As part of our ongoing reflections on Teaching International Law, Abhijeet Shrivastava and Rudraksh Lakra reflect on their recent experience as Jessup mooters. They explore how the institutional expectations of Jessup mooting and broader context of international law discourage certain arguments about decolonization.
Category Archive: TWAILR: Reflections
Towards Remedying the Transcivilizational Neglect: Revisiting the Story of the Spanish Requerimiento
Using Yasuaki Onuma’s ‘Transcivilizational Perspective on Internacional Law’, Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddiqui & Mohd Imran explore the emergence of the Spanish Requerimiento in the sixteenth century as a way to interrogate the absence, in the discipline’s historiography, of the encounter between European international law and its Muslim “other” in early modernity.
Through the lens of recent political developments, Ahmed Raza Memon analyzes the complex entanglement of social orders within Pakistan, where persistent colonial legacies interweave through local sociological realities in ways that resonate across the postcolonial world.
Shahd Hammouri reflects on the paradoxes of how freedom of speech is curtailed in certain contexts – thinking about critiques of neoliberalism in Jordan, critiques of settler colonialism in Palestine, and critiques of patriarchy by Arab feminists.
Margot E Salomon reflects on the positive environmental, economic and legal outcomes that ensue when alternative forms of economic organisation are recognised as an important and protected part of such communities’ culture.
Matiangai Sirleaf reflects on the importance of rendering whiteness visible in scholarship, connecting this to the aggressions of whitesplaining and whitewashing – and how both function to stymie Black intellectualism in international law and beyond.
Lorenzo Cotula draws on the 1952 Abu Dhabi Arbitration to show how the legal infrastructure that maintains global extractive industries endures, expands and thrives even in the face of climate change.
‘All Asiatic Vague Immensities’: International Law, Colonialism and the Return of Cultural Artefacts
Bharatt Goel reflects on the role of international law when it comes to colonial plunder and debates over the return of irreplaceable cultural heritage.
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.