Understanding the TWAIL Movement – Invitation to Participate in a Survey

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is a critical intellectual and political movement, project, and community that explores ways (European) international law has structured and legitimised global hierarchies of race, capital, and power. With critique in hand, its interlocutors also present resources and strategies to contest the inequalities exploring, Getachew might say, alternative forms of world-making.

Common coordinates evident across the TWAIL corpus include imperialism, colonialism, extraction, and sundry forms of domination. Equally prevalent are ways the oppressed challenge their domination, introducing forms of agency, creativity, and insurgent praxis of Third World peoples, states, and movements.

As part of a funded project, I am examining how scholars understand, experience, and contribute to the TWAIL movement. The project combines three strands of inquiry:

1. Tracing the intellectual genealogy/evolution of TWAIL;

2. Gathering survey data from international legal scholars; and 

3. Conducting semi-structured interviews with scholars who have engaged with TWAIL in their writing, teaching, or praxis.

With this post, I am writing to share the survey. It traces how TWAIL is understood and practised across scholarly communities, seeking to map the evolution of TWAIL as a critical framework and the lived experiences of those who engage with it in varied settings. The questions invite participants to reflect on their experience of and with TWAIL, and how the movement circulates within academic spaces (including relevant challenges). Participants are asked 17 substantive questions about how TWAIL travels, adapts, and influences discourse in international law and takes roughly 10min to complete.

Consistent with the TWAIL movement, I invite participation from far and wide. My goal is to understand the movement, while also exploring ways it might, can, or should evolve.

Participation is voluntary and responses are fully anonymised, meaning we do not record IP addresses, location data, or any other technical identifiers, and no information will be collected that can link answers to the participant or their institution. Any demographic or positional details provided are entirely optional and will be used only in aggregated form for analytical purposes.

Please feel free to respond candidly, knowing that all data will be handled confidentially and in accordance with established research ethics standards. Should you have any questions about the project, please contact me directly at mohsen.alattar@xjtlu.edu.cn. You may also contact the Research Office at XJTLU that has provided ethical approval for this survey.

You may access the survey via the following anonymous survey link.

Many thanks for your assistance.

Mohsen

Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash