About the Journal
LENTERA HUKUM is an open-access peer-reviewed scholarly journal focusing on legal issues arising in Indonesia and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere. This journal aspires to provide a comparative and interdisciplinary forum to particularly disseminate up-to-date analysis on constitutionalism, international governance, human rights law, environmental law, technology law, and legal pluralism within the Global South perspective.
Indonesia is characterised as a heterogeneous nation with European, Islamic, and indigenous legal traditions; often referred to as distinct from its colonial-origin legal system. While World War II ended, Indonesia's endeavours for legal development and democratisation have faced challenges such as authoritarianism, inequality, and divided society amidst the unfinished project of legal transplants, as they have been also encountered by many other Global South countries. Hitherto, the discourses on Indonesia's legal development and those in the other Global South countries remain relevant due to their relatively similar and unique pathways with arduous tasks in developing the legal system. They also experienced colonialism and imperialism in the past, followed by current efforts to consolidate and leverage state capacity to the emergence of nationalising, developmental, and neoliberal agendas.
Taking Indonesia and the Global South countries as a starting point for exploring legal conversation represents critical but more likely underrepresented discourse amidst the structural dominance of legal knowledge production in the Global North. The term "Global South" frequently refers to the unequal power relations that shape the lives of current and former colonised, enslaved, and dispossessed nations by imperial powers, believed as an epistemological grid of power, not a geographic divide, that has shaped academic knowledge, including legal studies. However, while many southern countries follow the West-led perspectives to legal development, the trajectory to designing their distinctive features has flourished and encouraged legal scholars to explore more complex relations due to politically, socially, and culturally diverse, whose legal developments are often directed to respond to newly emerging economies and divided societies. Therefore, this journal adds an increasingly important cross-border legal analysis with the Global South standpoint, primarily by considering southern countries' voices and experiences in legal development.
As an open-access journal, all contents are freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without prior permission from the publisher or the authors. This journal has been approved by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which indicates its compliance with the open-access requirements of a peer-reviewed journal.
Since 2020, this journal has exclusively published all papers in English. It only accepts submissions written in English. This change aims to leverage more international audiences; the publication is expected to engage more global readership and authorship. All authors interested in submitting their manuscripts to this journal are strongly advised to refer to our Call for New Submissions and Instructions for Authors.
