Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T06:12:18.695Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality. By Sundhya Pahuja. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii, 303. Index. $114, £65.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

James Thuo Gathii
James Thuo Gathii*
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago School of Law
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Recent Books on International Law
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 107 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 494 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For this reason, Pahuja argues that international law minimizes its “counter-imperial dimension, or emancipatory possibilities” (p. 37).

2 Elsewhere, Pahuja says that this instability “manifests in what we can think of as the gap between international law’s existence as a specific body of rules and the imaginative horizon of justice toward which that constellation of rules gestures” (p. 97).

3 Pahuja also suggests that this instability “is simultaneously essential to and generative of international legality and yet represents a threat to its very reach and existence” (id.). She notes that international law’s critical instability is “neither innocent nor impartial” (p. 37).

4 The application of the book’s thesis in parts of the text pushes this claim of instability even further. For example, in discussing PSNR, Pahuja argues that “it is the concurrent lack of an ultimate foundation for international law that makes the possibility of such ‘jurisdiction’ possible” (p. 114). Moreover, she explains that “the foundations of international law cannot maintain their grand ontological claim to ‘truth’ and/or ‘universality’; they are contingent. Factually or ‘ontically,’ law is still ‘grounded’ somewhere, or ‘founded’ somewhere, or ‘founded’ in concepts” (p. 42). Another example that Pahuja gives of the elevation of “a parochial set of values to the status of the universal” is the ideas of “development and growth” (p. 7).

5 As Pahuja explains,

[T]he erasure of the production of the nation state, the international, sovereignty and law through law is effected as if they are brought into being through the transcendent positioning of development and economic growth and the way that position offers grounds to international law. The transcendent position those concepts occupy allows them to appear external to the concepts in question. (P. 39)

6 Pahuja notes that post-World War II international law “did not bring the new equality it promised. Instead, it effectuated a shift from the old mode of power to a new rationality in which the operative mode of power was precisely the promise of a new universality for international law and the new institutions” (p. 4).

7 Pahuja further echoes this theme when she argues that the place where the line between the national and international is drawn in the development discourse “had the effect of attenuating the oppositional dimensions of the claim to PSNR. Casting the ‘international’ in a particular way, both conceptually and institutionally, facilitated this deradicalisation through the equation of the ‘West’ and ‘world’” (p. 123).

8 Pahuja makes this point explicit:

Development is the key example of a concept that performs this mutually securing transcendent positioning for and with law. Taken together, this dynamic yet stable series of concepts each facilitates the claim to universality of the other, securing the elevation to the universal of a parochial vision of social, economic and political organisation and erasing the violence of that claim. (P. 193)

8 Consequently, Pahuja concludes that

the overt subsumption within development of notions such as corruption, human rights and the rule of law not only depoliticises them and authorises their inclusion with the terrain of [international financial institution] intervention, but effectively removes their teeth as concepts which could bite between nations or, indeed, between debtor member states and the international organisations themselves. (Pp. 239–40)

10 See, e.g., Fakhri, Michael, Introduction: Questioning TWAIL’s Agenda, 14 OR. Rev. Int’l L. 1 (2012)Google Scholar; Odumosu, Ibironke T., Challenges for the (Present/) Future of Third World Approaches to International Law, 10 Int’l CMTY. L. Rev. 467, 475 (2008)Google Scholar; Natarajan, Usha, Creating and Recreating Iraq: Legacies of the Mandate System in Contemporary Understandings of Third World Sovereignty, 24 Leiden J. Int’l L. 799 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005);

see also Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations:The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (2001).

12 Gathii, James Thuo, Neoliberalism, Colonialism and International Governance: Decentering the international Law of Governmental Legitimacy, 98 Mich. L. Rev. 1996, 2020 (2000) (book review)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anne Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention:Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law 40–51 (2003); Chimni, B. S., Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto, 8 Int’l Cmty. L. Rev. 3 (2006)Google Scholar; Mutua, Makau, What is TWAIL?, 94 ASIL Proc. 31 (2000)Google Scholar; The Third World and International order :Law, Politics and Globalization (Antony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Mickelson & Obiora Okafor eds., 2004); Chimni, B. S., International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making, 15 Eur. J. Int’l L. 1 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James Thuo Gathii, War, Commerce, and International Law (2010).

13 Okafor, Obiora Chinedu, Newness, Imperialism, and International Legal Reform in Our Time: A TWAIL Perspective, 43 Osgoode Hall L.J. 171 (2005)Google Scholar; Kennedy, David, When Renewal Repeats: Thinking Against the Box, 32 N.Y.U.J. Int’l L. & Pol. 335 (2000)Google Scholar.

14 Koskenniemi, Martti, The Politics of International Law—20 Years Later, 20 Eur. J. Int’l L. 7 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Kennedy, International Legal Structures(1987); Kennedy, David, A New Stream of International Law Scholarship, 7 Wis. Int’l L.J. 1 (1988)Google Scholar; Koskenniemi, supra note 11; yShalakany, Amr A.,Arbitration and the Third World: A Plea for Reassessing Bias Under the Specter of Neoliberalism, 41 Harv. Int’l L.J. 419 (2000)Google Scholar; Garcia, Helena Alviar, Legal Reform, Social Policy, and Gendered Redistribution in Colombia: The Role of the Family, 19 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol’y & L. 577 (2011)Google Scholar; Musembi, Celestine Nyamu,De Soto and Land Relations in Rural Africa: Breathing Life into Dead Theories About Property Rights, 28 Third World Q. 1457 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dianne Otto, Professor, University of Melbourne, Keynote Address at the Third World and International Law Conference (TWAIL III): The Gastronomics of TWAIL’s Feminist Flavourings: Some Lunch-Time Offerings (April 20–21, 2007),in 9 Int’l Cmty. L. Rev. 345 (2007); Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (Adrien Wing ed., 2000); Andrews, Penelope E., From Gender Apartheid to Non-sexism: The Pursuit of Women’s Rights in South Africa, 26 N.C. J. Int’l L. & Com. Reg. 693 (2001)Google Scholar; Gordon, Ruth, Critical Race Theory and International Law: Convergence and Divergence, 45 Vill. L. Rev. 827 (2000)Google Scholar; Nesiah, Vasuki, Toward a Feminist Internationality: A Critique of U.S. Feminist Legal Scholarship, 16 Harv. Women’S L.J. 189 (1993)Google Scholar; Odeh, Lama Obu, Commentary on Islam and International Law: Toward a Positive Mutual Engagement to Realize Shared Ideals, 98 Asil Proc. 167 (2004)Google Scholar.

15 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Anti discrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Id. at 1335–36.

17 Crenshaw argues:

The Critics [of blacks using rights strategies] are correct in observing that engaging in rights discourse has helped to deradicalize and co-opt the challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context where they were deemed “other,” and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated in other terms.

Id. at 1385; see also Gordon, supra note 14.

18 See, e.g., Mohammed Bedjaoui, Towards A New International Economic Order (1979). For an overview of these approaches, see Gathii, James Thuo, Third World Approaches to International Economic Governance, in International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice 255 (Falk, Richard, Rajagopal, Balakrishnan & Stevens, Jacqueline eds., 2008)Google Scholar.

19 see David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue:Reassessing International Humanitarianism (2004).

20 Here one is reminded of the American Society of International Law’s centennial publication, International Law: 100 Ways It Shapes Our Lives (2006). That list was then followed by another list, written by José E. Alvarez and David Lachman, International Law: 50 Ways It Harms Our Lives (undated), available at http://www.asil.org/ilpost/president/50_ways.pdf.

21 Rajagopal, Balakrishnan, From Resistance to Renewal: The Third World, Social Movements, and the Expansion of International Institutions, 41 Harv. Int’l L.J. 529, 565–69 (2000)Google Scholar.

22 See James Gathii, Thuo, TWAIL: A Brief History of Its Origins, Its Decentralized Network, and a Tentative Bibliography, 3 Trade L. & Dev. 26, 39 (2011)Google Scholar.

23 Id.

24 Id. ; see also Gathii, supra note 12, at 2020. Some scholars have argued international law forestalls substantial or “radical” change. See, e.g., Ngugi, Joel, Making New Wine for Old Wineskins: Can the Reform of International Law Emancipate the Third World in the Age of Globalization?, 8 U.C. Davis J. Int’l L. & Pol’y 73, 75 (2002)Google Scholar (arguing that “[i]nternational law both enables and prevents any substantial success to challenge domination and oppression”). This view may be contrasted with a recent account that misreads critical accounts as failing to acknowledge international law’s potential for “emancipation and stability.” Fassbender, Bardo & Peters, Anne, Introduction: Towards A Global History of International Law, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law 4 (Fassbender, Bardo & Peters, Anne eds., 2012)Google Scholar.