We are very happy to bring you Issue 04 of the TWAIL Review. In light of the UN General Assembly seeking the ICJ’s advice on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, this issue opens with Ata R Hindi’s assessment of occupations under the rules of state responsibility, including for serious breaches of peremptory norms such as the prohibitions on annexation, denial of the right to self-determination, racial discrimination, and apartheid. In a pair of complementary analyses, Ananya Jain and Dominic J Bielby each consider the COVID-19 pandemic’s grave and disproportionate impacts across the Global South. Jain considers consequences for the right to health and the right to benefit from scientific progress, and extrapolates from the pandemic to illustrate the operations of international economic law as a tool of imperial domination. Bielby hones in on barriers to vaccine production and procurement due to the TRIPS Agreement under the WTO, and from this traces a ‘cascade of disadvantage’ that burdens the Global South. Both articles serve as timely warnings for addressing structural violence before the next pandemic. Staying with access to health, Alicia Haripershad undertakes a Third World Feminist analysis of the right to access contraception, interrogating Nigeria and Uganda’s interpretations of CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol and pointing to the advantages that regional laws could have for addressing the concerns of feminists in the Global South.
Issue 4 concludes with Spanish translations of three formative TWAIL texts read during the inaugural 2023 TWAILR Academy in Bogotá. Richard Delgado’s 1984 text, The Imperial Scholar, is an early and influential example of Critical Race Theory analyzing citational neglect of racialized scholars and the very real consequences of such skewed scholarship. Karin Mickelson’s Rhetoric & Rage from 1998 remains one of the most cited TWAIL works, delineating distinctive Third World Approaches through conceptual and literary analyses in a manner that illuminates the usefulness of such disciplinary stances. In Making New Wine for Old Wineskins, Joel Ngugi warned in 2002 that Global South engagement with international law should come from outside the disciplinary episteme, reminding us to treat all disciplinary categories as political and contested. We hope these enduring texts can enrich new generations of scholars across the Spanish-speaking world.
Producing a fully independent, open-access journal for our community of readers around the world involves a lot of care and labor. We are immensely grateful to our authors and translators for their their work, their writing, and their patience with us. We are likewise hugely thankful to all of our peer-reviewers for their generosity with their time and invaluable contributions, to our advisory board for their support and encouragement, and to our own institutions for their support, particularly Windsor Law, Maynooth Law, Leeds University, and Universidad de los Andes.
The contents of this issue and all the articles are freely available to read and download via the links here. We very much hope you like it, please do share it far and wide, and we look forward to receiving your submissions for Issue 05 and beyond.
