Conflicts of Worldviews and Private International Law

This book connects European private international law with decolonial theory.

Decolonial theory calls for alternative modes of producing legal knowledge – ones that give greater weight to the worldviews of formerly colonised peoples across the globe, including in Europe. At the same time, private international law has been described as a particularly suitable field for welcoming more otherness (altérité) in European law. This book therefore develops a decolonial theory of European private international law. To do so, it begins with Western court cases involving what the author terms a ‘conflict of worldviews’: a clash between the legal frameworks governing the dispute and the worldviews of the formerly colonised parties involved, referred to here as ‘postcolonised worldviews’. Through three case studies – respectively addressing religious arbitration, Indigenous sacred land, and faith-based politics – the book demonstrates that courts routinely overlook these conflicts. As a result, the claims of formerly colonised parties are inadequately addressed. To remedy this structural discrimination within European private international law, the book proposes a pluralised theory of choice of court, foreign law, and international jurisdiction, more inclusive of the postcolonised worldviews present in the case studies.

This is an important work, thought-provoking and challenging, which should be read by private international law and comparative law scholars, and more generally by legal and non-legal scholars interested in legal theory and decoloniality.