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.
Category Archive: TWAILR: Reflections
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.
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.