Global South

A decolonised international law module, and the law curriculum in general, should be able to imagine the world beyond a simplistic notion of ‘the law says so’

The three issues that I discussed here apropos teaching and researching international law are part of much bigger problems in Asia and Africa: statehood, sovereignty, resource management, knowledge production, to name a few. I believe, more specific examples of how these persistent problems shape (and also fail to shape) teaching and researching international law in these regions will emerge in course of this symposium.

My intervention here is premised on my experiences and my relationship to the teaching of CIL. Instead of directly engaging with the question—why teach critical international law—I offer two interconnected accounts of the teaching process. This unpacking takes place at the site of my identity as a pedagogue where these two strands of enquiry intersect—why did I choose to teach CIL and why did I choose to teach CIL. These enquiries are dynamic and through them, I hope to cover some ground on the teleological question.

It is high time that pedagogical, methodological, ethical, and sociological challenges of this nature are discussed and addressed if IL is to be assessed for what it is without plummeting into the depths of myriad situated perspectives, colonialism, linguistic barriers, paucity of resources, and sheer divisions within the academic world.

With this post I seek nothing more than prompt the reader to question their experiences, recount their anecdotes and challenge how the way we learned, and what and how we teach today. I invite you to take the chance of making a pause in the inertia that academic life entails, and become part of the discussion on how to transform our discipline to be better researchers and more effective teachers to the lawyers of the future. There is no excuse not to, the debate is alive and happening in fora, such as AfronomicsLaw, REDIAL and TRILA.

In this blog article, building on the findings of the TRILA Project Report, and using AfronomicsLaw blog as a case example, I focus on the role of academic blogging as one of the digital tools that has great potential in shaping scholarly development in international economic law in the Global South. The AfronomicsLaw blog, launched less than two years ago, has exponentially grown, and therefore this blog article provides scholars, legal practitioners, policy makers, law students and readers and followers of the blog in general with an opportunity to assess the benefits of academic blogging through its lens.

Conducting research and teaching international law in Indonesia has its characteristic that has been adjusted to the current academic conditions in Indonesia.

The optional subjects being offered at SAU also have considerable number of readings that focus on South Asia. They also include the works of South Asian scholars and Third World scholars. All the optional courses offered at SAU address international issues of relevance to South Asia, in varying degrees. Discussions on general topics include special reference to South Asia in most of the courses. Thus, the LL.M. course at SAU is heralding in a South Asian approach to IL.

So far, we have found that an uncritical Western perspective is favored in the teaching of international law in the region. In many cases, international law is generally presented as a single and objective law that must be applied uniformly in any part of the world and, therefore, leaving no place for regional contextualization or for questioning its premises. Likewise, it is widely preferred to teach it using a bibliography originated in the Global North, despite the substantive contributions of Latin American scholars in International Law and in the Humanities and Social Sciences. These contributions have been made invisible by the colonial past and globalization processes based on asymmetrical power-knowledge relationships.

This is a clarion call for Indian international law scholars to do collective work on strengthening and integrating the field within the domestic legal landscape and foreign policy, as well as with western scholarship. The restoration of the foundation of international rules well laid in ancient India is urgently required. The timely action could save the crumbling architecture of teaching and research of international law in India.