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Taking into account what we have already learned so far from Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars, Indigenous scholars, and other critical race scholars, in this short chapter we try to unpack the meaning and scope of race and ethnicity, through our own standpoints. First, we provide a critical overview of the race and ethnicity scholarship, paying close attention to the commentary of a few key interlocutors for our project in the short space of this chapter in the much larger project of this handbook. Next, we examine the place of race, and its displacement by ethnicity, in international law and regional human rights instruments. Tracking the social and scholarly move from biological determinism to social construction of what these concepts signify, we also assess the pragmatic and ideological reasons for a parallel ambiguity of these terms in international and human rights law. Ultimately, following our key interlocutors, we see this lack of definition and displacement of race as a tactic in the larger project of splitting solidarities and resetting the uneasy routes to more radical worldmaking. We conclude by briefly discussing two cases that show the pitfalls of juridification and the sometimes unintended and unsolicited transformations wrought by “ethnoracial” litigation.
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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.