Analysis

Through our analysis of the course outlines of the above subjects, we have arrived at the conclusion that the LL.M program at SAU has the potential to make a significant contribution to the development of South Asian perspective of IL. All the compulsory courses taught at SAU address issues of international law relevant to South Asia, scholarly works focussing on South-Asian issues have been given due consideration, as have the works of South Asian and TWAIL scholars.

So far, we have found that an uncritical Western perspective is favored in the teaching of international law in the region. In many cases, international law is generally presented as a single and objective law that must be applied uniformly in any part of the world and, therefore, leaving no place for regional contextualization or for questioning its premises. Likewise, it is widely preferred to teach it using a bibliography originated in the Global North, despite the substantive contributions of Latin American scholars in International Law and in the Humanities and Social Sciences. These contributions have been made invisible by the colonial past and globalization processes based on asymmetrical power-knowledge relationships.

There is a need to strip the teaching of PIL of its Eurocentric cognitive and civilisational conceits. ‘There is something profoundly wrong when syllabi designed to meet the ends of colonialism continue well into the [postcolonial] era’.

This is a clarion call for Indian international law scholars to do collective work on strengthening and integrating the field within the domestic legal landscape and foreign policy, as well as with western scholarship. The restoration of the foundation of international rules well laid in ancient India is urgently required. The timely action could save the crumbling architecture of teaching and research of international law in India.

Legal education has begun in Myanmar since 1878 under the administration of British Colonial Government. Rangoon (Yangon) College was founded as an affiliation of Calcutta University (CU), India in 1884-1885. British Government passed the University of Rangoon Act in 1920 through which the University of Rangoon was founded and has come into existence.

he curriculum of law schools was standardized and based on the framework curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education. Under the framework curriculum, law subjects are divided into compulsory and elective. The compulsory subjects are targeted at the basic laws, which are an unavoidable component of the legal education in Vietnam. Under the framework curriculum, both public international law and private international law are compulsory subjects. For this reason, law schools are obliged to make these courses available to their students, and students have to take and pass the subjects as a pre-requisite for the successful completion of their legal education.

The Central Asian States should learn to rely on international law, more proactively and consistently, as a tool for advancing their lawful interests, and for maintaining regional and international peace and security. Kazakhstan’s recent membership in the UN Security Council (2017-2018) was an excellent occasion to promote respect for international law at the regional level. Other recent examples of such reliance include the adoption of a Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea in 2018, or an ongoing reform of criminal law and procedure in Uzbekistan.

This series of blog posts gathers perspectives from international law teachers, researchers and students from different regions and all stages of their careers and legal education, to reflect together on common challenges and imagined futures of our profession. This Symposium is held in a moment of great uncertainty – but also of possibility: the Critical Pedagogy Symposium recently held on Opinio Juris offered thought-provoking commentary from across the globe on critical international pedagogy and the virtual space, while the forthcoming TWAILR series on Critique and the Canon promises stimulating discussion on balancing doctrinal rigour and critical engagement in the classroom.

The NUS Centre for International Law recently released its report on ‘Teaching and Researching International Law in Asia’ (TRILA) on the back of its inaugural conference in 2018. The TRILA Report presents a comprehensive empirical survey of the state of international law teaching and research in Asia. While the Report is focused on Asia, it is intended to contribute to the growing global discussion on teaching and researching international law around the world.

At the heart of African decolonization was radical political thinking about international non-domination, and the vision of an international legal, political and economic order that secured this anti-imperialism through global redistribution. This idea of the world, that involved radical reinterpretation of the principle of self-determination, united the political thinking of the tallest leaders of Africa – Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and others.