In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Alonso Gurmendi

25 Oct

[Alonso Gurmendi is a contributor for Opinio Juris and Assistant Professor at Universidad del Pacífico Law School, in Lima, Peru.] I am a long-time fan of 4X games. For the uninitiated, that stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit & Exterminate Games – a (lame) 1990s pun turned game-genre, coined by Video-Game reviewer Alan Emrich who wanted to promote his Master of Orion review by saying...

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21 Oct

Part I set out the fundamentals of the debate, explaining that a key part of the contextualist critique of Orford’s view of legal history centres on the difference between doing history of international law and using history in international law. This is where the two sides get stuck, because Orford presents the TWAIL critique as “correctives to problems with earlier...

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21 Oct

I am a big fan of Başak Etkin and Kostia Gorobets’ Borderline Jurisprudence podcast. I am also very interested in the intersection between law and history. Since Borderline Jurisprudence’s latest episode featured a discussion with Anne Orford on her latest book, International Law & the Politics of History(hereinafter ILPH), I could not resist to offer some comments. Anne Orford is, without a doubt, one of...

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16 Jul

Despite the publication of the MMIWG Report and its findings of an ongoing “race-based genocide” against Canada’s First Nations, issues of indigenous genocide and (neo)colonial oppression have remained side-lined from political discourse in the rest of the American continent. In fact, the situation has arguably worsened: at the same time as Canada protested the unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous...

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15 Jul

My friend Chiara Redaelli has produced an impressive volume, thoroughly analysing the topic of intervention in civil wars. As others in this symposium have already pointed out, it is usually difficult to offer comments on what one mostly agrees with. In this post, therefore, apart from congratulating Chiara for a fantastic book, I wanted to add to the conversation by briefly telling the story of...

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16 Jun

While results have not yet been officially announced, it is now a fact that Pedro Castillo, a rural farmer and schoolteacher from the town of Chota, in the northern Peruvian Andes, won Peru’s Presidential Election. Let me say this from the get-go: this is a historical moment. Peru is an immensely centralised, deeply racist country. Castillo’s meteoric rise to the...

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19 May

The past few days have been dominated by the horrible images of destruction coming out of Palestine. As is painfully visible to anyone with an internet connection, Israel has been targeting residential and commercial buildings in Gaza under the argument that they are used by Hamas militants. As one tweet by the Israeli Defence Forces put it, according to Israel,...

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01 Apr

International law has famously “turned to history”. Since then, what I like to call the “foundational myth” of international law has been poked, prodded, re-evaluated and re-told in powerful, unsettling and insightful ways. The publicist’s relation with their own discipline is no longer the same, and the colonial, often violent, roots of the rules we rely on every day, are increasingly more exposed and open...

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01 Feb

I recently read Steven Wheatley’s latest paper, “Revisiting the Doctrine of Intertemporal Law” and found it incredibly interesting. As someone who shares Prof. Wheatley's interest in the intersection between law and history, I found his effort to systematise the concept into a practical method extremely welcomed and insightful. At the same time, his equation-like approach to “the law in the...

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26 Oct

Judge Barrett is set to become Justice Barrett. Throughout her nomination process, I have been quite fascinated by the discussion surrounding her originalist views and originalism in general. As someone not used to originalism as a theory of Constitutional interpretation (it has not really caught on in Peru), this added exposure has offered me some new perspectives I had not previously considered, including originalism’s identity...

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05 Oct

[in English at the end] Hace poco me tope con un podcast llamado "Hablemos de Derecho Internacional", conducido por Edgardo Sobenes, ex miembro del equipo legal de Nicaragua ante la CIJ. El podcast está repleto de excelentes entrevistas a algunos de los más renombrados publicistas de Hispanoamérica. Personalmente recomiendo la entrevista al Dr. Juan José Ruda, Profesor Principal en la Pontificia...

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04 Aug

In 2018, Latin American states adopted the “Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean”, also known as the Escazú Agreement, for the city in Costa Rica were it was signed. The treaty sets out an obligation for Member States to legislate on these three matters under specific conditions, within the broader context of...

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