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The Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA) was enacted in December, 2013. Manitoba is the second Canadian province to enact accessibility standards legislation. The first province was Ontario, which enacted the Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2001, and, later, a more fortified and enforceable Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. The AMA presents a strong set of philosophical and social goals. Its philosophical goals mark accessibility as a human right, and aim to improve the health, independence and well-being of persons with disabilities. The AMA’s social goals have the potential to make a positive impact on the development of equality law norms within the context of disability discrimination. Nevertheless, the AMA would be strengthened with a more robust and explicit appreciation of how disability discrimination issues are experienced. The Act should show a greater recognition of the relevance of embodied impairment to individuals with disabilities, and there should be more significant scope for the statute to address intersectionality within disability discrimination. These two challenges replicate the two principal critiques of the social model of disability –the model of disability on which the AMA is based. Finally, for the legislation to be successful, issues of compliance and enforcement that require positive uses of discretion on the part of the civil service should be addressed early on. The findings of this article may be useful for the implementation of the AMA and for the design of future accessibility legislation in Canada and elsewhere.

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse.

This article will detail an event of revolutionary action in the historiography of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle in Iraq, namely al-Wathba (‘the leap’) of 1948, utilising it as an example to address the limitations of the methodology and analysis of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship. I will argue that there is a disconnect between notions of agency and structure in TWAIL analyses and that therefore TWAIL scholars should consider studying the conjunctures that allowed certain movements ample room to struggle against the imperialism of international law in the first place. I will use the example of the Wathba to illustrate how a conjunctural analysis may be undertaken, analysing its implications for the international legal order. I will then move to highlight the significance of labour to the conjuncture in question. Finally, I will demonstrate how events like the Wathba illuminate the transient and provisional nature of the foundations of international law, while emphasising its structural constraints.

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.

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own right.

This article explores the dynamics of diversity and inclusion in the context of boards of directors in the nonprofit sector. Our multimethod study builds on current diversity research by exploring social microprocesses of inclusion in diverse governing groups. We consider functional and social approaches to inclusion within boards, and address the potential for more transformative inclusion. Our findings suggest significant opportunities for meaningful change by shifting focus from diversity to inclusive practices within diverse groups.

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.