Geopolitical Connections to Legal Debate: Methodological Experimentations Between Legal Transplants and Power Struggles

Social antagonisms resulting from the coexistence of a variety of cultural groups and their rule systems in globalised societies may give rise to geopolitical conflicts, that is power struggles over a territory. Such conflicts may affect legal debate. This becomes apparent in the controversy over the institutionalization process of Islamic Alternative Dispute Resolution in England, which has resulted in mediation and arbitration bodies which are widely represented as parallel legal courts and, as such, indistinctly called “sharia courts”. The complexity of multi-faceted phenomena such as “sharia courts”, which show the mutual influence between geopolitical dynamics and legal developments, requires new disciplinary approaches. “Geo-Law”, as a methodology that combines comparative law and geopolitics to address geopolitical conflicts arising from the circulation of legal rules, tries precisely to offer a new analytical perspective. The “geo-legal” analysis reveals that the debate concerning the functioning of English “sharia courts“ direct legal evolution in different ways. On the one hand, there are calls for changes to domestic laws in order to review the application of sharia-based rules, especially in family law matters. On the other hand, „sharia courts” seem to have become a model of Islamic justice in the eyes of Muslims from other countries, who resort to these structures not only to solve their disputes, but also to be trained as “judges” and replicate that model in their own countries. In shedding light on the content of the English common law system and the Islamic model and in reconstructing the main events of the geopolitical conflict, the present paper uses “geo-law” as a key to illustrate and understand the unexpected evolution between the involved legal systems and their core values.

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