Gender-Based Violence in a Multipolarising World: Legal Pluralism, Dispute Settlement, and Pluriversal Futures from the Global South
Convener: Lidwina Inge Nurtjahyo
Co-convener: Mochammad Arief Wicaksono
This panel examines gender-based violence (GBV) in physical and digital spaces through the lens of legal anthropology, with particular attention to dispute resolution processes and legal pluralism in the Global South. Situating GBV within a multipolar world, the panel explores how shifting geopolitical configurations, such as the declining influence of Western-led institutions and the United States’ withdrawal from a key UN gender mainstreaming initiative, are impacting the reshaping of global commitments to gender justice. It also explores how these impacts resonate in everyday legal arrangements and practices related to the protection of women and marginalized groups.
Based on ethnographic cases, the panel highlights how various legal systems (state law, customary law, religious norms, and digital governance regimes) interact, conflict, contest, or even coexist in addressing GBV. This plural legal landscape is not simply a site of contestation but also a showcase for creative negotiations, where communities articulate alternative norms of justice, care, restoration, and accountability.
Responding to the symposium’s call for a pluriversal future, this panel asks: How can diverse epistemologies and normative frameworks from the Global South contribute to more context-sensitive and socially embedded responses to gender-based violence? Rather than assuming universal legal solutions, we advance approaches rooted in local contexts that reflect relational ethics, community-based dispute resolution, and culturally specific understandings of grievances, justice, and restitution. In doing so, this panel contributes to broader anthropological debates about how pluriversality can inform more inclusive and transformative pathways to addressing gender-based violence in a rapidly changing global order.