A Community-Centred Approach to Personhood and Law: Reasoning from Embeddedness

The notion of embeddedness offers a helpful lens for understanding the intricate interplay between personhood, law and politics. This article examines embeddedness at the nexus of (inter)dependence, vulnerability and responsibility. From this perspective, I advocate for a layered conception of community as a means to appreciate the complexity of our embeddedness. This understanding conduces to foregrounding the ecological dimension in our conception of community life and encourages us to continuously explore and contest the multifaceted nature of our interconnectedness. In navigating and organising community dynamics, law, especially rights, plays a crucial constitutive role by assigning a system of social meanings. Rights should thus be approached as a technique of (transformative) legal subjectification—a dynamic process of shaping personhood through structuring social relationships, navigating deliberations and building institutions. Accordingly, the state should foster a responsive politics of engagement to moderate dialogues and exchanges among and with its citizenry.