Introduction to Symposium on Theorizing Twail Activism

Abstract

This symposium on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) is the second to result from an open call. 1 In the first TWAIL symposium, contributors addressed international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and the use of force. 2 The three contributions to this symposium on "Theorizing TWAIL Activism" reflect conceptually on actors including contemporary third-world grassroots feminist activists, thirdworld international lawyers in the postwar decolonization period, and TWAIL scholars themselves.As Obiora Chinedu Okafor writes in the first essay, however broad and diverse the range of their scholarship, TWAIL scholars share an ethical commitment to the practical as well as the intellectual struggle to expose, reform, or even retrench the features of the international legal system that contribute to an unjust global order. They also share a commitment to reorient international law so as to displace the West as its center and to make the lives and experiences of the "rest" significantly more important. 3 In "Enacting TWAILian Praxis in Nonacademic Habitats: Toward a Conceptual Framework," Okafor introduces the TWAIL theme of "praxis," which he uses in the sense of the "inseparability of theory and practice." 4 Noting that there has been little study of the roles that TWAIL scholars could play in struggles involving politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, peasant movements, unions, international civil society, and other nonacademic actors, Okafor seeks to further such discussions by proposing a set of conceptual guidelines for TWAIL scholars' interventions in environments such as international institutions and local activism.In "Inheriting a Tragic Ethos: Learning from Radhabinod Pal," the second of the essays, Adil Hasan Khan begins from the experience of disorientation produced in the postcolonial world by the failures and reversals of "countless projects of global redemption." 5 In the TWAIL tradition of learning from the practices of earlier

Must International Legal Pedagogy Remain Eurocentric?

“…31 TWAIL's counter-narratives pried open the landscape of international law and of international legal scholarship, laying its subjectivities bare. 32 Even once absolutist concepts such as universality and sovereignty lost the esteem they formerly wielded. 33 TWAIL counter-narratives speak for non-European subjects.…”