What is TWAIL?

The regime of international law is illegitimate.' It is a predatory system that legitimizes, reproduces and sustains the plunder and subordination of the Third World by the West.' Neither universality nor its promise of global order and stability make international law a just, equitable, and legitimate code of global governance for the Third World.3 The construction and universalization of international law were essential to the imperial expansion that subordinated non-European peoples and societies to European conquest and domination.4 Historically, the Third World has generally viewed international law as a regime and discourse of domination and subordination, not resistance and liberation. This broad dialectic of opposition to international law is defined and referred to here as Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

TWAIL is not a recent phenomenon. It stretches back to the decolonization movement that swept the globe after World War II. Bandung was the symbolic birthplace of TWAIL, although the North-South confrontation draws heavily from Latin American opposition to the domination of the Third World by the industrialized West.5 This confrontation has its roots in the anticolonial movement. TWAIL is a response to decolonization and the end of direct European colonial rule over non-Europeans. It basically describes a response to a condition, and is both reactive and proactive. It is reactive in the sense that it responds to international law as an imperial project. But it is proactive because it seeks the internal transformation of conditions in the Third World.

TWAIL is driven by three basic, interrelated and purposeful objectives. The first is to understand, deconstruct, and unpack the uses of international law as a medium for the creation and perpetuation of a racialized hierarchy of international norms and institutions that subordinate non-Europeans to Europeans. Second, it seeks to construct and present an alternative normative legal edifice for international governance. Finally, TWAIL seeks through scholarship, policy, and politics to eradicate the conditions of underdevelopment in the Third World.

The present inquiry into the meaning and purposes of TWAIL rejects attempts by some scholars, particularly those of postmodern 6 and postcolonial' persuasions, to diminish the importance of scholarship and political movements and strategies deployed by earlier Third World voices and political leaders as tools against the imperial projects of the West. There is...