What Boaventura de Sousa Santos reveals about power and justice will make you rethink the law

Boaventura de Sousa Santos and law as a field of struggle

In the legal sphere, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has analyzed how law can simultaneously serve as an instrument of emancipation and of control. In his book Law and the Epistemologies of the South (2023), he examines the instrumentalization of law as a mechanism of power, particularly in contexts of political conflict. The concept of lawfare—or judicial warfare—occupies a central place in this analysis: it describes how judicial systems are used to neutralize opponents, manipulate institutions, and legitimize inequality. From this perspective, the law becomes a field of epistemological dispute where the meanings of justice are constantly redefined.

However, Sousa Santos’ work is not limited to diagnosis. He also explores the forms of resistance that arise on the peripheries of the global system. Indigenous communities, peasant movements, and grassroots organizations have appropriated legal language to defend their rights and rebuild collective notions of justice. For the author, these practices are examples of intercultural translation: processes in which different systems of knowledge engage in dialogue without imposing themselves on one another. Within them lies the possibility of genuine legal pluralism—one capable of integrating the diversity of human experiences into the construction of law.

His most recent reflections broaden this framework toward the structural crisis of Europe. In O Fim da Europa como a conhecemos (2024), Boaventura de Sousa Santos analyzes how wars, energy dependence, and the rise of authoritarianism are transforming the continent’s destiny. He argues that the rupture with Russia and the increase in military spending have eroded the foundations of the European welfare state, creating internal tensions and accelerating a process of political decline. The author approaches this decay not only as an economic phenomenon but as a cultural and epistemological one: Europe, he asserts, has lost much of its capacity to imagine alternatives to the neoliberal model it once exported to other regions of the world.

The theoretical and social legacy of Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Across both the legal and geopolitical domains, the vision of Boaventura de Sousa Santos converges on a common idea: the need to rethink the foundations of modern knowledge. By linking the critique of colonialism with a reassessment of law and politics, his work offers a complex and provocative reading of globalization. This intersection between theory and practice—between academic analysis and social engagement—explains why his ideas continue to generate debate in universities, public forums, and civic movements.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, emeritus professor at the University of Coimbra and founder of the Center for Social Studies (CES), has spent decades conducting comparative research between the Global North and the Global South. His intellectual production, translated into multiple languages, crosses disciplinary borders by combining sociology, political philosophy, and law. In an age of institutional crises and growing distrust in democracies, his thought offers an alternative: to build shared forms of knowledge capable of expanding the horizon of what is possible without falling into dogmatism.

Ultimately, his body of work represents a call to revisit the very foundations upon which modernity was built. Boaventura de Sousa Santos urges us to see the world through different categories—to recognize that justice and rationality do not speak a single language. In this ongoing quest to open spaces for dialogue between cultures and systems of knowledge, his legacy extends far beyond academia, reaching into the heart of the political and ethical debates that define the twenty-first century.