A Assessoria Jurídica Popular como Defesa dos Povos: desafios para uma Prática Cosmopolítica no Brasil e na América Latina

Abstract

This thesis proposes an immersion into Brazilian thinking on Popular Legal Assistance with the aim of not only understanding and consolidating the trajectory of research agendas in the country but also highlighting their limitations. This is especially done by considering the implications of decolonial thought within this debate. The specific objective is to present a new conception of popular legal assistance, capable of embracing new categories of thought and abandoning a priori assumptions and classifications that have always guided the construction of the research agenda in the country. The conception of the popular occupies a central space in this discussion, being largely responsible for maintaining a logic based on duality and opposition that contributes to obstructing political imagination around the practice. The thesis intends to bring to light the limitations of a thought that does not keep pace with the complexities revealed by practice, proposing a reinterpretation of the term popular to incorporate new ways of thinking about people who go beyond mere opposition and actually exercise political resistance. The methodological choice in this work was to no longer resort to field research (or predominantly empirical), but to make use of a broad and extensive literature that has been produced in recent decades regarding the practice of popular legal assistance in the country. The theoretical framework, in turn, is constituted both by the literature developed within this research agenda in recent decades and by perspectives that allow us to broaden the debates about the political use of law. This involves readings that propose a reworking of the idea of modernity and the introduction of a planetary or Earthly perspective to the debate on collective action. It is in the environmental issue that these problems manifest most significantly. The New Climate Regime requires us to think in ways other than those that have shaped critical thinking in the field of law in recent decades and traditional Latin American political thought. Starting from the hypothesis that popular legal assistance, as practiced in Brazil, already has the elements to characterize it as a practice committed to the defense of modes of existence and the promotion of other ways of inhabiting the Earth, I propose to think of politics as cosmopolitics and Popular Legal Assistance as a diplomatic practice that, through constant translation and negotiation, elucidates viewpoints and contributes to the composition of a new common.