Law and violence: rewritings surrounding legal pluralism

Abstract

An important element in the current conflicts between the State and the indigenous peoples in Chile is related to the belief that national law is intrinsically above the indigenous peoples own law. This has generated the lack of its effective recognition in our legal system, which in turn intensifies the general state of intercultural injustice that these groups still live in. Therefore, the present article suggests a review of the aforementioned premise of superiority, investigating the foundations of authority of state law, and proposes a new account of these matters, where these are intricately linked to violence. This new account should allow the opening of the official legal system to the basic fact of legal pluralism.