Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

This is a moment of repudiation of international law and of reckoning with racial injustice and committing to anti-racism. Some of the leading States that have shaped international law are not only exiting treaties, but also openly declaring and operating outside its rules. This lecture argues that one important way to trace the promise of international law at this moment of difficulty is to go outside the beltway of our discipline to places often unfamiliar in our textbooks and the locations where we practice and teach international law. To do that, this lecture will take you to places like Arusha, Tanzania, the seat of three international courts. 

In doing so, the lecture will bring into our conversation the voices of international lawyers from the Third World and the everyday issues that drive their practice and scholarship often under very difficult political circumstances. To appreciate fully the promise of international law, it is important to go beyond the usual debates, places and canons of our discipline in two ways.

First, this lecture challenges the limited geography of places and ideas that dominate the beltway of our discipline. This limited geography and set of ideas is characterized by the law of Geneva, the law of Strasbourg, the law of New York and that of Washington DC. These are the places that our discipline celebrates as producers of the type of international law which in turn becomes the benchmark for the efficacy of international law produced elsewhere. These are also the locations where the bulk of international legal practice is produced and which influences and reinforces our understandings not only of international practice but also of international law more generally. 

My second major point in this lecture, which proceeds from a Third Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, is that TWAIL speaks from a subaltern epistemic location. This means that TWAIL questions international law’s presumed universality. TWAIL contests the idea that international law is applicable everywhere and that we should therefore regard it as a view from nowhere. Third World States and TWAIL scholars have contested this non−situated, universal status of international law in a variety of ways. Ultimately, this lecture defends the claim that the Third World is an epistemic site of production and not merely a site of reception of international legal knowledge. Recognizing and grounding the Third World as a site knowledge production and of the practice of international law disrupts the assumptions that international legal knowledge is exclusively produced in the West for consumption and governance of the Third World. This lecture therefore argues that what is at stake is not an issue of inclusion or exclusion of non-western peoples, states within Western international law. Rather, it involves considerations of the very terms of the constitutional order of 'post-Enlightenment social knowledge, its structures of thought, and related constructions of political subjectivity'.

A bibliography of TWAIL scholarship from 1996 to 2019 is appended to this lecture.

The Promise of International Law: A Third World View

Es un hecho irreversible que el logos eurocentrico ha implosionado en sus propias fuentes de desarrollo politico y economico. El peligro de esta crisis es total porque abarca su hegemonia y a la humanidad y a la naturaleza. Â?De que alternativas disponemos para superar este fin de milenio y su hecatombe? Es evidente que estamos viviendo los “tiempos postumos” o de “filosofia finisecular” de una Modernidad que luce, por otra parte, rebasable desde otra episteme historico-cultural que reconozca la relacion ecosistema del hombre en el conjunto de la diversidad existencial de los seres vivos que pueblan este planeta. Esta otra epistemologia que tiene su genesis en la Teoria Critica y se recrea en America Latina, desde el Sur, se asume desde la praxis de un logos emancipador que fractura los limites hegemonicos del “capitalismo sin fin” y del “colonialismo sin fin”, ya que hace posible recuperar desde la “sociologia de las emergencias”, la presencia de los pueblos milenarios que han logrado la recreacion de su habitat a traves de una relacion simbiotica directa, con los ciclos o procesos de genesis y muerte de la Madre Tierra (Pachamama). La sabiduria ancestral que porta el pensamiento de estos pueblos originarios, expresados por sus tradiciones, ritos, magias, hasta sus representaciones antropomorficas de la realidad, son sintomas de que el ocaso de la civilizacion, no muere con Occidente, sino que renace desde el Sur con el “Sumak Kawsay”.

Epistemologías del sur

The African Union and the Development of African International Criminal Law

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogota's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.

Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development

* I would like to thank Antony Anghie for his comments on an earlier draft of the paper. The usual caveat applies. First published in: Antony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Mickelson and Obiora Okafor (Eds), The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003). 1 The word “recolonisation” is being inter alia used to indicate first, the reconstitution of the relationship between State and international law so as to undermine the autonomy of third world States and to the disadvantage of its peoples. Second, the expansion of international property rights which are to be enforced by third world States without possessing the authority to undertake the task of redistribution of incomes and resources. Third, the relocation of sovereign economic powers in international trade and financial institutions. Fourth, the inability of third world states to resist the overwhelming ideological and military dominance of the first world. 2 See UNDP, Human Development Report (1999). 3 We adopt here the definition of domination offered by Thompson: “We can speak of ‘domination’when established relations of power are ‘systematically asymmetrical’, that is, when particular agents or groups of agents are endowed with power in a durable way which excludes, and to some significant degree remains inaccessible to, other agents or groups of agents, irrespective of the basis upon which such exclusion is carried out.” See J. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, in The Polity Reader in Social Theory (1994) 133 at 136. Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto

Chimni

Papers

Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto