Your search

This paper explores the various means by which we can overcome the universalism imbedded in international law and international institutions. It asks: How can international lawyers and international law scholars learn from the Global South? This ‘how’ question prompts another, but related question: should we learn from the Global South? There is a rich interdisciplinary body of literature that identifies the Global South, or Europe’s other, as a site of knowledge production. The eurocentrism of the social sciences can be identified by examining the various founding fathers of their respective theories (especially sociology). This paper builds on southern theory in order to learn from these diverse perspectives in theorising global governance. This paper is organised in three sections. First, it sets out the rationale for a reorientation towards the Global South by examining the current state of global governance theory. In the second section, this paper focuses on the broad theoretical foundations of the Third World Approaches to International Law [TWAIL] movement. TWAIL scholarship is a reaction against the colonial and imperial projects of international law. Its main claims are set out and then there is an examination of its proposals as a means to arrive at an answer to the second question: should we learn from the Global South? In the final section, this paper explores the question of how we can learn from the Global South. In answering this question, the author offers two insights. The first is based on the premise of international law as a field of practice. The second attempts to problematise the ethics of international legal scholarship.

I use the United Nations Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka’s recommendation to create an international mechanism and recent demands for justice as a springboard to argue that the creation of a new ad hoc international or hybrid criminal tribunal for Sri Lanka may not produce the expected results of prosecuting those responsible for mass human rights violations. I argue that such an initiative will not heal the ruptures and cleavages among the different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka. By teasing out the political nature of international criminal law and the embedded nature of the history of international law, this chapter suggests that the creation of an international institution may not bring to justice the divergent perpetrators of war crimes. Rather, the politics of international institutions and the history of international law may allow for ‘regulatory capture’ and the continuing rise of international experts as seen through the illustrative history of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders (GLP) by Paul Schiff Berman is a legal pluralist’s contribution to the study of local and global regulation. In a tour de force, Berman articulates clear and concise arguments in support of adopting a pluralist lens (coined as a cosmopolitan pluralist perspective). He magnificently traverses the multiple and complex bodies of literature that seek to understand the various inchoate regulatory regimes, actors, norms, and processes, to simply state that we must harness the benefits of the overlapping legal authorities. The overlapping legal authorities for Berman produce legal hybridity, which is a product of globalization(s).

Every May 18, mourners gather near the sandy beaches of Mullivaikkal, a small strip between Chundikulam and Mulltaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, to commemorate the 2009 genocide against the Tamils. Mullivaikkal is where approximately three hundred thousand Tamil civilians found refuge as they fled the military bombardment between January and May 2009.1 Starting in 2010, the remembrance day commemoration attracts thousands of locals, coming together near the beach to reflect and remember. Increasingly, the commemoration also attracts transitional justice experts, along with diplomats and international governmental organization workers. In my contribution, I reflect on the work of the local and diaspora Tamil transitional justice experts as they begin to gather evidence from the families of victims for the newly created 2024 Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation. Drawing on Homer's The Odyssey and the story of the “lotus eaters,” I frame these experts as “truth eaters,” preoccupied with collecting victim narratives for the purpose of personal gratification. As they engage in the repeated collection of particular elements of the victims’ truth—elements predicated on the demands of the field of transitional justice—the truth eaters are oblivious to the root causes of the war. I explain how attention to root causes through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens can avoid the effects of the dominant liberal modes of truth seeking reflected in the work of these truth eaters.

This past August, I participated in the Blanket Exercise organized by the Faculty of Law University of Windsor with our incoming law students. The narrative exercise, designed by KAIROS (though sli…

Featured image courtesy Sydesian Transitional justice is a popular term in present day Sri Lanka. It is the means by which the various parties to the conflict have decided to bring about justice an…

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University’s Challenging Conventions! Speaker Series organized Re-Igniting Critical Race: A Symposium on Contemporary Accounts of Racialization in Canada on November 2, 2012.  The symposium sought to explore critical race theory and its praxis within the Canadian legal academy by inviting emerging scholars and practitioners to engage with the scholarship of Professor Patricia Williams.

With this brief introduction to a special issue of the Osgoode Hall Law School Comparative Law and Political Economy Research Paper Series, we hope to evoke some of the discussions and background preparation that invigorated the 2010 Osgoode Graduate Law Students' Association conference.

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.

Fathima Cader & Sujith Xavier discuss conceptualisations and practices of solidarity in response to genocidal violence against Tamils and Palestinians.

Sujith Xavier & Ntina Tzouvala introduce our series of reflections on ‘Teaching International Law: Between Critique and the Canon’.

The 2005 Supreme Court decision of Chaoulli v. Quebec (A.G.) is the most significant Canadian case vis-a-vis health care rights in the last decade. The two litigants were Dr. Chaoulli, a physician originally from France who was frustrated with governmental limits on his ability to practice privately, and George Zeliotis, a sixty-seven-year-old patient with hip and heart conditions who had to wait nine months for a hip operation. Mr. Zeliotis thought that if he were able to purchase private insurance then he could have financed his hip operation in the private sector. Chaoulli and Zeliotis were unsuccessful at both the trial and appeal levels but struck controversial success before the Supreme Court of Canada.

This article examines the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and violence in Sri Lanka through the combined lenses of international economic law (IEL) and transitional justice. We argue that colonialism instantiates vicious cycles in the histories of violence of ethno-racial capitalism through the creation of states with debts that can never be repaid. This system of ‘indebted impunity’ persists even under ‘new’ Southern sovereigns. We illustrate how IEL and transitional justice are co-constitutive in maintaining international law’s racial hierarchies, while pursuing the construction of racial hierarchies that precipitate ethno-racial capitalist formations, and violence, in Sri Lanka. We first attend to the emergence of international law with racial capitalism as a story of sustained violence, where offshoots like IEL and transitional justice remain tied to the foundational violence in ways that cannot be reformed away. The final section examines the colonial transformation of Sri Lanka, focusing on the British Empire’s role in configuring ethno-racial communities, to consider how IEL and transitional justice work together to maintain this cycle. We observe that indebted impunity persists as a structural condition even when the ‘white’ colonial masters have formally departed, and ‘brown’ differentially racialized compatriots become the ones in charge.