Gustavo Leite Neves da Luz reflects critically on a series of advisory opinions across different international courts and tribunals over recent years on the burning question of state responsibilities to address climate change and environmental harm.
Category Archive: TWAILR: Reflections
In this Reflection, Manas Raj Singh argues that the 2025-26 U.S.-India tariff dispute did not mark the collapse of a rules-based order but rather exposed the enduring coercive structures that have long underpinned international economic governance. Drawing on TWAIL scholarship, he traces how different legal instruments have repeatedly constrained the policy autonomy of states in the Global South.
Amrisha Tripathi describes how Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine has exposed a foundational crisis within the post-war international legal order, particularly the systematic collapse of jus cogens. Crucially for TWAIL, Tripathi applies her critique to India, considering India’s pivot from anticolonial solidarity to transactional realpolitik with Israel.
Margot E Salomon reflects, through a human rights lens, on the possibilities of systemic economic reconfiguration across the spheres of land, food, and natural resources.
Jeena Shah examines the ‘security-first’ and ‘capital-driven’ colonial features of Security Council Resolution 2803. Adopted in November 2025, it endorsed President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’ and granted international legitimacy to the establishment of the Board of Peace. Explaining how Resolution 2803 violates the peremptory norm of self-determination, Shah argues for its illegality.
Grace Tsegakele reflects on African states’ responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and argues that their varied voting patterns at the United Nations General Assembly are best understood not as inconsistency or indifference, but as an expression of structured ambivalence, a strategic and historically informed approach to international legal observance.
As part of the TWAILR symposium on the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), Shahd Hammouri reflects on the legacy and relevance of the UNCTC for contemporary questions around corporate accountability in contexts of war, apartheid and occupation.
As part of the TWAILR symposium on the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), River Baars reflects on a series of documents leading up to the establishment of the UNCTC, reading them alongside the work of Walter Rodney, and argues that radical anti-capitalist positions were foreclosed from the very outset of the UNCTC.
As part of the TWAILR symposium on the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), Kalika Mehta reflects on a series of internal UNCTC ‘overview’ reports to chart a shift from an explicitly political, NIEO inspired project of disciplining transnational corporations in the service of redistribution towards a more depoliticised, technocratic language of managing and measuring their effects.
As part of the TWAILR symposium on the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), Caitlin Murphy reflects on corporate ‘counter-strategies’ to the Third World’s NIEO agenda through the lens of a 1978 report produced jointly by the UNCTC and the UN Industrial Development Organisation on transnational corporations and the processing of raw materials.