TWAILR Mixtape: A playlist for rethinking the spirit and purpose of international law

Music and its arts of song, dance and ritual – as Fanon put it – precede and shape any political struggle: we ‘sense and feel in these arts the pulse of a free stimulus and the coming combat’. Since the advent of electrical recording in the early 20^th century, music-playing machines around the world have been, as Adorno recognised they would be, a ‘proletarian loudspeaker’. With that in mind, we are happy to use the ‘TWAILR: Extra’ space on our website to share playlists compiled by our readers and contributors – of any music broadly, explicitly or obliquely related to the politics and sensibilities of anti-imperialism, to third world approaches to international law, to global or local struggles for economic, ecological, racial and gender justice (and which of course does not promote abuse or bigotry). Obviously any collection of songs will reflect to a greater or lesser degree the geographic and linguistic horizons of the collector, and since we’d aim to limit each playlist to 15-20 tracks, the idea is for it to simply be a sample of tastes and inspirations, rather than any comprehensive curation. But we would love to hear and share what our friends and readers around the world are listening to (or drawing on in your teaching or writing), and we are delighted to start the tape running with a selection from Babatunde Fagbayibo.