SYMPOSIUM THIRD WORLD APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW Foreword (original) (raw)

Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law (with Sundhya Pahuja)

2012

Third World Approaches to International Law, or ‘TWAIL’, is a response to both the colonial and postcolonial ethos of international law. It is also one of the most explicitly articulated juridical and political spaces in which to think about an international law beyond its (post)coloniality. In this article, we describe TWAIL as having a characteristic ‘double engagement’ with the attitudes of both reform and resistance vis-à-vis international law and scholarship. This double engagement has the potential to provide us with the tools both to delineate the (post)colonial character of international law, and to work actively toward a meaningfully plural international normative order. This latter possibility arises from a nascent conceptualisation within TWAIL scholarship of a universality that is compatible with an understanding of international law as an agonistic (and not imperial) project. To make good the tantalising potential of this ‘new’ universal, we suggest an explicit methodological move for TWAIL and its fellow travelers. Such a move involves paying attention to international law as a ‘material project’. By being attentive to the daily operation of international law on the mundane or ‘material’ plane of everyday life, it may be possible to generate a ‘praxis’ of (the new) universality. Such a praxis would trouble the way places and subjects are currently constituted in the name of the international and its (post)colonial ethos. Crucially, it would make intelligible to international legal scholarship the numerous forms of resistance already at play in the struggle against the (post)colonial normative order now being institutionalised and administered across the world.

TRAIL-ing TWAIL: Arguments and Blind Spots in Third World Approaches to International Law

Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 2014

Beginning in the early 1990s, Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship (TWAIL) destabilized the mainstream narrative within international law that its doctrines were constituted by the historic search for order between formally equal state sovereigns. Instead, TWAIL scholars argued that the key constitutive dynamic of the discipline was the colonial experience, which continues to hold powerful sway over the legal architecture of global regulation whereby international law functions to perpetuate inequality and oppression. At the same time, however, TWAIL scholarship regularly posits international law as an emancipatory force that may be mobilized on behalf of former colonized populations and other marginalized social identities. The rise of post-Marxist scholarship, and more generally, the turn to interdisciplinary within the profession in recent years offers an opportunity to analyze this curious paradox and construct alternative modes of analysis for future TWAIL scholarship. In the first section, the paper draws upon a diverse array of TWAIL scholars over the last thirty years to map the argumentative logic within TWAIL literature. In the second section, the paper incorporates debates and insights from complimentary academic disciplines to illuminate some blind spots within TWAIL’s central arguments, and potentially ‘radicalize’ its future possibility of critique against the growing inequality within global governance.

Between Resistance and Reform: TWAIL and the Universality of International Law (with Sundhya Pahuja)

2011

In this article we explore the relationship between TWAIL scholarship and the universality of international law. In particular, we offer an account of this relation as the outcome of what we describe as TWAIL’s characteristic double engagement with the attitudes of both reform and revolution vis-à-vis international law and scholarship. In being thoroughly critical of the cornerstones of the established order, and yet engaged with the practice and operation of international law at the same time, TWAIL scholars have intimated in their search for justice, an idea of universality capable of accepting international law as an agonic project. To further its political engagement with the universal promise of international law, we suggest an explicit methodological turn for TWAIL scholarship that is attentive to international law as a material project. By paying attention to the daily operation of international law at the mundane, quotidian and material plane, we suggest that TWAIL can sharpen its analytical potential and generate at the same time, a ‘praxis of universality’. Such a praxis would be capable of troubling the constitution of places and subjects in the name of the international, whilst heightening our sensitivity to the numerous forms of resistance that are already at play as a particular normative project is being institutionalised and administered across the world.

Third World Approaches to International Criminal Law

Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2016

Scholars working under the moniker of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) are well-placed to capturethe ambiguities and ambivalences of ‘tribunalized’ responses to various forms of atrocity. In this symposium, we consider the field of international criminal justice as a particular site of contestation in TWAIL’s interaction with international law, and explore it as a surface over which broader debates of concern to TWAIL sensibilities (such as radicalism v. reform, hegemony v. universality, and international law’s double movements of emancipation and exclusion) play out. What does it mean to think about international criminal law’s norms, rules, institutions and procedures through the frames of the colonial past or imperial present? What biases, blind spots, political moves and rhetorical tropes emerge from the ways in which international criminal justice mechanisms navigate the racial and socio-economic cleavages that persist between North and South? Of particular concern for the authors in this symposium is the issue of whether and how TWAIL can enrich the practice of, and scholarship on, international criminal law. The question here is whether TWAIL can be more than simply reflexively critical, and whether it can identify possibilities and alternatives to that which it problematizes, and new avenues of exploration for scholars working outside of the TWAIL tradition.

'The Dark Corners of the World': TWAIL and International Criminal Justice

Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2016

Despite international criminal law’s historically contingent doctrines and embedded biases,Third World self-determination movements continue to be enticed by international criminal justice as a potentially emancipatory project. This article seeks to peer inside the structural anatomy of the international criminal law enterprise from a vantage point oriented to the global South. It reflects broadly on discourses of international criminal law and its exponents as they relate to the global South, and explores one particularly contentious issue in the politics of international criminal law - that of operational selectivity. Redressing such selectivities as they arise from geopolitical biases is an important first step for any reconstruction of the field of international criminal justice. The article emphasizes, however, the need to also look beyond the problems of unequal enforcement, to reconceptualize the forms of violence criminalized at the design level.We ask whether, given certain colonial features, the premise and promise of international criminal justice can - for self-determination struggles or anti-imperial movements in the global South - be anything more than illusory. Drawing on the perspectives of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the article concludes with some thoughts on what ‘TWAILing’ the field of international criminal justice might entail.