TWAIL - Third World Approaches to International Law

In this chapter I will examine the origins, functions, and consequences of extraterritoriality in Siam, and its important role in the creation of the modern Thai state. More specifically, I will trace the role of extraterritoriality in the creation of a territorially bound polity governed through bureaucratic mechanisms displaying a high degree of legalisation of social relations and integrated into a global capitalist system. In the first part of this chapter, I will examine the establishment, operation, and abolition of extraterritoriality in Siam, having as my main reference-point the 1855 Bowring Treaty and the subsequent legal, institutional, and economic reforms enacted by the Siamese monarchy in its attempt to have extraterritoriality abolished. In the second part, I will discuss the process of creating a territorialised, centralised state and the assumption of control over former vassal states by Bangkok. Here I revisit imperial struggle and co-operation between Britain and Siam regarding the resource-rich Northern Siam (Lanna). I will argue that extraterritoriality treaties in 1874 and 1883 crystallised the alliance between foreign capital and the Siamese ruling classes, an alliance that drove the process of state-building in Siam. The core of my argument is that extraterritorial jurisdiction was a legal technique through which British capitalists, the Foreign Office, the Siamese monarchy, and the nascent bourgeoisie formed a precarious and contradictory, yet operationally effective, alliance that enabled Siam’s transition to capitalism, the emergence of fixed borders, and the subjugation of northern vassal states and concomitant consolidation of state control over these territories, as well as the mastery over and commodification of nature.

This paper explains Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”) as a historically-aware, epistemologically-focused, integrated methodology that aims to explore the enduring effects of colonialism on international law and provide an alternative version of the history of international law from the perspective of Third World people.

The purpose of the article is to critique the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from the point of view of its (self-declared) role as the implementing body of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Our main concern lies with what the activities of the Permanent Forum entail with regard to the scope and substance of Indigenous rights, with a focus on human rights as distinct from a group right of self-determination. The article hinges on a detailed analysis of the processes through which the Permanent Forum has sought to create and define its own mandate. These processes have involved a marginalisation or co-option of ʻotherʼ voices in the field of Indigenous rights, testifying to the capacity of international organisations and the state system they represent to ʻderadicaliseʼ Indigenous resistance.

Why have Arab states chosen to solidify their boundaries through International Court of Justice (ICJ) adjudication? What patterns of discourse emerge in reading the pleadings and what can we conclude more broadly about international law's legitimacy in this 'post' colonial era? The following article demonstrates the value of applying critical methodologies to territorial adjudication. In particular, the article reveals how the dichotomy between law and politics is the central linguistic device structuring both legal speech and its silences. Discursive strategies are highlighted to show the extent to which Third World-and especially Arab-experiences continue to be silenced by the conventions of ICJ speech.

This article focuses on the European standard of civilisation regarding domestic legal systems and its application in imperial Ethiopia. It establishes a link between European legal imperialism, Abyssinian imperialism, and imperial Ethiopia’s domestic legal regime overhaul. More specifically, it examines imperial Ethiopia’s response to charges of inadequate domestic legal regime (notably, civil codification) and its relationship to the ideological views and interests of the Abyssinian elites concerned with the consolidation of a unique Horn of African empire in the shadow of semi-colonialism. It argues that civil codification in imperial Ethiopia was embedded in an imperialism bent on expanding the Abyssinian image of Ethiopia into the juridical realm. The 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code, which did not make concessions to non-Orthodox Christian gebbars of imperial Ethiopia’s peripheries, is a pronouncement of Abyssinian paramountcy in imperial Ethiopia. By showing the 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code, imperial Ethiopia’s most recognisable response to European legal imperialism was reflective of Abyssinian imperialism, not just its semi-colonialism, the article highlights the importance of considering the multiple historical (imperial) contexts for semi-colonial polities’ responses to European legal imperialism.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia typifies the “modern” starting point of state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention within conventional historical treatments of International Relations (IR) theory. The treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War signaled the dawn of an international society after medieval Latin Christendom with new diplomatic arrangements that assigned legitimate autonomy to specific European states independent of Roman imperial and papal authorities. The ideological archetypes of Westphalia for IR theory during the twentieth century were contemporaries Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) the realist and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) the rationalist. Each of them powerfully envisioned a modern form of international relations: Hobbes accented sovereign political independence and international anarchy between states whereas Grotius affirmed a worldwide association of states absent a global authority yet still regulated by norms of universal law to justify war and intervention. Hobbesian sovereignty and Grotian international law produce the dynamic tension and terms of modern international relations. Yet the turn to the global history of international law has challenged the conceptual parameters of the IR Westphalian narrative focused on intra-European relations between sovereign states. In particular, attention to the constitutive role of imperial expansion and colonial settlement outside Europe offers a richer scope for analyzing the development of “modern” international relations and its legal-political concepts such as the state of nature, the law of occupation, and the law of nations.

An analysis of the international, regional and domestic anti-trafficking legal and policy mechanisms available for implementation by the Ugandan government. This work also includes assessment of anti-trafficking practice along the 4 ps -Protection, Prevention, Prosecution ans Partnership- as well as implementation of the developed legal and policy frameworks by the Ugandan government in selected court cases.

This text sets some landmarks for constructing an alternative history of human rights in modernity. This narrative supplements and destabilises the standard history, which usually takes into consideration events that ocurred within the borders of Europe, and locates rights in the framework of the struggles against absolutism and totalitarianism, and in the context of the relation between governments and individuals. From the perspective of the Third World colonialism and the struggles for self-determination since the times of the Conquest of America also constitute key events in the history of modern human rights. In this horizon of understanding, rights are seen as barriers protecting individuals and peoples from the advance of empires. Moreover, not Hobbes and Grotius, but Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas are postulated as precursors of modern human rights and international law.
Published in Jose-Manuel Barreto, Human Rights from a Third World Perspective. Critique, History and International Law. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Within the field of international criminal justice, opinion remains divided concerning the extent to which international criminal courts should be expected to write history. Taking this debate as its point of departure, this article argues that contestation over the historical function of international criminal courts hinges on the underlying conception of justice – adjudicative or sociopolitical – to which scholars and practitioners adhere in practice. The article demonstrates how these rival conceptions of justice function less as static positions and more as lines of argumentation that can be deployed to support or critique the range of practices that shape the historical narratives constructed within international criminal courts in practice. The article concludes by identifying a potential avenue to advance the conversation on the historical function – one that would assist in articulating what should legitimately be expected of international criminal courts and enable their practices to be evaluated in a more textured manner.

Peripheral international legal histories are considered a new subfield of the discipline's historiography, though there is no defined canon, chronology, or accepted set of theoretical questions or conflicts. Despite the absence of an established literature, this review argues that peripheral histories of international law challenge the linear narrative that a European international legal system was unquestioned and easily incorporated by the new non-European states that surged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This overview looks at several forms of approaching the literature that differ in methodology but share a (partial or complete) challenge to a coherent universal international law and a homogeneous forward-looking global project.

For complimentary access to this review article please go to:

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/EZQZGRSYJVRCNTQF47MN/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110316-113348

A reflection on the continuity between International Law's colonial past and neocolonial present. This paper analyses the decoupling of extractive and narrative International Laws, the continuing depredations of the former and the accidental complicity of the latter. It argues that Development and Humanity have never functioned to ameliorate the conditions of the oppressed and exploited. In fact they have operated to entrench and naturalise exploitation.

The paper (in my experience) is suitable for undergraduate and masters level students, and offers an introduction to some of the central themes of the TWAIL movement.

The natural environment and its governance through law have a long history in the global South. As in the global North, nature has been regulated since ancient times through complex plural regimes of sovereign, religious, customary and tribal laws, and in more recent times colonial, state, regional, transnational and international laws. This chapter specifically examines how international lawyers that are part of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement have approached environmental issues and international environmental law. As I am part of this movement and have focused on the environment in recent years, this chapter is a self-reflective critique on a subject of increasing interest within TWAIL. Section 2 introduces TWAIL and explains our continued usage of the term Third World despite allegations of its being anachronistic. Section 3 examines TWAIL and the environment through division into three phases: first, the period following independence, particularly the 1960s and 1970s, where Third World international lawyers prioritized natural resource governance; second, the inauguration of the acronym TWAIL in the 1990s and a movement that remained largely skeptical of and disengaged from international environmental law; and third, the contemporary moment with the resurgence of interest in the environment within TWAIL.

As communities struggle to make sense of mass atrocities, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to render authoritative historical accounts of episodes of mass violence. Taking these expectations as its point of departure, this book seeks to understand international criminal courts through the prism of their historical function. The book critically examines how such courts confront the past by constructing historical narratives concerning both the culpability of the accused on trial and the broader mass atrocity contexts in which they are alleged to have participated.

The book argues that international criminal courts are host to struggles for historical justice, discursive contests between different actors vying for judicial acknowledgement of their interpretations of the past. By examining these struggles within different institutional settings, the book uncovers the legitimating qualities of international criminal judgments. In particular, it illuminates what tends to be foregrounded and included within, as well as marginalised and excluded from, the narratives of international criminal courts in practice. What emerges from this account is a sense of the significance of thinking about the emancipatory limits and possibilities of international criminal courts in terms of the historical narratives that are constructed and contested within and beyond the courtroom.

This article considers the ways in which concerns about economic equalities both among and within countries where taken up in human rights debates of the 1970s and how concerns about economic inequalities impacted on discussion about the possibilities, objectives and conceptions of rights. It shows how scholars and advocates from the global South, concerned about the production of underdevelopment and unequal accumulation, advocated a more 'structural approach' to human rights during this period, that argued that a just international order was necessary for the realization of rights. The article first considers Third World demands for a New International Economic Order to address inequalities among countries, as well as the potentially conflicting focus on inequalities within countries promoted by the World Bank and its subsequent promotion of a 'basic needs' approach to development. Thereafter, it considers how these different approaches to economic inequality were taken up in and influenced human rights debates and frameworks of this period.

The food sovereignty movement has been a powerful force that, over the past several decades, has changed international trade institutions, property rights, and human rights law. Indigenous communities have been part of that movement and have affected how food sovereignty is used and understood as an idea. In this course, we will explore how different communities may want to critically think about food sovereignty in order to decide whether it is an idea and movement worth engaging with, and if so on what terms. At the completion of this course, students will be able to: • Think critically about food sovereignty as a concern of international trade, property, and human rights. • Better understand how food sovereignty has been used by Indigenous communities as a means of strengthening Indigenous governance.

*Winner of the 2017 IALT Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship*

What does it mean to say we live in a permanent state of emergency? What are the juridical, political and social underpinnings of that framing? Has international law played a role in producing or challenging the paradigm of normalised emergency? How should we understand the relationship between imperialism, race and emergency legal regimes? In addressing such questions, this book situates emergency doctrine in historical context. The book has three main aims, broadly mirrored by the three parts into which it is structured. First, it seeks to illustrate some of the particular colonial lineages that have helped shape the concept of the state of emergency, and to emphasise that contemporary formations of emergency governance are often better understood not as new or exceptional, but as part of an ongoing historical constellation of emergency politics. Second, it demonstrates the direct influence of colonial legal traditions on the normative content of contemporary international law in relation to emergency doctrine and human rights derogation provisions. Third, it appraises the continuing legacy of these colonial legal traditions through contemporary settler colonial contexts where emergency powers are deployed in a racialised fashion. With such emergency interventionism facilitated by international law’s doctrine, and unsanctioned by its institutions, we are forced to reckon with fundamental questions about the nature of law and its relation to physical and structural violence.

It is now widely understood that neoliberalism came to be entrenched in the legal systems of many states after the effective collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s. What is not widely understood, though, are the relations between this turn to neoliberalism and the contemporaneous success of international human rights movements. Many scholars now regard the 1970s as critical for the operational “breakthrough” of individualistic human rights. Yet work on the political economy of this “breakthrough,” especially its relation to the consolidation and concomitant normalization of neoliberalism, is still in its infancy. This article attempts to develop a finer understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights by examining the “North-South Commission,” chaired by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Established with the aim of facilitating “dialogue” between the “First World” and the “Third World,” the Group of 7 and the Group of 77, the commission sought unsuccessfully to win support for a model of global political economy in which enhanced aid, lending, debt-relief, investment, and technology transfer would foster economic growth and meet “basic needs” in the South while countering inflation and unemployment in the North. While the commission’s work has generally been understood as a form of global Keynesianism, and is sometimes linked to the New International Economic Order project of the 1970s and early 1980s, I argue that the commission articulated a broadly rights-friendly form of economic development that accommodated certain elements of the neoliberal movement. 

Anna Julia Cooper is rightly celebrated as a Black feminist icon, an educator, a literary theorist, and a pioneer of Africana philosophy; however less attention has been paid to her influence on (Black) Internationalism and, by extension, her (still) pioneering critiques of International Law. In 1900 Cooper was one of two Black women to address the inaugural Pan-African Conference, where she presented a paper on ‘The Negro Problem in America’ and was elected to the Executive Committee of the resultant, short-lived Pan-African Association. This short essay will focus primary on two aspects of Cooper’s intellectual ouvre as they relate to International Law. It does so in order to counter the practice what Brittney Cooper describes as ‘triaging Black women’s histories’, whereby ‘when we have recovered a black woman figure, that is, when we have saved her from being buried and lost to the annals of history, when we know her name and as many details as we can about her life and work, we... move on to the next patient’.  Rather, paraphrasing Brittney Cooper, this essay aims to engage with the content of what Anna Julia Cooper said, and its ‘critical scholarly utility’, even as it celebrates all that she did. In particular it will focus on two concepts introduced (or perhaps anticipated) by Cooper’s work that are central to contemporary understandings of human rights and international law (or should be), namely: ‘intersectionality’ and ‘racial capitalism’.

LLM Subject - 2018 - Kent Law School. Feel free to use it with due acknowledgment.

About the subject: Public International Law is a complex and dynamic field of law, and an extremely important site through which to think about – and act upon – the current global order. After all, the international legal order is everywhere – as you will have noticed every time you switch on the news. The past few years alone have witnessed the attempt to realise the right of peoples to ‘external’ self-determination via collective recognition at the UN (Palestine); a dispute over the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in respect of ‘non-state’ parties to a civil conflict (Colombia); a Security Council-authorised ‘humanitarian’ military intervention into a ‘sovereign’ state (Libya) by the ‘international community’ (in the guise of NATO); a systematic round of interventions by the International Monetary Fund into the Global North in a manner previously reserved for the Global South (Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal); an extremely paradoxical – and extremely violent – rejection/embrace of International Law by a self-proclaimed and yet largely unrecognised ‘state’ (ISIS); the annexation of part of a state (Ukraine) by its neighbour (Russia), supposedly – as a permanent member of the Security Council (Russia) – one of the guardians of the international legal order, and many other global crises in which International Law has played a central role.

In this intensive course, we will be thinking about how the international legal order has shaped situations such as these, as well (apparently) as far more mundane interactions between economic, social, political and cultural actors. In order to focus our attention in this way, the module is organized around four key themes in Public International Law: Subjects, Sources, Jurisdiction and Responsibility, and Force and Violence.

At the most general level, this course will take you step-by-step through the fundamental elements of the discipline of Public International Law. The course will provide you, in this sense, with a detailed understanding of the norms, doctrines and institutions of the international legal order, giving you a relevant and rigorous language and set of techniques with which to analyse and assess world politics, world economics and world history through the lens of International Law.

Importantly, just as you will learn to bring international norms and institutions to bear on politics, economics and history, you will also be encouraged to reverse this relationship, bringing politics, economics and history to bear on international norms and institutions, in order to think more critically about the discipline and its effects. Is International Law always a force for good, or is it possible that it might have contributed to the construction and sustenance of the very problems it is called upon to solve?

Finally, in order to equip you with the tools to apply the knowledge gained in this course critically and broadly, we will be paying special attention to the question of how the doctrine, norms and institutions associated with ‘the international’ influence not only international relations but also our daily life.

""This book 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, TWAIL, Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the book constructs 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 puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely theory of human rights, history, and international law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field
José-Manuel Barreto …………………………………………………… 

Part I:  Critique of the Theory of Human Rights

1. Who Speaks for the “Human” in Human Rights?
        Walter Mignolo …………………………………………………

2. Provincializing Human Rights? The Heideggerian Legacy from Charles Malik to Dipesh Chakrabarty
        Martin Woessner ………………………………………………..

3. The Legacy of Slavery: White Humanities and its Subject
      Sabine Broeck ……………………………………………………

4. “Moral Optics”: Biopolitics, Torture and the Imperial Gaze of War Photography
        Eduardo Mendieta ………………………………………………

Part II:  Signposts for an Alternative History of Human Rights

5. Imperialism and Decolonization as Scenarios of Human Rights History
        José-Manuel Barreto ……………………………………………

6. Las Casas, Vitoria and Suárez, 1514-1617
        Enrique Dussel …………………………………………………

7. The Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity
        Anthony Bogues ………………………………………………

8. Beyond Love and Justice: Natural Law in Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community
      Vincent Lloyd ……………………………………………………

9. Human Rights, Southern Voices: Yash Ghai and Upendra Baxi
      William Twining ………………………………………………

Part III: Decolonizing Constitutional and International Human Rights Law

10. The Rule of Law in India
        Upendra Baxi ……………………………………………………

11. Eddie Mabo and Namibia: Land Reform and Precolonial Land Rights
        Nico Horn ………………………………………………………

12. Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
        Susan Waltz ………………………………………………………

13. Forging a Global Culture of Human Rights: Origins and Prospects of the International Bill of Rights
        Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat …………………………………………

14. Mode d’assujetissement: Charles Malik, Carlos Romulo and the Emergence of the United Nations Human Rights Regime
        Glenn Mitoma ……………………………………………………


LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Juanita and Joseph Leff Professor and
Chair of Political Science at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is the author of Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries (iUniverse, 2003), Human Rights Worldwide: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2006) and Insan Haklarý ve Demokrasi Üzerine Tezler (Boyut Yayýnlarý, 2007).

José-Manuel Barreto is Visiting Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of De los Derechos, las Garantías y los Deberes (with Libardo Sarmiento, Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 1998). His works have appeared in collections such as Critical Legal Theory (Routledge, 2011) and Critical International Law: Post-Realism, Post-Colonialism, and Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Upendra Baxi held the position of Professor of Law at the University of Delhi and served as Professor of Law in Development, University of Warwick. His publications include The Future of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Anthony Bogues is Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science, Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (Pluto, 1997), Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (Routledge, 2003) and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom, and Desire (University Press of New England, 2010).

Sabine Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen. She is the author of White Amnesia - Black Memory? Women's Writing and History (Peter Lang, 1999) and Der entkolonisierte Koerper. Die Protagonistin in der afro-amerikanischen weiblichen Erzähltradition der 30er bis 80er Jahre (Campus, 1988). She is currently President of the International Collegium for African-American Research (CAAR).

Enrique Dussel is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Mexico. His publications include Ethics of Liberation in the age of Globalization and Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2012), Twenty Theses on Politics (Duke University Press, 2008) and The Invention of the Americas. Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity (Continuum, 1995).

Nico Horn is Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Namibia. He is the author of Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Namibia (with A Bösl, MacMillan 2008) and The Human Face in the Globalizing World, Ten Years of Human Rights Education (with M.O. Hinz and C. Mchombu, University of Namibia, 2002). 

Vincent Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Religion, Syracuse University. He is the author of The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York. He is the author of Global Fragments: Latinamericanism, Globalizations, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007) and Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Walter Mignolo is William Wannamaker Professor of Literature, Duke University. His publications include The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke University Press, 2012), The Idea of Latin America (Blackwell, 2005) and Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Glenn Mitoma is Assistant Professor, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut. His research interests include the history and contemporary working of universal human rights as discourse, structure, and practices, and is currently focused on developing a “human rights biography” of Charles H. Malik.

William Twinning is Emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London. His publications include General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective, (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and How to Do Things With Rules (with David Miers, CUP, 2010). He is the editor of Human Rights: Southern Voices (CUP, 2009).

Susan Waltz is Professor of International Relations and Public Policy, University of Michigan. She has written “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of Muslim States.” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2004) and “Reclaiming and Rebuilding the History of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Third World Quarterly, 2002. She currently sits on the Board of Amnesty International-USA.
Martin Woessner is Assistant Professor of History & Society, The City College of New York's Center for Worker Education (CUNY). He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
""

The universal promise of contemporary international law has long inspired countries of the Global South to use it as an important field of contestation over global inequality. Taking three central examples, Sundhya Pahuja argues that this promise has been subsumed within a universal claim for a particular way of life by the idea of 'development'. As the horizon of the promised transformation and concomitant equality has receded ever further, international law has legitimised an ever-increasing sphere of intervention in the Third World. The post-war wave of decolonisation ended in the creation of the developmental nation-state, the claim to permanent sovereignty over natural resources in the 1950s and 1960s was transformed into the protection of foreign investors, and the promotion of the rule of international law in the early 1990s has brought about the rise of the rule of law as a development strategy in the present day.

Winner, 2012 American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit.

International law was invented in 1789 when Jeremy Bentham introduced the term to replace the outmoded “Law of Nations.”  Since then, international lawyers have spent a lot of time thinking about whether international law is in fact law, and little or no time considering how international law is international, or what international actually means. In this Article, I want to suggest that, with the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, the term international came to incorporate elements of both the terms world and global: as an imaginary, a world international lawyers lived inside (and produced), and a global perspective they took of (and used to take from) its Others.

In particular, I aim to show that this “international” was a racial imaginary—a White International (or “White World” in W.E.B. Du Bois’s terms)—that emerged from and reinforced Global White Supremacy.  This White World was consecrated as the de jure international order with the founding of the League of Nations after World War I, and the sociopolitical system of Global White Supremacy (or “Racial Contract” in Charles W. Mills’s terms) underpinning this international survived its formal demise with decolonization.

The whiteness of this international—both historically and in the present—has been rendered invisible to most international lawyers, however, in part because of the current conceptualization of race by both mainstream and critical accounts of the discipline.  In order to begin to unwhiten it, Part I of this Article rereads existing historical and theoretical accounts of the discipline, arguing that aside from the racial aphasia that characterizes the mainstream, critical scholarship is prone to either overparticularize, or underhistoricize, the role that race has and continues to play.

Part II of this Article then reconsiders the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, arguing that it was only thinkable and possible because of the racial imaginary—the “White World” or the “international”—that its founders (that is, the Men of 1873) assumed and reproduced, one that was based on a particular biological conceptualization of race.  It aims to show how, paraphrasing W.E.B. Du Bois, the Men of 1873 discovered that they were white and international, and, by that token, wonderful, at the same time.

In Part III, this Article turns to the Black Internationalist fiction of W.E.B. Du Bois and George Schuyler to show how, in Dark Princess and The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World, respectively, these scholars not only recognized this “white international” as a sociopolitical system of Global White Supremacy, but they also set out to map its conditions of making and unmaking. This Article will end by considering how Black Internationalist fiction more generally might be read for what Charles W. Mills calls “alternate clocks and maps of global racial resistance” and as tools for unwhitening both the "International" and the world.

Despite being declared a crime against humanity by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, and being the subject of a convention which more than half the states in the world have signed up to that demands its punishment, there has never been a single prosecution of the crimes against humanity of apartheid committed in South Africa. This paper interrogates the commitment of the ‘invisible college of international (criminal) lawyers’ to never prosecute the crime against humanity of apartheid, both at Rome in 1998 and more recently in the efforts by the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative and International Law Commission to produce a specialized convention on the subject. It argues that, at best, the ‘symbolic’ inclusion of apartheid in the latter signifies this commitment to never prosecute apartheid once again (this time at the domestic level). At worst, it discloses the racial politics of international criminal law that render the prosecution of the crimes committed by the West or in its name not only untimely, but unthinkable.

Struggles 'over' international law in the period between 1955 and 1974 should be understood not as a battle to control a pre-existing international law in an extant world, but instead as marking a series of encounters between rival practices of world making, each of which travelled with rival accounts of international law. The question of the corporation, how it should be conceptualized, and its proper relation to law and state, was a key element of those rival stories. In this chapter, we will deploy a novel methodological orientation toward an 'historically inflected jurisprudence', to the (successful) effort to establish the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations, and the (unsuccessful) attempt to draft a binding convention on Trans National Corporations. This telling institutional moment reveals that the struggle over the proper understanding of the relationship between international law, the state, and corporation-which-travels was a struggle between rival practices of authorization, invoking both the authorship of worlds, as well as the authority to govern them. Paying attention to such practices shows us that the battle lines were drawn in ways which upset the comfortable rehearsal of a North-South divide. Anti-colonial struggles, the incipient 'Cold War', the invention of Development, and the implementation of a (Marshall) Plan to (re)construct Europe, all played into the generation of rival imaginaries and competing anxieties, producing unexpected commonalities include coalitions across North and South, and instructive alliances of interest between 'public' and 'private' actors. Slowing down our study of this moment reveals that much of what was a stake then remains so today, and that other worlds are still possible.

This study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of world literature and international human rights law are related phenomena. The author argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call the free and full development of the human personality. Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, the author suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the author focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neo-imperialism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism.

We are witnessing environmental change unseen in millions of years: The sixth mass extinction of species, the changing climate, the dying oceans and dwindling forests, the spreading deserts, the increasing toxicity of our water, air and soil, and the complex interrelatedness between these phenomena. In attempting to formulate adequate responses, communities, activists, technical experts, academics, as well as law and policymakers, are increasingly turning to the notion of environmental justice for guidance. Before examining reasons for such a turn, it is worth stating that I am among those making this move, and this Chapter is self-reflexive participation in constructing what environmental justice means for the Global South. I am an international law scholar and practitioner in the Global South and part of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. My assessment of environmental justice is colored by my location, profession, and politics. I judge the utility of environmental justice against the backdrop of how effective international law has heretofore been for addressing the environmental concerns of the Global South.

The concept of environmental justice has its origins in the United States in the 1980s when it was used to describe the unequal impact of industrial pollution on racial minorities. From these beginnings, over the last four decades the idea has blossomed, expanding both geographically and historically to encompass variegated environmental struggles worldwide, including those from centuries past. Why does this concept have such resonance and wherein lies its usefulness? This chapter examines these questions from the point of view of the Global South. I begin with some background on what is meant by the Global South and by environmental justice. I then use the customary four-pillar formulation of environmental justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, corrective justice, and social justice – to explain the different theoretical and practical ways in which this concept is helpful for understanding environmental struggles across the Global South.

Environmental justice is an important framework for understanding the North–South divide in many areas of international law and policy, including energy, climate, hazardous wastes, and food. An environmental justice analysis makes visible the ways in which the global North benefits from unsustainable economic activity while imposing the environmental consequences on the global South and on the planet's most vulnerable human beings, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and the poor. This chapter applies an environmental justice analysis to the global food system, analyzes the underlying causes of the inequities in food production and consumption, and outlines several strategies to create a more equitable and sustainable approach to global food governance.