معهد أمريكا اللاتينية للخدمات القانونية البديلة
ILSA's decades-long institutional background is related to the promotion of a critical vision of law expressed in different manners, from the defense of the alternative use of law by popular legal services, passing through the recognition of juridical pluralism, to a criticism of legal formality and the incorporation of contemporary debates on the realization of rights, constitutional transformations and gender mainstreaming. In this regard, its distinctive feature has been to propose a critical discourse and practice of law that has intended to respond to the changing economic, social and political contexts in Latin America and in Colombia.
The understanding that ILSA has developed about law has been rooted in a serious analysis of the principal capitalist transformations and, especially, of the production of legislation that the new forms of governance and domination have deployed and institutionalized. Simultaneously, ILSA has understood law as an expression of the complex dynamics of popular and social struggles. In these struggles new forms of production are put at stage -those that could be characterized like "from down to top" and by "those from below"-, from resistance to the possibility of alternatives. In this regard, efforts towards a complex understanding of human rights theory and practice from holistic approaches have been central too.
