Decolonizing International Law?

A Decolonial Critique of Third World Approaches to International Law

Abstract

International law is often represented as a neutral and universal legal system; however, critical scholarship has illustrated the ways in which it is inextricably embedded in colonial histories and sustained by global power hierarchies. Third World Approaches to International Law emerged as a significant critical intervention, highlighting the Eurocentric underpinnings of international law and its unfair impact on the Global South. Although TWAIL has made valuable political and theoretical contributions, this paper argues that its decolonizing project remains limited since decolonization is an epistemic process rather than an exclusively historical or material one. The paper uses post-colonial theory to investigate how TWAIL regularly relies on inherited legal categories such as sovereignty and universality, categories constraining its critique. Through a qualitative analysis of TWAIL scholarship, the paper argues for the necessity of going beyond reformist engagement to epistemic questioning as a condition for the decolonization of international law.