TWAIL

International legal scholarship on migration remains obsessively focused on migration from the global north to the global south. Even knowledge production anchored in critical traditions within international law, such as Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), tends to skew in the direction of analysis that centers Third World encounters with the First. This general orientation comes at the costly expense of a deeper understanding of what Oreva Olakpe terms “South-South migrations” in her powerful intervention addressing this glaring shortcoming in the literature. Neglect of detailed study of experiences of international law in the global south, and in South-South relations, results in more than a merely incomplete picture of the nature of international law.

International court decisions, the corruption of the elite in the Global South, and the refusal of states to uphold their obligations towards people who are excluded from the privileges of citizenship shape how migrants experience law, as well as how they forge their paths to justice, recognition, and access. This book and symposium contribute to efforts to understand and document how international law impacts migrant communities, but also how these communities fill the lacunae created by law and migrant status through their acts of contestation and innovative approaches. It delves into the evolving approaches to migration and international obligations in the two states as they face new migration-related challenges.

One of the sites where the legacies of colonialism continue to be perpetuated in the Global South is the law classroom. In the teaching and research of international law, ‘mainstream’ narratives of international law are privileged as the Subject, and critical international law scholarship is treated as the Other.

This is the video recording of the Afronomicslaw Academic Forum Guest Lecture Series on "The Sovereign Alien: History, TWAIL, and International Economic Law" by Prof. Antony Anghie with Humphrey Sipalla as discussant.

The Afronomicslaw.org Academic Forum Lecture Series brings experts and discussants together to discuss broad issues arising from international economic law as they relate to Africa and the Global South.

The Afronomicslaw.org Academic Forum invites you to join their next guest lecture series.

May 14, 2021

 

 

February 15, 2020

 

By highlighting the governance practices that enabled India and Brazil to circumvent and minimize the oppressive TRIPS regime, Vanni offers a critical perspective with key implications for scholarly work on the politics of intellectual property in marginalized contexts. Her emphasis on local approaches to law-making is certainly instructive for the interdisciplinary literature on intellectual property that tends to focus on foreign appropriation of traditional knowledge and illegal efforts such as piracy and counterfeit production to subvert the international regime.

This chapter, like much of the book, is exceptionally well researched, and brings seemingly unconnected developments neatly within the overarching narrative mentioned above. The author’s focus on how international law affects the ‘mundane’ everyday life, and vice versa, allows (or perhaps requires) her to examine much more than just the oft over-discussed ‘hot topics’ (i.e., compulsory licenses and patentability criteria) of the Indian pharma-patent landscape.