Global South

The successful International Schulich Law Visiting Scholar will spend a minimum of 4 weeks and a maximum of one term in residence at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University.

The past three decades have seen a growing scholarship on international law addressing legal and policy discussions on investment, trade, financial services and regulation, intellectual property right, tax, energy, competition law and even the environment. Despite this growth in the teaching and scholarly research of IEL, there remains question over the plurality and diversity of methodologies, voices and viewpoints in the discipline.

TWAIL scholarship share three central themes. First, it engages in historical analysis to disinter partial narratives of international law. Second, the historical analysis exposes avenues through which particular aspects of international law are unjust to everyday realities of Third World peoples. Third, some TWAIL scholarship attempt to reform or transform unjust international law to suit the needs and realities of Third World peoples.

There is no single ‘correct’ approach to legal scholarship. The beauty of international economic law research and study lies in the availability of diverse theories and methods of other non-legal disciplines that can be carefully deployed to effectively engage in debates arising in today’s complex social, political and economic environment.

Critical perspectives can be both distinct from and form part of the broadly defined ‘socio-legal’ approach to social inquiry. To adopt a critical perspective is to commit to the project of demystifying and disrupting dominant narratives, interpretations and ways of both knowing and understanding legal phenomena. It represents a quest for truth and offers alternative ways of seeing the world around us. As such, critical perspectives encompass doctrinal, empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of law. In short, it is the purpose of critical approaches to challenge and disrupt that which has been taken to be a ‘given’ in mainstream discourses and narratives

This Symposium, and the contributions carry on the conversation by examining the ways in which the contributors have harnessed theory and method in their critical scholarship on IEL in Africa. Continuing to build the knowledge base on IEL that is both rigorous and relevant to Africa has a lot to do with the lens through which research work is conducted.

We write to thank our readers and contributors for a really productive 2019.

The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights announces establishment of the Oak Foundation Research Visitor Programme through funding provided by the Oak Foundation.

In short, the SDGs and its interesting set of targets are a fertile ground not only to reimagine past UN led decade themed goals and their implications for (sustainable) development, but, to also situate them in contemporary discourse of the activities of nations, transnational corporations and other non-state actors. As part of the 2019 Purdy Crawford Workshop, the contributions to the symposium on “Sustainable Development Goals, Trade, Investment, and Inequality” critically examine these goals from the vantage point of each contributor’s scholarly expertise.

The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law will host a one-day workshop on decolonial comparative law on 6 October 2020 at the University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg).