Deprovincialising Jurisprudence: Ideas of Law in Global Political Thought

Scholars across public law, political theory, history, political science, and religious studies gathered at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in Oxford on 8 September 2026 for a conference titled ‘Deprovincialising Jurisprudence: Ideas of Law in Global Political Thought’. 

The conference was organised by Dr Moiz Tundawala, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Law and the Bonavero Institute, and Dr Salmoli Choudhuri, Fellow at the Koch History Centre and Affiliate Fellow at the Bonavero Institute.

The conference reappraised the conventional separation between legal and political thought—an assumption that underlies many intellectual traditions. It explored the relationship between law and politics across and beyond established Euro-American frameworks. Deliberately eclectic in approach, the conference brought together a wide range of theoretical traditions, historical contexts, and methodological perspectives.  

Fourteen papers were presented across four panels organised around ideas that have shaped modern constitutional and political thought: fraternity and belonging; freedom and resistance; sovereignty and law; and minority and post-sovereignty. Taken together, the papers offered fresh perspectives on how we might live and govern together amid difference, drawing on different histories of empire, decolonisation, and political ordering.

Deprovincialising jurisprudence, the conference suggested, therefore requires more than enlarging its geographical archive. It also entails questioning the disciplinary separation of legal from political thought and recovering legal and constitutional ideas as integral to the ways in which political communities understand and organise collective life.