Mohsen al Attar is Reader and Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He holds a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School, where he studied under Ruth Buchanan and Obiora Okafor. A scholar dedicated to anti-colonial and anti-racist praxis, al Attar is recognised for his contributions to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), critical pedagogy, and global political economy.

He is the editor (with Claire Smith) of Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialised Boundaries (Oxford University Press, 2025), which examines the reproduction of racial hierarchies through a range of international legal instruments and practices. His forthcoming monograph, A Guerrilla at the Hague (Oxford University Press, 2026), offers a genealogical and conceptual analysis of TWAIL, examining its internal tensions and its enduring relevance to the global legal order.

Al Attar’s articles have appeared in McGill Law Journal, Third World Quarterly, and International Community Law Review, among others. His work is characterised by a commitment to decolonisation—not only as critique but as method and praxis. He has written extensively on legal pluralism, neoliberalism, and the colonial architectures that undergird international law.

A Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy, al Attar is equally committed to transformative pedagogy. His essays “TWAIL Pedagogy: Legal Education for Emancipation” and “Education for Emancipation” are foundational texts in critical legal education. Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Angela Davis, and Walter Rodney, he teaches from a narrative and iconoclastic tradition that treats the classroom as a site of political struggle. “Injustice today,” he tells his students, “is enforced not just through gunboats, but through syllabi.”