Description
‘Legal empowerment’ covers a range of activities aimed at facilitating access to justice, especially for people historically precluded from doing so. First introduced as a response to the rule of law ‘orthodoxy’ that permeated peacebuilding initiatives, the concept has gained traction in recent years through its association with the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding. In line with the ethos of the local turn, legal empowerment promises a people-centred and rights-based approach to justice, in which law becomes an accessible tool for the marginalized to advocate their rights. But just as the ‘local turn’ has been challenged by scholars, so should ‘legal empowerment’. This paper argues that legal empowerment activities carry similar practices and assumptions to those that have underpinned rule of law interventions. Through a critical overview of such initiatives in Burundi, this paper contends that legal empowerment activities have continued to uphold a technocratic view of justice, depoliticising the underlying conditions that breed disempowerment, and failed to translate local empowerment into local ownership.
