In this reflection, Ayobami Aluko argues that the crisis facing international law is not merely institutional or doctrinal, but moral. Against the technocratic and managerial tendencies that continue to shape global governance, Aluko advances Decolonial Legal Humanism (DHL) as a framework for reimagining law through dignity, reciprocity, and moral repair, offering a relational response to the enduring realities of climate coloniality and global injustice.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 95/2026
International law has never been more present. Treaties multiply, tribunals issue judgments, and funds are disbursed. Yet the world burns, floods, and fractures under the weight of unrepaired injustice. From the latest COP decision to the routine denial of climate reparations, law operates with procedural brilliance but moral emptiness. It manages harm without healing it. This is not a failure of technical design. It is a crisis of moral imagination. Positivist and managerial jurisprudence, with its obsession with compliance, indicators, and conditionality, has severed law from the question that ought to animate it: what does it mean to live justly with others?
This reflection proposes a way out of this disenchantment through Decolonial Legal Humanism (DLH). This framework does not abandon universality but reconstructs it through plurality, grounding law’s legitimacy in three interdependent pillars: dignity, reciprocity, and moral repair. DLH is not a theoretical exercise. It is an urgent response to the ‘climate coloniality’ that treats entire regions as disposable, to the epistemic silence that still excludes African and Indigenous legal traditions, and to the humanitarian aid that perpetuates hierarchy under the mask of generosity. The argument is simple: law cannot heal the world until those who make, interpret, and apply it treat it as a relationship, not a machine.
The Technocratic Wound
Max Weber called it the ‘disenchantment of the world’, the slow replacement of meaning by calculation. For law, disenchantment means substituting the question of justice for the question of compliance, not whether an outcome is right, but whether the correct procedure was followed. In law, this disenchantment took the form of positivism: a pure science of norms, indifferent to justice. Hans Kelsen purified law of morality by insisting that a norm’s validity depends only on its correct enactment within a hierarchy of rule, never on whether it is good or just. His heirs now run global governance on performance metrics and good governance conditionality. What is rarely said is that this wound has a colonial genealogy. The rationality that became ‘universal’ was carved through exclusion. As Anghie has shown, the civilising mission did not end with sovereignty. It was repackaged as development and good governance. Quijano’s account of the coloniality of power deepens this diagnosis by exposing colonial rule as fundamentally epistemic rather than merely political and economic. It installed a hierarchy that universalised European rationality as ‘reason’ while reducing the knowledge of the colonised to custom or culture, denying it any power to make law.
The result is a legal order that enforces rules without reconciliation. Human rights treaties multiply while dignity is auctioned. Environmental conventions expand while ecosystems collapse. The jurist has become a technician who can certify legality, confirming that a rule was validly enacted, but cannot account for legitimacy in explaining why that rule deserves to be obeyed. This is the void DLH tries to fill, not by inventing something wholly new, but by naming and organising, as a portable moral grammar, commitments that other traditions have long practised under other names.
Three Pillars for a Relational Jurisprudence
DLH builds on two streams. From classical humanism it takes Aquinas’s claim that positive law answers to a higher moral order and is not self-justifying merely because it was enacted, and Grotius’s sociability thesis that a shared human community binds peoples and states to obligations toward one another prior to any treaty. From decolonial thought it takes Fanon’s account of colonialism as a totalising order that cannot be reformed piecemeal but must be confronted whole. DLH’s contribution is not discovering these traditions, since TWAIL scholars, Ubuntu jurists, and Latin American decolonial theorists have worked with them for decades. Rather it is to braid classical humanism’s moral realism to decolonial thought’s structural critique, re-centring law on relationship rather than rule. That shift is expressed in three interdependent pillars, each transforming a core legal concept.
Dignity. In liberal humanism, dignity is often a property of the autonomous individual, a status one possesses. In DLH, dignity is relational: it emerges through recognition. Ramose captures this in African Philosophy through Ubuntu using the Ubuntu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons). To affirm another’s humanity is to confirm one’s own. Dignity is therefore not a shield against the world but a moral invitation to see the other as co-constitutive of the self. In legal terms, this transforms rights from entitlements into reciprocal duties of respect. A climate refugee is not a victim to be pitied but a rights-holder whose dignity demands that loss and damage compensation be paid without conditionalities or means-testing that reproduce the hierarchies of aid.
Reciprocity. Where dignity is the ground, reciprocity is the structure. It rejects the vertical logic of benevolence that pervades global aid, debt relief, and climate finance. Charity is not justice. Reciprocity insists on mutual obligation: between North and South, between states and communities, between law and life. In African and Latin American thought (Ubuntu, Buen Vivir) this is the grammar of moral community. No one is a mere recipient of another’s largesse, because every act of giving implies a corresponding claim on the giver, and every act of receiving carries a corresponding voice in how the relationship is governed moving forward. In legal practice, reciprocity demands that a climate fund be governed not by donor conditionality but by shared accountability. South-South solidarity, as Malherbe and Oladejo argue, is not an add-on but the very form of justice. Reciprocity also demands that polluters cannot discharge their obligations through carbon offsets that leave frontline communities untouched; they must instead enter direct, binding agreements with those they have harmed.
Moral repair. The third pillar faces history. Colonialism, slavery, and ecological extraction are not past events; they are ongoing structures of harm. Law that ignores history becomes procedural theatre. Moral repair, as Margaret Walker defines it, is the effort to restore trust and hope in a shared moral world after wrongdoing. This means acknowledgment, restitution, and institutional reform. It is not retribution but the transformation of memory into responsibility. As Ricoeur argues, justice turns memory into a project, and it is that project which gives the duty of memory its imperative form. In practice, moral repair requires truth commissions that include ecological crimes, reparations that are material and not merely symbolic, and the redesign of international financial institutions so that debt cancellation for climate vulnerable nations is automatic, not subject to creditor veto.
Together, these three pillars turn law from a command into a covenant, from a system of rules imposed on subjects into a set of obligations co-authored with those who bear their consequences. None of the three is DLH’s invention, because each has deep roots in the traditions it draws on. What DLH offers is their deliberate conjunction, providing a working test that can be applied, pillar by pillar, to any legal instrument.
Why This Matters Right Now. Climate Coloniality as the Test Case
One of the most urgent sites for DLH is the climate crisis, but not as a technocratic problem of emissions reduction. Farhana Sultana has named it ‘climate coloniality’: the way extraction, dispossession, and racialised vulnerability are reproduced under the banner of green transition. Loss and damage funds are announced, but the voices of the most affected remain unheard. Adaptation aid is channelled through consultants from the Global North. Reparations are treated as a radical demand rather than a legal duty.
Consider the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, presented as a breakthrough at COP28. Read against the three pillars, its design inverts each one. First, dignity is inverted because the fund’s initial design allowed for loans rather than grants, a model that expects climate-devastated nations to go further into debt for survival. It treats the injured as supplicants rather than right-holders. Second, reciprocity is inverted because the fund prefers channelling money through national governments, many of which are themselves indebted to Western creditors, rather than directly to local organisations, cooperatives, or Indigenous councils. The result is accountability runs upward to creditos rather than outward to the communities harmed. Third, moral repair is inverted because the fund operates on a standard project-proposal cycle that takes months or even years to disburse money. Communities displaced by floods or droughts need relief within weeks. This timeline treats historical responsibility as a matter for eventual processing rather than urgent acknowledgment. This is vertical benevolence dressed in procedural clothing. A truly reciprocal fund would be rapid, unconditional, and grant-based, acknowledging that historical emissions create a duty of repair, not a favour.
DLH offers a diagnostic lens and a reconstructive path across its three pillar. Dignity demands that we stop treating climate victims as objects of pity and recognise their intrinsic rather than instrumental worth. Practically, this means replacing paternalistic needs assessments, such as donor designed governance scores or proofs of institutional capacity, with an automatic trigger that releases funds on a climate-induced disaster. Reciprocity insists polluters and the polluted share a mutual obligation, though not a symmetrical one. The obligation of the historically polluting is material repair. The obligation of the polluted is not to reciprocate in kind but to hold real, resourced governance seats with transparency, local oversight, and a binding vote in how funds are allocated. Historical emissions are not a footnote, rather they are the basis of a duty to repair. In practice, reciprocity requires a binding international convention on climate reparations, not voluntary contributions, where high emitting nations pay into a fund governed equally by contributors and recipients. Moral repair translates that duty into concrete mechanisms: debt cancellation, technology transfer, and genuine restitution, not as gift but as obligation. It also means redistributing epistemic authority. Global South climate scientists now hold a record share of IPCC authorship, accounting for 42 percent of institutional affiliations and 50 percent of citizen representation in the seventh assessment cycle. That presence must translate into authority over framing and findings, not just headcount. Indigenous knowledge systems, too, must count as valid evidence in loss and damage determinations in their own right, not as supplement folded into IPCC synthesis.
This is not a utopian wish list. It is the principled extension of commitments that already exist in fragmented form such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Escazú Agreement, and the growing jurisprudence on intergenerational equity. What is missing is a moral grammar that binds them together. DLH provides that grammar.
How DLH Differs from Other Critical Frameworks
DLH does not emerge from nowhere and does not claim to. It builds on, and stay accountable to, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the tradition through which Mutua, Anghie, Chimni, and others exposed how colonialism shaped international law’s foundations. TWAIL has not been purely deconstructive. In fact a substantial and growing strand of TWAIL scholarship is reconstructive. Usha Natarajan, Carmen Gonzalez, and Julia Dehm’s collaborative work on international law praxis amid ecological crisis, and the Locating Nature project’s effort to rework sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property around Indigenous cosmologies and non-human standing, are only two examples. DLH does not add a reconstructive moment that TWAIL lacks, rather it draws directly on this strand, and its three pillars are best read as one way of organising commitments this scholarship already develops.
DLH is equally not a departure from TWAIL. Scholars including Paulo Illich Bacca, José Manuel Barreto, and Roger Merino work at the intersection of decolonial legal humanism and TWAIL, and TWAILR itself has hosted dialogue between DLH-aligned and non-DLH TWAIL scholars. DLH is not a new insight completing an unfinished project but one voice within a continuum of subaltern knowledge-making. This continuum spans centuries of African, Andean, and Indigenous legal and philosophical traditions that international legal scholarship too often treats as recent additions, not long-suppressed interlocutors.
Ubuntu jurisprudence offers a powerful relational ethics but is often treated as a regional particularity. DLH universalises Ubuntu’s core insight without appropriating it: relational personhood is not an African exception but a human condition. Similarly, posthumanist legal theory correctly critiques anthropocentrism, but in dissolving the human it risks dissolving accountability. DLH retains the human as a moral agent, albeit a decentred, interdependent agent whose duties extend to ecosystems and future generations. Finally, feminist and intersectional critiques show how law’s universality masks patriarchy and racism, and how the two intersect within international law. DLH incorporates these insights, insisting that recognition, the first act of dignity, requires seeing those who have been rendered invisible. Yet DLH goes further by translating recognition into reciprocity as power-sharing and moral repair as structural transformation.
This raises a further question from Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory. Does treating ‘humanity’ as an undifferentiated moral agent obscure the specific and uneven responsibility of industrialised and colonial powers for ecological harm? DLH’s answer is that it need not, and its reciprocity pillar is built to prevent exactly that flattening. Obligations are calibrated to historical responsibility, not distributed evenly across an abstract humanity. A moral repair regime charging the Global South and North equally for a crisis manufactured disproportionately by the latter would fail DLH’s own test. Thus, DLH is a synthetic jurisprudence, taking TWAIL’s critique, Ubuntu’s relational ontology, posthumanism’s ecological reach, and feminism’s attentiveness to marginalisation, binding them into a normative architecture for law. This synthesis is not eclectic. It is driven by the three pillars, acting as normative filters. Any proposal, whether a climate fund, a trade agreement, or a human rights treaty, can be tested against dignity, reciprocity, and moral repair.
We have inherited a legal order that is efficient but empty. We can choose to re-enchant it, not by magic, but by the slow, difficult work of turning legality into a covenant of care.
From Critique to Covenant. The Jurist as Custodian of Relationship
Much decolonial scholarship has been brilliantly diagnostic, exposing hierarchy, revealing epistemic violence, deconstructing universality. That work is indispensable. Yet critique alone does not heal. DLH moves from deconstruction to reconstruction. This requires a different posture for the legal scholar and practitioner, one that moves beyond the positivist conception of the lawyer as a technician and recognises the activist critic’s longstanding concern with the distributive and exclusionary effects of law. TWAIL scholarship and the praxis tradition running through Freire, Gramsci and Said have spent decades asking who is excluded, favoured, and burdened by law’s application. This concern continues today in the work and practice of scholars such as Fakhri, Rajagopal and Achiume, while TWAIL itself has explicitly theorised praxis as a relationship between scholarly reflection and transformative practice. DLH does not claim to discover this posture but to consolidate it into a teachable discipline. It understands the legal scholar and practitioner as a custodian of relationship who practises three disciplines that translate this diagnostic tradition into institutional design.
The first discipline, extending that praxis tradition rather than departing from it, is hermeneutic listening. This involves interpreting across epistemic boundaries without appropriation. That means reading a contract or a treaty not only for its text but for the moral relationships it implies. Who is excluded? Whose voice is missing? A custodian of relationship asks these questions as a first step rather than an afterthought. The second discipline is translational courage. This involves rendering moral intuitions from diverse traditions into a shared normative language. Ubuntu’s ethics of community, identification and solidarity can be translated into legal approaches to restorative justice, while Buen Vivir’s conception of harmony between persons, community and nature can inform approaches to environmental assessments. Translational courage does not homogenise difference. It creates a common vocabulary for moral deliberation. The third discipline is reflective accountability, which draws on Wiredu’s principle of sympathetic impartiality and its demand that moral judement take seriously the interests of others by imaginatively placing oneself in their position. This means, for example, that a judge in an international court should not only apply precedent but also ask how a decision would be received by the community most affected by it. Reflective accountability turns jurisprudence into a dialogue rather than a monologue.
In practice, this means reading a treaty not as a contract of interests but as a moral conversation. It means designing a climate fund not as a disbursement mechanism but as a reparative covenant. It means teaching international law not as a set of doctrines but as a site of struggle over who counts as human and how. This is not soft sentiment. It is a disciplined and relational rationality, one that Fanon understood in his conception of decolonisation as a project that sets out to ‘change the order of the world’ and create ‘new men’ and a ‘new humanity’.
An Invitation, Not a Blueprint
I have not offered a detailed institutional blueprint here. Short reflections are not the place for that. Instead, I have tried to show that law’s crisis is fundamentally a crisis of moral imagination, and that a decolonial legal humanism, anchored in dignity, reciprocity, and moral repair, can renew that imagination. The pillars proposed are not foreign to existing legal traditions. They resonate with the restorative ethics of Ubuntu in South African jurisprudence, with the relational cosmology of Indigenous legal orders, and with the unfinished project of human rights. What DLH does is to bring these resonances into a coherent, post-imperial grammar of universality, one that does not erase differences but makes it the very texture of justice. The task now is to build institutions worthy of that vision. Not tomorrow, but today, in every court, every climate fund, every classroom where law is taught as if it were merely a tool.
What can you do? If you are a scholar, teach international law through the lens of moral repair: ask students to redesign a treaty or a fund using dignity, reciprocity, and moral repair as criteria. If you are a practitioner, use these pillars in your briefs, your arbitrations, your negotiations. Demand that climate funds be evaluated not only by speed of disbursement but by whether they restore relational balance. If you are an activist, organise around the demand for a binding Reparations Convention that operationalises moral repair. And if you are a jurist, when you write an opinion, add a paragraph: how does this decision affirm dignity, embody reciprocity, or facilitate repair? We have inherited a legal order that is efficient but empty. We can choose to re-enchant it, not by magic, but by the slow, difficult work of turning legality into a covenant of care.