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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 paper brings forward Justice Pal's dissenting opinion at the Tokyo Tribunal to add to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) literature on international criminal law and the rules of evidence and procedure. It is part of a TWAIL effort to scrutinize the everyday practices of international prosecutions through procedural and evidentiary rules. By locating and situating Justice Pal's reasoning within the broader academic literature on dissents in international criminal law, it is possible to illustrate how and why Justice Pal's views were obscured as a relevant dissent. From this vantage point, this paper pursues Justice Pal's legacy as it relates to the rules of evidence and procedure in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It traces the evolution of the judicial power to draft and amend these rules, and examines the impact of these decisions on the everyday functions of the tribunals and how truth is determined.

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.

Based on an empirical review of post-RDS caselaw, I argue that there is a demonstrable colour blindness within the existing jurisprudence on judicial impartiality. I illustrate this colour blind approach through two arguments. The first argument is based on the evidence needed to pierce the veil of judicial impartiality. A large number of the cases surveyed illustrate the propensity of decision makers to deny recusal arguments based on the cogency of the evidence. In these cases of colour blind decision making, the presented evidence was deemed insufficient to warrant piercing the veil of judicial impartiality. The second argument focuses on judges that adopt an antiracist perspective. When judges have relied on social science evidence to engage in contextual and antiracist judging, they have been policed and their decisions overturned by supervisory and appellate courts.

Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann’s ‘The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era’ (Battle for International Law) is an ambitious undertaking. The editors along with their gathered authors explore ‘the battle’ waged by the newly formed independent states, as they arrived on the international scene from prolonged periods of colonization. What […]

Global administrative law scholars have argued that global administrative law’s principles and normativity can bring about legitimacy to global governance institutions, and subsequently benefit the people of the Global South. I challenge these recent arguments that suggest global administrative law has managed to incorporate the concerns of the Third World. I caution international lawyers’ attempts to theorize global governance as administration to fill the democracy gap within the global space. My arguments are premised on the history of domestic administrative law and its uses to facilitate the settler colonial project in places like North America. I first examine the two animating claims within global administrative law and then focus, based on taxonomies available within the current literature, on procedural administrative law. The procedural argument has been developed by American legal scholars who want to deploy their common law based notions of administrative law within the global space. Based on this analysis, I develop and deploy a case study from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as illustration of judicial review within an international criminal institution set up by the UN Security Council. In the final section, I challenge global administrative lawyers’ arguments that global administrative law can be a tool of emancipation for the people of the Global South based on the ICTR case study.

This Special Issue emerges from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Cairo Conference in 2015 and addresses the conference theme, ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, by focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as a political actor. In introducing this Issue, we provide some background to the TWAIL network, movement, event, and publications; and delineate our own understandings of scholarly praxis as editors and conference organisers. Broadly, we understand 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.

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 signals to 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 focus 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.

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.

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,1 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).2

Professor Ladeur argues that administrative law's postmodernism (and by extension Global Administrative Law) necessitates that we move beyond relying on ideas of delegation, accountability and legitimacy. Global Governance, particularly Global Administrative Law and Global Constitutionalism, should try to adapt and experiment with the changing nature of the postmodern legality and support the creation of norms that will adapt to the complexities of globalisation. Ladeur's contestation, similar to GAL's propositions, can be challenged. By taking the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a significant contributor to the field of international criminal law, as an example, it is suggested that the creation of networks that Ladeur makes visible may not account for ‘regulatory capture’. This paper will argue that from the outside, the proliferation of networks may suggest that spontaneous accountability is possible. A closer look, however, drawing on anthropological insights from the ICTR, reveals that international institutions are susceptible to capture by special interests. Furthermore, there are two central themes that animate the response to Professor Ladeur: the political nature of international institutions and the history of international law, and the role of institutions in this history.

Victor Kattan's “From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949” is an archival excavation of the Israeli-Palestinian (Arab-Israeli) conflict and its origins. This review will examine the contours of Kattan's book followed by a brief examination of objectivity in academic scholarship often enunciated through the concept of ‘balance’ as it relates to those scholars (like Kattan) working on the conflict. Finally, this review will explore some of the weakness of the arguments that Kattan advances.