International Law

Both the proponents and critics of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) have called for a closer examination of the state of affairs in Third World countries, as opposed to the sole focus of examining the impact of colonialism and Western action, to explain and understand the impact of international law on these countries. The aim for such a call, mainly of the critics, appears to be the need to highlight the role of actors within the Third World in the existing socio-economic and political conditions and the problems in these countries. While conceding the share of responsibility of Third World leadership for the ongoing cycle of problems faced by Third World people, the call of TWAIL scholars primarily focuses on the grander objective of elevating Third World voices, narratives, and discourse into a meaningful mainstream position. Oreva Olakpe’s book makes a great contribution in this respect. It methodically examines the understanding of international law and its impact on the everyday lives of people in the Global South. It does so by solely relying on sources of knowledge in the Global South. The book makes a crucial epistemological intervention that seriously questions the status quo of knowledge production in international law, which heavily relies on the laws, policies, and experiences of the Global North, and asserts the vitality of shifting to the laws, policies, and experiences of the Global South to generate knowledge

Opening with the impact of untold narratives, Oreva Olakpe’s book, South-South Migrations, and the Law from Below, analyses South-South migrants in international law through a TWAIL lens. It considers ‘stories of building community, finding justice outside the protections of the state, and of their struggles against discrimination and exclusion within a state that does not recognize international migrant and refugee protections.’ (2) It weaves the experiences of undocumented migrants in the spaces that they are occupying while situating the impact of their experiences in international legal work. The book intentionally centers on undocumented communities as subjects of international law to map how they interact, shape, and resist in their own spaces. Doing so, the book critiques dominant literature that treats the Global South as objects of international law. The book attests to the agencies of undocumented migrants.

International legal scholarship on migration remains obsessively focused on migration from the global north to the global south. Even knowledge production anchored in critical traditions within international law, such as Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), tends to skew in the direction of analysis that centers Third World encounters with the First. This general orientation comes at the costly expense of a deeper understanding of what Oreva Olakpe terms “South-South migrations” in her powerful intervention addressing this glaring shortcoming in the literature. Neglect of detailed study of experiences of international law in the global south, and in South-South relations, results in more than a merely incomplete picture of the nature of international law.

International court decisions, the corruption of the elite in the Global South, and the refusal of states to uphold their obligations towards people who are excluded from the privileges of citizenship shape how migrants experience law, as well as how they forge their paths to justice, recognition, and access. This book and symposium contribute to efforts to understand and document how international law impacts migrant communities, but also how these communities fill the lacunae created by law and migrant status through their acts of contestation and innovative approaches. It delves into the evolving approaches to migration and international obligations in the two states as they face new migration-related challenges.

This long-awaited book provides a fresh view of how international law is forged, implemented and practiced in Africa, offering a global vision of the position that the African continent presently occupies in the international legal order. In addition to some contributions by European authors, the book mostly gathers young African scholars (including the editor, one of the most promising African international lawyers of our times) who consider different aspects of international law.

International criminal practice reflects biases toward high-resource languages, affluent states, and prestigious institutions. Along with its many benefits, digitalization of international criminal evidence has begun to further entrench some of the distance between differentially situated individuals. This post seeks to address the role that digital solidarity should play in the collection and analysis of international criminal evidence. Incorporating aspects of digital solidarity into the field of international criminal law would help address asymmetries in public international law and the digital realm through anchoring digital spaces and connectivity to such spaces in universal human rights and combatting the so-called “digital divide.” Through integrating aspects of digital solidarity into the field of international criminal law, legal practitioners can work to prevent the systematic relegation of already marginalized voices

One of the sites where the legacies of colonialism continue to be perpetuated in the Global South is the law classroom. In the teaching and research of international law, ‘mainstream’ narratives of international law are privileged as the Subject, and critical international law scholarship is treated as the Other.

Solidarity is an important principle that spans many areas of international law and policy such as human rights, trade, peace and security, criminal justice and environmental protection. In a landmark resolution, the UN Human Rights Council acknowledged that ‘[t]he same rights that people have offline must also be protected online’. This establishes a ‘normative equivalency’ between online and offline rights. Thus, for instance, the right to freedom of expression, safeguarded by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), is equally valid for online expression. This normative equivalency applies to the enjoyment of other human rights, including solidarity rights.

This book emerged from the observation that in international law scholarship, few studies have been done on Africa as both object and subject of international law despite the involvement of African states and Africans in the international arena and their active participation in many debates. To fill this gap by examining, sixty years after the independence of African states, the place of Africa in international law and the way international law looks at Africa is the challenge that the contributors to this book, all internationalists of the 1980-1990 generation, have taken up. The book highlights the specificity of a particular African law and examines the African experience in this fi eld from an international law perspective.

The American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA) is excited to announce that registration is now open for International Law Weekend (#ILW2023) which will be held October 19-21, 2023 in NYC. The unifying theme for ILW 2023 is Beyond International Law.