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"Pahuja, Sundhya"
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Decolonising international law : development, economic growth, and the politics of universality
\"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\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Not to save, but to encounter: Fitzpatrick as transnational jurisprudent
This essay sketches the lineaments of the relationship between international law and the jurisprudence of Peter Fitzpatrick. It argues that Fitzpatrick was a model ‘transnational jurisprudent’ who accepted responsibility for the ongoing conduct of lawful relations, even as he offered a thoroughgoing critique of occidental law. For the occidentally trained international lawyer, Fitzpatrick's work offers a way to take up that responsibility by reimagining international law through its historical roots as a parochial law of encounter.
Journal Article
The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South
International interventions of all kinds-humanitarian, military, developmental, and financial-are usually predicated on the idea that a state, which has emerged endogenously from \"the people\" \"within,\" is being \"assisted\" from \"outside\"-to develop, to overcome civil war, to govern itself better. Such interventions are neither imagined nor constructed in law as actions that impose and stabilize a legal form, \"the nation-state,\" from \"outside,\" disciplining it from \"within,\" to actualize and maintain that particular form. Indeed, the authority of international law as well as the operation of the international legal order relies on the twin myths that ground this reading: first, that states are independent juridical institutional formations that come into being once they are formed in \"fact\" and which are only later \"recognized\" as a matter of international law; and second, that sovereign states come before a law that they have consensually created.2 A classic textbook statement reflecting this mythic grounding might be, \"In international law ... it is the states themselves that create the law and obey or disobey it.\"3 And yet this predicate is not only mythic but fictional: a fiction that conceals the world-making-via state-making-work of international law and institutions. This work is now intensifying in both scope and violence.In this essay, we redescribe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the imagined directionality of the flow that sequences nation-states coming first and international law second.5 At its most provocative, our argument is that, rather than international law being a creation of the state, making and remaking the state is a project of international law. We pay particular attention here to the institutionalized project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law creates and maintains nation-states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points \"within\" them.6 Understanding this process is particularly important when trying to make sense of the pasts and presents of the Global South, but is increasingly relevant to understanding reconfigurations of states in the north, too.
Journal Article
Reading Modern Law
Reading Modern Law identifies and elaborates upon key critical methodologies for reading and writing about law in modernity. The force of law rests on determinate and localizable authorizations, as well as an expansive capacity to encompass what has not been pre-figured by an order of rules. The key question this dynamic of law raises is how legal forms might be deployed to confront and disrupt injustice. The urgency of this question must not eclipse the care its complexity demands. This book offers a critical methodology for addressing the many challenges thrown up by that question, whilst testifying to its complexity. The essays in this volume - engagements direct or oblique, with the work of Peter Fitzpatrick - chart a mode of resisting the proliferation of social scientific methods, as much as geo-political empire. The authors elaborate a critical and interdisciplinary treatment of law and modernity, and outline the pivotal role of sovereignty in contemporary formations of power, both national and international. From various overlapping vantage points, therefore, Reading Modern Law interrogates law's relationship to power, as well as its relationship to the critical work of reading and writing about law in modernity.
eBook
Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law
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 travellers. 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.
Journal Article
