Description
Legal empowerment is a rights-based approach to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups that engages legal tools, knowledge and practices to generate legal autonomy and eventually help sustain meaningful social, political or economic improvements. As an alternative to state-centered practices, it promotes pragmatic legal pluralism and a people-focused, empirical and context-cognizant approach to justice. While the concept itself is recent, many NGOs have piloted equivalent programmes in the past decades, with some engaging these techniques in post-conflict settings, such as Burundi. Relying on fieldwork, interviews and field observations, this paper proposes a critical overview of such initiatives in contemporary post-conflict Burundi and argues that legal empowerment activities face intrinsic and extrinsic challenges to their implementation. Torn between the managerial constraints of their organizations and the necessity to sustain the approval of authorities in a judicial arena marked by competitiveness and politicization, legal awareness workshops can serve to entertain and support a fictionalized view of justice which may further ‘disempower’ claimants.
