The journal of Third World Quarterly has recently published a special issue on the Third World Approach to International Law.
Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is a movement encompassing scholars and practitioners of international law and policy who are concerned with issues related to the Global South. The scholarly agendas associated with TWAIL are diverse, but the general theme of its interventions is to unpack and deconstruct the colonial legacies of international law and engage in efforts to decolonise the lived realities of the peoples of the Global South.
In addition to important critical analysis to theoretical fundamentals relevant to the study of the Third World, the special issue also deals with more immediate praxical questions of if, how, and when to deploy international legal argument, whether as sword, shield, or strategy of rupture. The concept is engaged in an open manner, in order to avoid an essentialised Third World identity, but to deconstruct it, so as to allow for a fuller disciplinary engagement with the plural, hybrid, ever-evolving, and contested performance of identity everywhere.
Some of the chapters worth reading are:
- The Third World intellectual in praxis: confrontation, participation, or operation behind enemy lines?
- On fighting for global justice: the role of a Third World international lawyer
- Disrupting civility: amateur intellectuals, international lawyers and TWAIL as praxis
- Migration, development and security within racialised global capitalism: refusing the balance game