International | Critical Legal Teaching

Coloniality of international law

by Ruben Wissing | | Colonialism, International, TWAIL

Public international law, as the current global regime regulating relations between states, is primarily the product of a European law of nations (Volkerenrecht) that has been universalised at specific historical moments. Its fundamental principles and norms find their roots in the European project of nation building, such as the central concept of state sovereignty. A critical method to understanding international law is to historisise the current regime through a genealogy of its origins. A...

Justice

by Anita Ferrara | | Critical Legal, International, Transitional Justice, TWAIL

Justice is a fundamental principle of law and political theory, often understood as underpinning the fair distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resources. In classical legal thought, justice remains mainly grounded in a liberal-legalist framework, which conceptualises it through normative ideas such as fairness, equality before the law, and the impartial application of rules (Rawls 1971, 2001). This perspective equates justice mainly with individual responsibility, formal legal...

Emergency

by Cosmin Cercel | | Biopolitics, Critical Legal, International, Legal Theory

Emergency is a key constitutional concept that is operative across constitutional orders across the world, in various forms ranging from written constitutional provisions especially devised for addressing situations of crisis, to articulated constitutional or purely institutional practices. Traditionally, emergency has been theorised as a matter of international communis opinio as a legal mechanism that is declared when states face a situation of ‘public emergency which threatens the...

Dis/ability and the Production of the Human

by Beatriz Perez Perez | | Disability, Human Rights, International

Critical studies of dis/ablism have shown how the ability/disability binary operates as a central apparatus in the production of the ‘human’ (Campbell 2008; Goodley 2014): and thus, the non-human, the less-than-human, and liminal and devalued forms of humanity (Butler 1993). This process can be understood through the mutually constitutive relationship between ableism and disablism. The term disablism, whose genealogy can be traced to the British disabled people’s movement...

An Introduction to Critical Approaches to Human Rights

by Illan Wall | | Critical Legal, Human Rights, International

There are a wide variety of different critical responses to human rights, spanning over 250 years, from Olympe de Gouges’ feminist critique of the rights of men and Edmond Burke’s critique of abstract universalism; to the way the Haitian slave revolution shows the racial undertones of rights or Marx’s analysis of human rights as the rights of ‘egoistic man’. Increasingly after WWII, and particularly after the success of anticolonial struggle and US President Jimmy Carter’s new foreign policy,...