New Max Planck Research Group

After successfully participating in a rigorous and highly competitive selection procedure, the mpilhlt’s postdoctoral researcher Mariana Dias Paes has won funding to start her own Max Planck Research Group from January 2022. The group Global Legal History on the Ground will focus on new theoretical and methodological approaches to writing the history of normative production in a global perspective, in which African legal history will play a central role. The title of the project expresses the Research Group’s two main goals. First, it is concerned with writing a global legal history told from the perspective of daily and concrete normative production that happened in ordinary places and in which local and subaltern groups were active participants: normative production on the ground. Second, it aims for a global legal history that privileges research on African archives. The project will therefore put forward joint initiatives with different African archives and academic institutions: archives on the ground. Mariana Dias Paes currently leads the Research Group Law and the Creation of Dependency in the Ibero-Atlantic, which is part of the Bonn Cluster of Excellence Beyond Slavery and Freedom. She has extensive experience in research that analysis court cases filed before judges in Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau.