International law is an illegitimate regime. It is a predatory system that gives the West’s looting and exploitation of the Third World legitimacy, reproduction, and sustenance. The Third World has historically perceived international law as a system and language of oppression and subjugation rather than as a means of emancipation and resistance. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is the term used here to describe this vast dialectic of opposition to international law. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is an active, purposefully open-ended, decentralized network of academics of international law that engage with and cogitate about the Third World. In the context of TWAIL, the term Third World designates the vast and typically marginalized socio-political region that, by the middle of the 20th century, was perceived as “Non-aligned,” conveying that it did not belong to either the “independent,” “socialist,” “Marxist,” or the “collectivist” worlds. Nevertheless, the Third World is more frequently called the Global South, the “transforming world,” or the “decolonized world.” Describing this sociopolitical geography as the majority of the planet could be more accurately facing a proliferation of Global South in the Global North and Global North in the Global South within the utter asymmetrical, racialized, gendered, and unstable ecologically discriminatory system.
A TWAIL Renaissance
As James Gathii has penned, “a group of Harvard Law School graduate students got together to discuss whether it was practicable to have a TWAIL and what the major apprehensions of such an approach might be,” which gave rise to the TWAIL rubric in the spring of 1996. Students and academics from the Third World and other travellers from the North participated in those first debates and the ones that soon followed. In March 1997, the inaugural TWAIL gathering took place at Harvard University. Since then, the main goal of TWAILers’ work has been to critically analyze international law’s stated neutrality and universality in light of its lengthy history and current link with imperialism. Another goal was to outline fresh decolonization and emancipatory agendas for a more globalized world.
The Third World has always been plagued by imperialism, colonization, and globalization [recolonization] and required re-decolonization in the contemporary Jewish World Order [JWO] for re-establishing the…World Order. To solve the material and ethical concerns of people living in the third world, a new set of tools had to be created in response to this reality. This first wave of TWAILers was unwavering in their dedication to examining the relationship between international law and Third World conditions. Still, they also understood how important it was to pay tribute to a long-standing tradition of international lawyers, political figures, and intellectuals from the South who had long struggled with the ups and downs of the international legal system. They were thinking specifically of those whose contributions during the decolonization era were crucial to ending formal imperialism.
Antony Anghie and Chimni created the terms “TWAIL-I” and “TWAIL II” to help make sense of this lengthy tradition of South-oriented international law. The former term referred to the scholarship produced by that initial generation of post-colonial international legal actors, while the latter term focused on scholarship that broadly followed the TWAIL-I tradition and elaborated upon it while unavoidably diverging from it in significant ways. Anghie and Chimni emphasized the importance of intergenerational training and learning in their retrospective chronology, a cornerstone of TWAIL. They also drew attention to the groundbreaking work of modern TWAIL (II) academics who have been challenging the realities in the Global South from an intersectional and global viewpoint. TWAIL-I’s mission was to combat formal imperialism domestically. The TWAILers II, III, IV, and beyond fight against the lingering effects of the growing multifaceted imperialism with formal and informal orientations.
The TWAIL Universe
Since this first round of talks, the TWAIL scholarship has expanded tremendously in terms of issues and the geographic and historical range of the study its members have undertaken. TWAIL scholars have recently focused on several topics, including revising the general theory of international law, revealing its global history, questioning how the international order functions and the role of international lawyers within it, re-theorizing the state and revising current discourses on the constitutional order, security, and transitional justice. They have also covered various topics, including international criminal law, international human rights law, comparative international law, international economic law, international environmental law, international humanitarian law, international refugee law and the importance of social movements, Indigenous peoples, and climate migrants in the international order. This work has consistently focused on how race, gender, and class intersect while examining historical and contemporary decolonization and resistance movements.
In addition, the 1997 TWAIL meeting marked the commencement of a series of international conferences 2001, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2017, and 2018 that have functioned as forums for the exchange of research findings, the strengthening of current and new relationships, and the evaluation of the potential for changing the practice and pedagogy of international law. More than 20 years after its founding, TWAIL is still a significant topic of contention in discussions on the development of the international legal system. It would be an understatement to argue that TWAIL’s discoveries and the work generated under its auspices have fundamentally changed teleological conceptualizations of international law as inherently progressive and always on the side of social, economic, and environmental justice. Above all, because of TWAILers’ efforts, Eurocentric interpretations of international law are no longer allowed to go unchallenged. With a substantial and expanding body of literature, TWAILers, and a new generation of international law students and practitioners can now be inspired to challenge the widespread power imbalances that have long coexisted with and were not independent of international law. They may also refer to those other applications of international law and those other worlds that the South and its allies have been working to implement for the entire time, thanks to TWAIL.
In Quest of Conclusion
TWAILers have emphasized the significance of paying attention to both the political and the personal, as feminist academics have demonstrated, given this comprehensive agenda of study and political activity. This is vital considering how antagonistic nations and people are in the Global South. Symbols of independent living under colonial authority, many have themselves adopted the repressive, xenophobic traits of the society they left behind. In many Third World states the legacy of imperialism is still felt in both active and passive ways. People are either unwillingly or forced to participate in destructive cycles of production and consumption, are complicit in the radical securitization of daily life, or are deaf to the protests of Indigenous groups and minorities who are still subject to colonialism. The battle is still there, and it needs to continue being there for TWAIL academics. It is about current “tactics” and a longer-term “strategy,” and it always has to be. Thus, TWAIL is a multi-alignment, not an organization, a struggle, not a conservatory, a sensibility, not a creed. Above all, TWAIL’s desperation and dedication to transparency are fed by the variety of the world it reacts to and draws its energy from.