Latin American Institute for Alternative Legal Services

ILSA has for decades been involved in the promotion of a critical vision of law expressed in different manners, from the defense of the alternative use of law by alternative legal services for social organizations through the recognition of juridical pluralism to a criticism of legal formality and the incorporation of contemporary debates on the realization of rights, constitutional transformations and gender perspective. It has proposed a critical discourse and practice of law intended to respond to the changing economic, social and political contexts of Latin America and Colombia.

The knowledge that ILSA has developed about law is based on a serious analysis of the principal capitalist transformations, and especially on the production of legislation that the new forms of governance and domination have deployed and institutionalized. Simultaneously, ILSA understands law as an expression of the complex dynamics of social struggles. In these struggles, new forms of production are put at stage. Those could be characterized as “bottom-up” and range from resistance to the possible alternatives. In this regard, efforts have been directed towards a sophisticated and holistic understanding of human rights theory.

In line with this perspective, analysis and considerations of the impacts of recent transformations in Latin America represent a challenge for ILSA’s intellectual and political projection, for its idea of law, and for its work with social movements and actors in the future.