This book addresses the themes of praxis and the role of international lawyers as intellectuals and political actors engaging with questions of justice for Third World peoples. The book brings together 12 contributions from a total of 15 scholars working in the TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) network or tradition. It includes chapters from some of the pioneering Third World jurists who have led this field since the time of decolonization, as well as prominent emerging scholars in the field. Broadly, the TWAIL orientation understands praxis as the relationship between what we say as scholars and what we do – as the inextricability of theory from lived experience. Understood in this way, praxis is central to TWAIL, as TWAIL scholars strive to reconcile international law’s promise of justice with the proliferation of injustice in the world it purports to govern. Reconciliation occurs in the realm of praxis and TWAIL scholars engage in a variety of struggles, including those for greater self-awareness, disciplinary upheaval, and institutional resistance and transformation. The rich diversity of contributions in the book engage these themes and questions through the various prisms of international institutional engagement, world trade and investment law, critical comparative law, Palestine solidarity and decolonization, judicial education, revolutionary struggle against imperial sovereignty, Muslim Marxism, Third World intellectual traditions, Global South constitutionalism, and migration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

This collection of essays explores different dimensions of the relationship between the third world and international law. The topics covered include third world approaches to international law, non-state actors and developing countries, feminism and the third world, foreign investment, resistance and international law, and territorial disputes and native peoples. It is a further contribution to the work done by scholars intent on elaborating what might be termed Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). This initiative seeks to continue and further develop the important work that has been done over many decades, particularly by scholars and jurists from the third world, to construct an international law which is sensitive to the needs of third world peoples. This body of scholarship has attempted to extend and expand the concerns and materials of international law. The essays in this volume are animated by these same motives at a time when unprecedented issues confront third world peoples, particularly since the contemporary international system appears to be disempowering third world peoples, intensifying inequality between the North and the South, and indeed, importantly, within the North and the South. TWAIL scholars attempt to look afresh at the history of colonial international law, engage previous trends in third world scholarship in international law, take cognizance of the dramatic changes which have characterized the body of international law in the last few decades from the perspective of third world peoples, record their resistance to unjust and oppressive international laws, and advance new approaches that address their needs and concerns. These are the broad themes and concerns which animate this collection of essays.

Using the theoretical tools drawn from historical materialism and deconstruction, Tzouvala offers a comprehensive history of the standard of civilisation.

Over the past decades international affairs have been increasingly legalized. International law has dramatically expanded into new fields and taken on new challenges. Despite this development, there has been little in-depth scholarship on what impact these changes have had on the field of international legal theory, how it is taught, and where it is going. This volume investigates the major developments in the field and explores the core assumptions and concepts, analytical tools, and key challenges associated with different approaches. An outstanding team of legal academics provides an accessible overview of competing theoretical movements, and a more in-depth understanding of the strengths, preoccupations, insights, and limits of those schools of thought. The contributions provide an authoritative account of current thinking about the theoretical foundations of contemporary international law and will serve as an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners.

Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles by leading scholars puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely philosophy or theory of human rights, history, and constitutional and international law. This book combines critical consciousness and moral sensibility, and offers methods of interpretation or hermeneutical strategies to advance the project of decolonizing human rights, a veritable tool-box to create new Third-World discourses of human rights.

This interdisciplinary exploration of the modern historiography of international law invites a diverse assessment of the indissoluble unity of the old and the new in the most global of all legal disciplines. The study of the history of international law does not only serve a better understanding of how international law has evolved to become what it is and what it is not. Its histories, which rethink the past in the present, also influence our perception of contemporary matters in international law and our understandings of how they may potentially unfold. This multi-perspectival enquiry into the dominant modes of international legal history and its fundamental debates may also help students of both international law and history to identify the historical approaches that best suit their international legal-historical perspectives and best address their historical and legal research questions.