Mohsen al Attar

Mohsen al Attar is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick (though is currently visiting at UCL). He holds a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School, where he worked under Ruth Buchanan, Ikechi Mbeoji, and Obiora Okafor. As an anti-colonial legal scholar, he is best known for his writings on Third World Approaches to International Law, a theory that guides his investigations into international economic law and political economy.

In his forthcoming book, A Guerrilla at the Hague (OUP), he argues that many principles of international law preserve a Eurocentric view of human development and flourishing. This argument is inspired by his earlier writings on the Eurocentrism of international law and on the strangulation of Third World epistemic realities.

Mohsen is equally reputed for his teaching and is a Senior Fellow with the Higher Education Authority. He eschews a black-letter analysis of law, preferring to engage with its context and history. His narrative approach aligns with an iconoclastic tradition that treats information as a tool of resistance. Injustice in the modern era is preserved not through gunboats alone but, as the great Kenyan bard Ngugi wa Thiong’o said, with the chalk and the blackboard. Mohsen forever tells his students that education is a struggle on the path to emancipation.