The Race Ceiling and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Resolution: What the UNGA Vote Reveals About International Law’s Epistemic Community

[Renée Ramona Robinson holds law degrees from Sciences Po, Queen Mary, and Harvard Law. She is a PhD researcher specializing in the paradoxes of international law at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as a creator and lecturer of law modules at Sciences Po Paris.]

In March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as the greatest crime against humanity in recorded history. The resolution passed. One hundred and twenty-three states voted yes. Three voted no: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Fifty-two abstained, a group concentrated in Western Europe, with Japan, New Zealand, and Fiji among them.

The vote was historic. It was also clarifying, though not only in the ways the coverage suggested. The abstention map deserves sustained attention, because it overlaps almost precisely with the geography of international legal authority. The states that declined to vote yes are the same states that host the discipline’s flagship institutions: the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the major international law faculties of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and the editorial infrastructure of large law journals. The discipline that produces, authorizes, and reproduces international law as a field of knowledge is overwhelmingly housed in states whose governments could not bring themselves to vote yes on this resolution. That is not a coincidence requiring proof. It is a structural observation that the vote makes available.

This piece argues that the UNGA vote illuminates something the discipline has been slow to name: a race ceiling operating within international law itself, distinct from the racial hierarchies the discipline now increasingly studies. The race ceiling is a structural limit on racialized authority that conditions who may speak with legitimacy in international law, even as the discipline expands its critical vocabulary about race. Race is the central axis of this argument, though it does not operate alone — geography, class, and institutional positioning all shape access to the discipline, and their effects overlap. But overlap is not equivalence. Geography-based exclusion and race-based exclusion are related phenomena that produce distinct patterns, and the discipline’s current frameworks have been better at naming the first than the second. The race ceiling names that gap. It operates through three interlocking mechanisms: displacement, by which nationality and geography substitute for race as the authorized markers of critical authenticity; a double-bind, by which Black diasporic scholars in the Global North are rendered epistemically homeless, too proximate to the metropole for TWAIL legitimacy yet too racialized for mainstream international law authority; and opacity, by which neither mechanism can be formally named because each operates through criteria that appear neutral. The UNGA vote makes all three visible simultaneously. Darryl Li’s distinction between race and empire as distinct yet overlapping categories, and Achiume and Carbado’s observation that CRT and TWAIL have developed in parallel without fully theorizing the space between them, together identifies a dimension of racial exclusion that those frameworks have not yet fully addressed. 

What the Abstentions Reveal

The Western European abstentions are the easy part of this argument, almost too easy. When the states that host international law’s institutional infrastructure decline to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity, the discipline’s relationship to racial hierarchy is not merely historical. It is present tense. The abstention is not a deviation from international law’s universalist project. It is consistent with how that project has always managed race: acknowledging it at the level of discourse while declining to allow it to produce binding consequences.

The United States withdrawal from multilateral institutions, especially in the past few months, fits within this pattern rather than disrupting it. When American disengagement from international law is narrated as a collective national act, as “America” stepping back, the language flattens a crucial distinction. Black Americans and other racialized subjects within the United States have never experienced international law primarily through state power or geopolitical dominance. Their relationship to it has been mediated through regimes of migration, policing, economic governance, and vulnerability that international law both shapes and legitimates. To treat American withdrawal as the expression of a unified national will is to attribute complicity to those most marginalized by the state while erasing their distinct relationship to international legal institutions. Race is camouflaged in this narration, and nationality becomes sticky.

The UNGA vote on the transatlantic slave trade exposes this stickiness. The no votes and the abstentions are cast by states, but they are interpreted within a disciplinary community that has its own racial distribution of authority, one that maps closely onto the geography of those abstentions.

What the Yes Votes Cannot Resolve: Political Solidarity and Epistemic Displacement

The yes votes are where the argument becomes more difficult, and more necessary. African states, Caribbean states, Latin American states, and much of the Middle East voted yes. This is genuine political solidarity across racial lines and should be recognized as such. The resolution’s passage reflects a real coalition, one that includes states whose scholars have built the TWAIL tradition– a tradition whose critique of international law’s colonial foundations is indispensable and whose contributions to exposing the racial architecture of sovereignty, recognition, and development remain foundational. To engage critically with TWAIL’s epistemic framework is not to contest its project. It is to ask whether that project has fully reckoned with the exclusions it risks reproducing within its own epistemic community. However, solidarity at the level of UN voting and displacement at the level of epistemic authority are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the discipline’s comfort with the first may be part of what makes the second harder to see. Theorists have noted that the vast majority of TWAIL scholarship is itself produced and published in the Global North, a tension the tradition has acknowledged but not yet resolved–and it is precisely within that unresolved space that the race ceiling operates most visibly.

The race ceiling critique is uncomfortable for Global South scholars and institutions precisely because it implicates the Global South frame itself, not only the European establishment. The argument is not to say that Global South scholars are wrong about empire, or that their barriers are not real. The financial and structural barriers facing lawyers who must navigate visa regimes, unpaid institutional access points, and non-recognition of non-Western credentials are genuine and documented. But the frame through which those disadvantages are recognized and the frame through which epistemic authority is distributed within the discipline are doing different things simultaneously, and the second has consequences that the first tends to obscure.

The Global South/Global North binary treats some scholars as the authentic voice of racial critique while rendering others illegible. A Black British scholar at a London law school is too proximate to the metropole to embody the authorized critical other, yet too racialized to represent the neutral cosmopolitan subject that mainstream international law rewards. A Black American or Black British scholar carries a passport that reads as hegemonic, and so their experience of racialized exclusion within the very institutions those passports are supposed to open is treated as either redundant or suspect. That misreading produces epistemic foreclosure. The Black Global North scholar who has built a career within Northern institutions is read as a beneficiary of the system rather than a subject of it, their presence in New York or London taken as evidence of privilege rather than as the only viable path within a global economy built on their ancestors’ labor. The international legal community’s willingness to accept that misreading is not interpretively neutral. The Global South frame makes that misreading respectable, converting structural necessity into apparent complicity and then using that apparent complicity to justify exclusion — foreclosing precisely the voice that the transatlantic slave trade resolution implicitly calls forward, in the name of a solidarity that cannot see who it is leaving out.

The UNGA vote makes this paradox visible in a particular way. The resolution recognizes the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. Its primary subjects are people of African descent in the diaspora: Black Americans, Black British, Afro-Caribbean communities across Europe and the Americas. These are precisely the people the race ceiling renders epistemically invisible within international law. The Global South voted yes in solidarity with a recognition claim whose subjects are largely Global North Black people. But the discipline’s epistemic community still cannot recognize those same people as authoritative voices within the field. The solidarity is real. The displacement continues.

The Discipline’s Own Record

The pattern is not new. Henry Richardson III spent decades making exactly this argument within the American Society of International Law. His work documented how African Americans were excluded from ASIL membership in the organization’s first sixty years, how the American Journal of International Law’s Board of Editors had no Black member until 2014, and how race scholarship faced stringent scrutiny that other approaches did not. James Gathii’s subsequent study found that from AJIL’s founding in 1907 to 2021, only 1.25% of its published documents substantially engaged with race. The discipline’s premier journal, across more than a century, treated race as peripheral to international law’s concerns.

What is significant for present purposes is not only the exclusion but how it was classified. Richardson’s intervention was consistently treated as a domestic matter, a question of American civil society rather than international legal epistemology. This is the same move the race ceiling makes at the structural level: Black engagement with international law is reclassified as local, personal, or sociological, while engagement from scholars positioned within the Global South frame is recognized as international and theoretically generative. The transatlantic slave trade resolution is a useful corrective here, because it insists on the international character of what was done to Black people across the Atlantic world. If the crime was international, the authority to speak about its legal legacy cannot be confined to those whose states voted yes while Black diaspora scholars in abstaining states are told their critique is too domestic to matter.

What the Discipline Amplifies

There is a recognizable type of critical narrative that international law’s publication infrastructure currently rewards: accounts of Global South precarity in international legal careers that confirm the field’s cosmopolitan self-image while leaving its epistemic authority intact. These narratives are valuable and the barriers they describe are real. But the forms of critical voice the discipline amplifies tend to be those that do not implicate its own recognition structures. A piece about structural barriers facing lawyers from the developing world will find a home in the field’s blogs and journals. A piece arguing that the Global South frame itself displaces Black diaspora scholars from epistemic authority faces a different reception, because it does not confirm the field’s sense of its own progressivism. It disrupts it.

This is opacity at work. Because the race ceiling operates through neutral-sounding criteria — geographic diversity, cosmopolitan merit, institutional affiliation — it cannot be formally violated. Each Black diaspora scholar who encounters it does so privately, reading exclusion as personal rather than structural. The individualization of that experience is itself a technique: it fragments the collective recognition necessary for reform and ensures that the discipline can continue to absorb critical approaches while remaining structurally unchallenged. 

What the Vote Demands

The UNGA resolution on the transatlantic slave trade is not self-executing. Resolutions rarely are. But it creates an obligation of interpretive seriousness: if the international community has recognized this crime, then the discipline that claims to govern international community relations cannot continue to treat those most directly descended from its victims as epistemically peripheral.

The abstaining states’ governments do not speak for the discipline, but their institutional footprint shapes it. The journals, the fellowship programmes, the training institutions, the editorial boards that determine what counts as international legal knowledge are overwhelmingly located in states that could not vote yes. The Permanent Court of Arbitration’s own recruitment policy states that vacant posts are filled with “due regard to maintaining geographical diversity in order to maintain the international character of the institution.” Geography, not race, is the stated criterion of institutional diversity. The resolution the UNGA just passed is not legible within that framework. Neither are the scholars whose intellectual authority it implicitly endorses.

What the vote reveals is the gap between international law’s political and epistemic communities. The political community, represented in the General Assembly, has moved. The epistemic community, represented in the discipline’s journals, fellowships, faculties, and institutions, has not moved at the same pace, and its geography of authority suggests why. The race ceiling is the name for that gap. It will not close simply because 123 states voted yes in New York. 

The next moment in this process will likely involve reparations. Calls are already building within the same coalition that delivered this resolution, and the discipline will be asked to provide the legal architecture. It is worth asking whether that architecture will be built with the voices of those most directly implicated in its subject matter, or whether international law will manage reparations the way it has managed race: incorporating the discourse while preserving the distribution of authority. If the race ceiling does not close in response to formal recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity, there is little reason to believe it will close in response to a reparations framework either. Recognition without redistribution of epistemic authority is not repair, it is the latest iteration of a discipline that has learned to speak race without relinquishing the power to define what speaking it means. It will only close, if it closes, when the discipline can recognize that the authority to speak about the transatlantic slave trade and its legal legacy belongs not only to those in the Global South who voted yes, but to those in the Global North who have always lived in its aftermath.

Photo attribution: Photo by İpek Dükel on Unsplash