies have focused on individuals to identify ideas about legality that sustain or undermine the law’s hegemony. In contrast, this paper analyses collective legal consciousness, as bottom-up experiences of how people understand, experience, give meaning to law and act in relationship to those conceptions. Therefore, it is a process of constructing legality and a meaning-making exercise that usually sustains the law’s hegemony. While some studies have identified the gap in legal consciousness studies to analyse collective action, very few have addressed it, with notable exceptions. Through discourse analysis of x/tweets of the #MeToo movement in India over three iterations of the movement between 2017 and 2021, this paper analyses collective legal consciousness and the role of gender on ideas about the law and sexual harassment and rape. It argues that #MeTooIndia worked as a polyvocal movement that decentred and re-centred the law. It explores the constant redirection and belief in law to solve gendered harm despite its apparent inefficacy. This paper contributes to understanding and questioning law’s centrality as a medium for gender justice by analysing the relationship between social movements, online activism, and collective legal consciousness.

 Legitimising Penality: Human Rights Discourses and Punitivism in Colombia

Despite their benevolent appearance, transnational discourses of human rights have played a substantial role in fuelling the deployment of coercive power. Yet, their impact on domestic systems, particularly in the Global South, remains largely unexplored. This article examines the interaction of these discourses with local practices, processes, and narratives in the Colombian context. I argue that, rather than being merely imposed or imported, notions of victims’ rights and anti-impunity, along with discourses of national and international security, have forged unique coercive pathways in domestic penal policy and constitutional law that transcend transnational obligations. On the one hand, victims' rights and anti-impunity have played a key role in the justification of increased coercion throughout the criminal law as a whole, rather than being restricted to serious human rights violations. On the other, although the language of human rights has been instrumental in denouncing rights violations in prisons, it has also played a crucial role in legitimising the imposition of punishment under conditions recognised as unconstitutional.