Newness, Imperialism and International Legal Reform in Our Time: A TWAIL Perspective

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2023

Source Publication

Lyons, D. (Ed.). (2023). Leading Works in International Law (1st ed.). Routledge.

Abstract

This chapter offers my reflections, grounded in part on the relevant empirical evidence, on how my 2004 journal article that goes by the same title has influenced the field of international law, and especially the development of ‘Critical Third World Approaches to International Law’ (TWAIL). The article at issue is concerned with how claims regarding the supposedly radical or highly significant ‘newness’ of certain crises are deployed to legitimise international legal reform projects that have had, or are likely to have, a tendency to facilitate or justify longstanding imperial ambitions. The article argues that: (a) the deeply political practice of asserting the kinds of newness claims discussed above allows its proponents to better justify the implementation of longstanding, but previously far less tenable, international law reform projects; (b) it is only through the displacement of third-world suffering from internationalist consciousness that the construction of this ‘post-9/11’ world as a significantly new world order has been made possible; and (c) TWAIL analysis is extremely useful international law optic/methodology with which to better understand and deal with the processes through which these newness claims are deployed to render significantly more tenable the international law-reform projects that are thus undergirded.

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