Geography Brown Bag Colloquium Series: Rescaling Nomosphere for Legal Geography Studies in the Philippines

Prof. Reidan M. Pawilen from the Department of Social Sciences, UP Los Baños is the keynote speaker for the third Geography Brown Bag Colloquium Series for the first semester. His discussion, Rescaling Nomosphere for Legal Geography Studies in the Philippines, highlighted legal geography as an emerging sub-discipline in human geography.

Legal geography deals with how people and places co-consitute the world. It draws from the “premise that the legal co-creates the spatial and the social, while the social and the spatial co-create the legal.” While there have been multitudes of studies concerning legal geography from the Global North, research on the subject matter from the Global South remain few and far between. This study serves as an active effort to enrich legal geography research in the Global South, giving emphasis on nuances that cannot be captured through generalizations obtained from the Global North alone. Using the framework nomosphere developed by Delaney investigates the “cultural-material environs that are constituted by the reciprocal materialization of ‘the legal’, the legal signification of the ‘socio-spatial’, and the practical performative engagements through which such constitutive moments happen and unfold.” In his study, Pawilen utilized the Bodong Indigenous Allied Group, Inc. (BIAG) as a case study for this conceptual framework.

Prof. Pawilen walked the audience through Bodong functions as an alternative dispute resolution method (ADR). The lack of representation for both Indigenous Peoples and IP rights in the country’s legal system led to a need to establish and reorganize to a more “formal” institution that the state could easily recognize. For the Bodong, it was their reformation as BIAG. BIAG’s method of enacting justice makes use of the group’s numbers to occupy a certain space, most often turning the home of the accused as a trial court, “to disrupt and neutralize the daily activities of the area and force a mediation between aggrieved parties.” The only limit given to these activities of enacting justice is that they do not violate any currently existing human right. Their means and reach are more flexible that the traditional legal process and can easily be adjusted on a case to case basis.

These IP institutions for justice such as the BIAG continuously challenge not only state authority and state laws but also other neighboring IP communities. One of the consequences of reorganizing such systems is that it exposed certain tensions between differing communities most especially in terms of jurisdiction. Given these circumstances, Prof. Pawilen ends the discussion on the idea of crafting a national ADR program that seeks to integrate and formalize Indigenous ADR practices to the legal system of the country.

* Quoted statements are taken from Prof.  Reidan M. Pawilen’s presentation