Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He has written and published widely in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Arabic and Polish. His current research interests are epistemology, sociology of law, post-colonial theory, democracy, interculturality, globalization, social movements and human rights. One of his most recent publications is The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018).

'At a moment when the world confronts multiple existential crises, this book-synthesizing a half-century of wisdom-is magisterial, essential, and poetic. De Sousa Santos sustains the impossible tension between optimism and pessimism by presenting examples of 'real legal utopias', a seeming oxymoron that captures the necessity to engage law as both a realist and a utopian.' Richard L. Abel, UCLA

• Part I. The Tragic Optimism of the Law: The End of a Story: 1. Unsettling times; 2. The end of legal reformism? Lineages of legal reformism; 3. The early demise of legal reformism: my journey through the Law and Modernization Program at Yale University; 4. Room for manoeuvre: Paradox, programme, or Pandora's Box?; Part II. Epistemologies of the South and the Law: 5. Introducing the epistemologies of the South; 6. The epistemologies of the South and law: towards a post-abyssal law; 7. Is post-abyssal law possible? Part III. The Abyssal Law under the Mode of Abyssal Exclusion: 8. Lawfare: a long history; 9. Colonial law and imperial law; 10. Colonial legal duality: the creation of legal codes for indigenous populations; Part IV. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the State: 11. The heterogeneous state, legal plurality and traditional authorities in Africa: the case of Mozambique; 12. The rise of a micro dual state: a case of highly politicised legal pluralism; 13. The refoundation of the state in Bolivia and Ecuador?; Part V. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the Law: 14. Law and revolution in Portugal: experiences of popular justice after the carnation revolution of 1974; 15. Popular justice in cape verde; 16. The landless rural workers' movement in Brazil and its struggles for access to law and justice; 17. The law of the excluded: indigenous justice and plurinationality in Bolivia and Ecuador; 18. Decolonising justice and democratic peace in Colombia; Part VI. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting Hegemonic Human Rights: 19. Human rights in a post-secular age: counter-hegemony and progressive theologies; 20. Towards an insurgent, intercultural and cosmopolitan declaration of human rights and duties; 21. Rights of nature.