Sara Ali introduces the #TheorizingWhileBlack Symposium.

Kamari Maxine Clarke uses Michael Manley’s metaphor of going up the down escalator to show how some states and peoples are privileged over others in the international sphere.

Robert Knox grapples with the question of #TheorizingWhileBlack through a Marxist lens to engage with the concepts of power, erasure and knowledge production. Knox critiques the dichotomy of either using law or abandoning it altogether.

Babatunde Fagbayibo asks whether contemporary international law has the capacity to ‘advance ideas and strategies for Africa’s human and material development’ in the face of the erasure of black thought, and posits a useful framework for future international legal scholarship.

Valarie Waboose reflects on the Indian Residential School legacy with the intent to educate those who know little or nothing about the treatment Indigenous children received in Indian Residential Schools. By educating more people, this dark chapter in Canadian history will produce more awareness and understanding of the quandary of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

In January 2020, E. Tendayi Achiume & Aslı Ü. Bâli convened the UCLA Law Review symposium, ‘Transnational Legal Discourse on Race and Empire’. In this reflection, they situate the symposium within its broader intellectual context: renewed momentum among Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars to engage Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars in collaboration, aimed at deeper understanding of issues of shared concern.

Noura Erakat & John Reynolds
نورا عريقات وجون رينولدز

Alice Panepinto reflects on the decision of the ICC Prosecutor to end the preliminary examination of British violence in Iraq, and thinks about how moral lessons might still emerge from those proceedings and be translated into more accurate storytelling outside the theatrics of law.

Noura Erakat & John Reynolds reflect on Palestinian efforts to engage the International Criminal Court, in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism and both its spectacular and structural violence. Conscious of the limits of international criminal law, they think about Palestinian activist legal tactics – and the charge of the crime of apartheid in particular – in relation to political strategy.

Amaka Vanni reflects on the role of international trade and investment law in the creation of intellectual property rights that sacrifice the life and health of the poor and racialised at the altar of corporate profitability.