The Colonial Hangover: Why Western Law Still Thinks It’s Universal

Edited by Maaz Hamid

Abstract

Western law’s claim to universality is not a neutral truth but a colonial artifact rooted in conquest and exclusion. This paper critically examines Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, exposing how their theories rationalized imperial domination and Indigenous dispossession. Engaging decolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Walter Mignolo, Glen Coulthard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, alongside Indigenous legal traditions such as the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace and Anishinaabe relational governance, it challenges the illusion of Western legal neutrality. Because Western law was imposed without genuine consent and constructed to suppress alternative legal orders, its legitimacy is fundamentally compromised. Liberal reforms and rights-based frameworks cannot dismantle the colonial foundations they were built upon. A radical shift toward legal pluralism is necessary, one that decouples legal legitimacy from Western epistemology and recognizes multiple legal traditions as equally valid.