If you're not careful, [international lawyers] will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.Malcolm X The Power of Mythmaking Origin stories are always more fiction than fact, more myth than reality. At times, origin stories serve to redeem a dubious past, while at others they enable us to justify an unwelcoming...
Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. Ibn Battuta From its vantage point atop the Kasbah in Tangier, Morocco, the Ibn Battuta museum overlooks the meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea—a vista coloured by myriad beginnings and a few endings as well. More of a memorial than a museum, the site...
Dr Mohsen al Attar and (Dr) Omar Kamel Academics are professional thinkers. We might be charitable and describe ourselves as specialised communicators as well. We engage in a variety of roles, ranging from the advancement of knowledge to the teaching and mentoring of students, from guiding policymakers to supporting social movements. Some of these tasks are mundane—setting assessment questions—just as others...
Dr Mohsen al Attar and Dr Rafael Quintero Godínez** Modern legal education has been criticised for trying to make itself harmless. Law professors provide students with a sanitised view of the field that camouflages the cracks and contradictions on offer. This approach leads to the circulation of parochial knowledge that overlooks the nuances of the societies we inhabit and the struggles...
Where is knowledge headed? AI gate-crashed our thinking, leaving this question on everyone's mind. The answer is probably not surprising: wherever the thinker wants it to go, more Rorschach test than prediction, as assumptions about desirable scientific trajectories dictate our response. I have been thinking about knowledge a lot these days. Along with the rise of AI, two of my PhDs...
1 Experimentation is the lifeblood of a pedagogue. Without this, our craft is at risk of going stale: the materials will become anachronistic, just as the methods will falter. Law schools, however, are not ideal sites for experimentation. Staunchly grounded in professional practice—we might say jealously guarded by the guild—the curriculum constricts space for pedagogical adventure, bounded by the demands of an absentee landowner. Law students are not...
1- White Supremacy and the International Legal Order Writing in 1997, Charles Mills threw a grenade into political theory. With a touch of hyperbole, we might even say he collapsed the contours of the social sciences. Standard undergraduate philosophy courses, he tells us, cover two thousand years of political thought. Mainstream philosophers introduce students to liberalism and libertarianism, capitalism and communitarianism, socialism...
International lawyers do debate class, but not necessarily in their own professional milieu. There is significant literature on ‘bourgeois’ international law, while the discussion as to what a ‘proletarian’ international law might look like is still alive and well (see for example here, here, and here). Despite these long-standing ties between international legal scholarship and the question of class, there...
Legal academia is a contact sport. Students, faculty, and managers brutalise one another with gusto. Personifying the adversarial character of the dominant legal systems, they wrestle over course design and assessment, procedures and promotions, not to mention teaching allocation and the inevitable inequities that ensue. And I’ve only scratched the surface. To improve win rates (or survival chances), participants in...
Mohsen al Attar and Ata R. Hindi, with Claire Smith* What has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reaffirmed for racialised scholars of international law? For one, we’re reminded of the limitless capacity of international lawyers to centre themselves and the discipline we hold dear, come what may. Once more, we are in crisis, jeremiads flowing with the freedom of disciplinary self-importance. What...
What is the difference between a Marxist and a TWAILer (except for the class element)?Julia Emtseva, Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute* Posed on twitter, this question about Third World Approaches to International Law triggered a flurry of responses. 'Many TWAILers are grounded in historical materialism'; 'it’s about the ‘ultimate’ power relations…to TWAIL, it’s empire-colony, or race'; and 'most TWAIL draws heavily...
To our readers, I begin with an apology. While we launched the call for submissions for this vital symposium some months ago, a combination of technical and personal events prevented us from taking it forward on schedule. On the personal front, I left the UWI and took up a post at UCL. This precipitated the technical issue: I was unaware...