Please join us on Wednesday 19 November 2025 for an important webinar on Genocide in the Age of Economic and Physical Coercion.
TWAIL
Adil Hasan Khan’s reflection celebrates Antony Anghie’s formative TWAIL text, drawing on Khan’s presentation at the ‘Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law: 20 Years On’ Conference organised by the Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law in Naarm/Melbourne on 7 and 8 August 2025.
This online lecture series seeks to foster interdisciplinary and historically-inflected discussions about how international law both shapes, and is shaped by, struggles over natural resources. In Semester 2, the lecture series will focus on resources struggles in the context of occupation around the world. We will collectively explore how struggles over resource plunder and exploitation shape the dynamics of occupation, and how peoples under occupation are contesting extraction and asserting ownership and sovereignty over resources as part of a broader resistance movements. Speakers will examine resource struggles under occupation in Greenland, West Papua, Palestine, Kashmir, Bougainville and Western Sahara to consider the different forms of political contestation they produce and how resource struggles might be mobilised to enliven political possibilities for self-determination and decolonisation.
Recording of Panel Discussion: Almost two years into a genocide that has sought to devastate all Palestinian life in Gaza, this move to conditionally recognize a Palestinian state comes across as a response essentially out of time. While this attempt at redeeming a liberal international legal order is no doubt far too little, far too late, what might a Palestinian national liberation movement tactically salvage and repurpose from this irredeemable wreck, and what should they approach with caution? This panel critically examines this urgent question at a time of immense danger and devastation.
Almost two years into a genocide that has sought to devastate all Palestinian life in Gaza, this move to conditionally recognize a Palestinian state comes across as a response essentially out of time. While this attempt at redeeming a liberal international legal order is no doubt far too little, far too late, what might a Palestinian national liberation movement tactically salvage and repurpose from this irredeemable wreck, and what should they approach with caution? This panel critically examines this urgent question at a time of immense danger and devastation.
Issue 06 is out now with articles on space resource exploitation, non-performative restorative justice, sanitary regulation of food production, global regulation of data, preventing illicit financial flows, desensitization to wartime violence, the suspicious ‘magic’ of AI + 1 key TWAIL text now in Spanish.
Mohamed Thahir Sulaiman explores how the Global South has challenged mainstream notions of what it means for a state to be specially affected when it comes to customary international law formation. Sulaiman argues that the doctrine of specially affected states can be used to counteract hegemonic international law and amplify the voices of the Global South in shaping customary international law.
Benjamin P. Davis talks to Usha Natarajan about Ben’s book on the inspirational Caribbean poet, Édouard Glissant. What we can learn from Glissant about human rights? What does Glissant mean by the ‘right to opacity’? Is it necessary and possible to know the Other? How do we ‘choose our bearing’ and engage in ethical academic and legal praxis amid neoliberal institutions that are complicit in genocide, famine, violence, and suffering?
Sarah Riley Case talks with Usha Natarajan about the foundational link between racism and ecological harm and how to repair relations between peoples and planet. They discuss Sarah’s research on recovering third world ecologies, making reparations, and reconceptualizing the human, and conclude by considering the crucial situation in Palestine.
What is the role of the (legal) intellectual in social transformation today, amid escalating environmental and economic injustice, and the rise of racist regimes worldwide? How should the tactics of third world anti-imperialists evolve amid the disintegration of US power and the mass suffering inflicted by the death throes of US imperialist and capitalist hegemony? While international laws and institutions have contributed to structuring and reproducing suffering across the global south, what role (if any) can law play towards structuring a world order for peace and ecological stability based on respectful interrelations? Vijay Prashad discussed these issues and more with Usha Natarajan and John Reynolds online on 23 April 2025.