In recent years, the Latin American and Caribbean region has been embroiled in momentous events. On the one hand, the global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 exacerbated existing structural inequalities, placing the most vulnerable populations in conditions of greater health, economic, labor, and social vulnerability (ECLAC, 2020). On the other hand, the impact of social unrest in several countries of the region, such as Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia, starkly revealed the symptoms of a feverish state resulting from the implementation of neoliberal policies and long-standing social processes that have contributed to the erosion of the social fabric (Rajlan & Benente, 2016).

In the context of the pandemic, several Latin American and Caribbean states, some co-opted by transnational corporations and others by criminal organizations, chose to present themselves as having deficits (Jessop, 2016) and minimalist approaches (Álvarez, 2005) in their decisions during crucial moments when strong social protection for their populations was essential. Some even repressed protesters, human rights defenders, and groups maintaining neighborhood barricades during the pre- and post-pandemic social uprisings. Many of these protests were sparked precisely by the exacerbation of inequality brought about by the health emergency.

Simultaneously, the health and social emergencies fostered the emergence and strengthening of combative resistance actions, political and community-based care networks, massive and popular artistic interventions, independent healthcare and legal organizations, alternative forms of public denunciation, community kitchens, and a complete takeover of social media, among other things. This led to Latin America becoming the stage for disruptive and emblematic social protests for other countries around the world, such as the marches and rallies in favor of the decriminalization of abortion.

This confluence of events is taking place in a region still struggling to rebuild progressive or national-popular political projects. This does not diminish the interesting tension arising from disputes over the dominance of different trends in public governance, both in electoral arenas and in social and redistributive policies (Benente & Navas, 2019). In this regard, it is worth noting the return of Peronism to power in Argentina, led by Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández; the victories of Gabriel Boric in Chile, Luis Arce Catacora in Bolivia, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; and the historic rise to power of Gustavo Petro in Colombia, in addition to the positive projections for Lula da Silva in Brazil. Meanwhile, Cuba and Venezuela continue to resist the constant economic and political attacks carried out by the United States and its allies through economic blockades or so-called Unilateral Coercive Measures (Boueiri, 2020).

Furthermore, beyond the political and social circumstances in which our region finds itself, it is important to highlight the socio-legal implications of contemporary processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005). The current stage of capitalism, in its phase of accumulation by dispossession, along with the implementation of neoliberal policies by many of our states, has unleashed intense social struggles against the dispossession of territories and natural resources by transnational corporations, many of which are linked to states and even organized crime. This has also revealed a dispute in the realm of constitutions and laws, highlighting tensions between the legal framework governing dispossession and the emancipatory nature of law.

All these socio-political changes have an impact on the legal field that can foster alternative legal narratives that, on the one hand, document unnamed and incompassionate structural injustices (Médici, 2015; Molina, 2022) to empower subjects who are subaltern or excluded from political and economic power and, on the other hand, challenge configurations of the official universalist normative reality of Human Rights that tend to delegitimize and falsify policies and decisions with a vocation for justice (Rosillo & Machado, 2020; Sánchez, 2018).

To succinctly present the contexts of our lines of work involves, first and foremost, mentioning these panoramas, which can be interpreted through the lens of recent history, but also considering those that are more genealogical and rooted in generational academic trajectories in Latin America. It is crucial to keep alive the tradition of a combative hermeneutics (Wolkmer, 2017) as well as legal critique (Correas, 2002) that permeates the disciplinary and methodological treatment we give to the various tensions between law and society in our research. Contexts of crisis in the human sciences (Echeverría, 1995), the drive to document cultural malaise through structural patterns of domination (Matamoros & Hernández, 2019), and also the intricate webs of political subjectivities, are some of the influences that are reinterpreted in the development of our lines of work.

Finally, we agreed to prioritize some social and normative phenomena that will impact the course of our individual and collective reflections, among them: the tensions of the uses of law by the State and/or diverse social and political actors, the presence of new communication and information technologies in daily life where technopolitics and cyberculture predominate (Sierra Caballero, 2017; Marino, 2016); the gravitational movements that feminisms and dissidences bring to grassroots political militancy; neoliberal policies transformed into legislation and regulations that affect rights; the so-called legal battle (or lawfare), understood as the illegitimate use of the Law in judicial proceedings to harm an adversary and obtain a political result (Rivera, 2021); Social concern about climate change and the demand for environmental protection, as well as the concentration of media and the messages that hegemonic media constantly broadcast against emancipatory social processes (Estepa and Maisonnave, 2019).

The social transformations in our region and the challenges we face require critical, contextual, and situated legal thinking, based on critical hermeneutics, that takes into account the material basis of the phenomena analyzed, but above all, requires thinking about new categories of legal thought that foster liberating frameworks for social action.

The collaborative work, research, and discussion activities of the Group and Project proposed in this call for proposals are based on the work of a consolidated and productive working group that has successfully presented its findings on several occasions to CLACSO, namely: the Working Group on "Latin American Legal Critique: Social Movements and Emancipatory Processes" (2013-2016); "Critical Legal Thought" (2016-2019); and "Legal Critique and Sociopolitical Conflicts" (2019-2022). Each of these working groups has studied law as a social phenomenon that expresses power relations, the various uses of law by social movements, constituent assemblies, and the constitutions that have emerged from them in Latin America (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador). In turn, the tensions that exist within the legal field between Law as a reproducer of oppressions and status quo, and Law as a possible instrument to promote processes of social emancipation have been studied in depth, all of the above analyzed and debated from approaches of legal pluralism and decoloniality, as well as from Marxism.

The research and articulation of different critical perspectives on Law in Latin America and the Caribbean are increasingly solid and necessary in contemporary social sciences, as they allow us to explain and analyze socio-legal phenomena in their specificities, as well as the political, economic and social implications they entail.

In this sense, critical theories of law start from common premises, among them, that law is not neutral, objective and universal; that law is a social and power phenomenon; and that the State is not the only producer of law, that is, that there is a legal pluralism that needs to be analyzed in its particularities, even though the State has the monopoly on the use of force, that is, coercion.

Critical legal theories tend to dismantle the mythology and fetishism (Rivera Lugo, 202) embedded in the positivist conception of law and to account for new legal narratives that offer alternatives to the dominant ones, revealing structural inequalities, asymmetries, oppressions, subalternities, and injustices. Critique, as cognitive knowledge and an exercise in emancipation, must demonstrate the degree of alienation and automation experienced by human beings and highlight processes that instill mythical representations used to conceal these realities (Wolkmer, 2019).

However, the critical perspectives on law that this Group adopts to address the issues raised do not remain solely at the descriptive and critical analysis level of the diverse socio-legal realities experienced by our Latin American and Caribbean societies—which in itself constitutes a contribution to the field—but rather propose the development of analytical categories and concrete approaches that can be expressed at epistemological and pedagogical levels as well as at normative and political levels (political constitutions, legislation, analysis of court rulings, normative production of indigenous peoples and communities, among others). All of this is directed toward generating a legal common sense to materialize processes of social emancipation (Santos, 2010).

Within this framework, each of the lines of work that the members of the Group delve into allows for the configuration of a theoretical corpus useful for understanding sociopolitical phenomena from the perspectives of epistemologies of the South, Marxist, feminist, decolonial, the philosophy of liberation, the hermeneutic-critical approach to human rights, the peoples and from legal pluralism, as well as from understandings that do not escape contemporary geopolitics (Rajland, Burgos and Machado, in press).

It is of social and intellectual importance to continue delving deeper into the analysis of the role that law and legal expressions have played in the current stage of the capitalist system, characterized by accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005; Federici, 2021). This will allow us to understand the legal forms that dispossession, neo-extractivism, and neoliberal policies take, and the impacts these have on the lives of individuals and communities. Within this framework, several of our research projects are developed within the field of social struggles and in collaboration with those who are building new political approaches to the commons.

On the other hand, explain from the approaches indicated, the wide range of conservatisms and actions against progressive governments that have been occurring in the countries of the region, such as: the judicialization of politics in a broad sense, the phenomenon of lawfare, coups d'état, soft coups, hybrid wars and their respective unilateral coercive measures that include legal, psychological and economic warfare.

Furthermore, we intend to continue deepening the analysis of the problems presented by our progressive governments within their geopolitical frameworks and conditioned by neoliberal policies within global capitalism, showing limitations, failures, or proposals that are not very committed to changing the socio-political and legal structures of domination and hegemony that we have in them.

Finally, we propose to expose the facets of the different legal disputes that occur within social groups, communities and peoples, related to human rights, with specificity in feminist, sex-gender diversities and indigenous peoples where critical, anti-capitalist perspectives, construction of otherness and patterns of liberation of them and their social environments predominate.