Volume 14, Issue 1, 2011
Randall Williams
Pages 1-23
The Ballot and the Bullet
Anti-Juridical Praxis from Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela to the Bolivarian Revolution
This essay examines multiple iterations of anti-juridicalism in relation to shifting forms of postwar imperialism and decolonization. The anti-juridical designates a differential political praxis of rights and law grounded in conditions of subalternity and revolutionary struggle. It stands in opposition to the abstract, neutral
universality advanced by dominant theories of liberallegalism and hegemonic conceptions of the rule of law. In contemporary modalities, anti-juridical praxis serves as a necessary, critical supplement to the articulation of constituent power in the postcolony with profound implications for constructing a state of law and justice, and for building of a new internationalism of peoples.