Race and Ethnicity in International Law on the Americas: From a ‘Regime of Truth’ to a ‘Dynamic of Indifference’

Author ORCID Identifier

Amar Bhatia: 0009-0007-1883-1899

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

8-21-2025

Source Publication

Liliana Obregón Tarazona, and others (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Law and the Americas (online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Feb. 2023 - ), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197661062.013.67

Keywords

race; ethnicity; international law; TWAIL; dynamic of indifference; settler colonialism

Abstract

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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