Third World Approaches to International Law ― On Praxis and the Intellectual

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.

Amar Bhatia is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. His research focuses on transnational migration in a settler-colonial context and the intersection of immigration law, Aboriginal law, treaty relations, and Indigenous legal traditions.

Usha Natarajan is Assistant Professor of International Law and Associate Director of the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Her research is multidisciplinary, utilising Third World and postcolonial approaches to international law to provide an interrelated understanding of the relationship between international law and issues of development, migration, environment, and conflict.

John Reynolds is Lecturer in International Law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research focuses on the operation of international law in states of emergency and in contexts of conflict, crisis, and coloniality.

Sujith Xavier joined the University of Windsor Faculty of Law in January of 2014 as an Assistant Professor. His interests span domestic and international legal theory, international law, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), as well as the intersections of law and society with an emphasis on race, colonialism and imperialism, gender, and sexuality.