The notion of legal pluralism has attracted wide scholarly interest since the early twentieth century. It has become an increasingly important topic given the prevalence of legal modernisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which laid great emphasis on both legal centralism and legal positivism. These two approaches elevated the importance of the legislative and judicial bodies of the state in law (decision) making, and rejected the authority of any law from a source outside the state, unless it was given the force of law by the state. Legal pluralism thus arose as an alternative to legal centralism. While the modern nation-state's legal centralism considers only one uniform law for all subjects, legal pluralism is a situation characterised by the co-existence of two or more laws that interact within the processes of modernisation programmes in nation-states (Hooker 1975).

Legal pluralism in some contexts is often justified as a technique of governance on pragmatic grounds (Griffith 1986: 5). It is also often understood as a special legal arrangement where different groups of the population are defined in terms of their respective ethnicities, religions or other categorisations. In the view of Woodman (1999: 10), this is a situation of ‘state law pluralism’ where different bodies of law are branches of one larger body of norms. This type of legal pluralism is identified as ‘weak’ legal pluralism, as opposed to ‘strong’ legal pluralism. In strong legal pluralism, different legal orders exist together and do not necessarily have to recognise or negate each other (Moore 1978). Strong legal pluralism is characterised by situations in which law is neither all state law nor administered by formal state institutions.