Educating for the End of a Necropolitical World: What Happens Beyond Decolonisation in Legal Education?

This chapter argues that coloniality of power is reproduced by and in Euro-modern legal education and this contributes to the increasing emergence of a necropolitical world. Such a necropolitical world is concerned not with the preservation of life or the earth itself, but the governance of death, as ‘necropolitics’ describes a structure and body of legal knowledge dedicated to the sovereign’s power over ‘who may live and who must die.’ This also describes the logics of a decadent discipline which is unable to die and unable to bring life. Therefore, legal education requires a radical rethink of its aims and concepts. ‘Decolonisation’, as a theory and praxis, responds directly to the coloniality in the system, but it is often engaged in, with little understanding of how ‘unsettling’ decolonisation aims to be to concepts and norms that produce contemporary human and global conditions. Therefore, what is required most urgently within legal education, as a matter of planetary and equal biological survival [no matter what the intervention is called] is building a legal knowledge for a world that can protect and bring life. A world beyond this necropolis.