This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

Chapter 3 analyses the normativity of sustainable development in international law and politics as expressed beyond the questions on its present (domestic) manifestations or the endless struggle to place the concept within general legal (normative) registers. It highlights how international law tends to subordinate non-Western experiences in its elevation of sustainable development into a global standard. What emerges from this process is that the more the world pursues sustainable development in its current form, the more we unwittingly contribute to the global dissemination of a particular strand of Eurocentrism. Sustainable development thus reveals itself as an amalgam of power and knowledge while simultaneously establishing itself as a vital component in international legal governance. What emerges in this chapter is that, although the concept of sustainable development is always at the forefront of international public discourse, little is done, in fact, to achieve its presumed objectives. Thus, while sustainable development’s quick ascent to become a universalist concept is central to this book, the concept’s character must be understood as quietly operating to mute global ecological violence that disproportionately affects marginalised peoples in the Global South.

The introduction provides the book’s framework. The UN is regarded as the guardian of the rules-based international legal order, but it is often not faithful in discharging this role. Building on the Third World Approaches to International Law school of thought, the chapter argues the existence of ‘international legal subalternity’ – a condition that marks the relationship of the global south with international law from its modern European origins to the present day. This condition is marked by the UN’s repeated representation of international law as a means through for historically disenfranchised peoples to achieve justice, but which is perpetually kept out of reach. International legal subalternity is the result of the creation and use of international law as a tool by hegemonic power, the manifestation of which is the production and reproduction of global subaltern underclasses who have little or no say in the substantive formation or application of the law that purports to govern them. The UN’s management of the question of Palestine most aptly illustrates this, as a critical examination of key moments from 1947 to the present will demonstrate.

This chapter begins to shape the theory of authority posited by this book, by exploring the way in which the authority of international criminal law is rooted in both justice and rights, exploring the development of international criminal justice in parallel with the human rights movement, and the way in which both have sought to serve victims of abuse. It also explores the way in which a reliance on State consent as the source of authority can undermine the authority of international criminal law. This argument is underpinned using Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship, which offers the opportunity to move away from the Euro- and State-centric approach to international criminal law and encourages a greater focus on domestic prosecution. The discussion engages with what this complete approach should comprise, exploring the impact of generalised support for domestic prosecutions to ensure that its exercises of power are truly legitimate.

This chapter contends that international law is structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. Many of international law’s basic concepts, such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development and human rights, have evolved in trajectories unsuited to perceiving or respecting ecological limits. International law treats nature as a resource for wealth generation and environmental degradation as an economic externality to be managed through special regimes. This chapter traces the coevolution of such assumptions about nature alongside formative disciplinary concepts, arguing that such understandings have been central to making international law, and that the discipline helps universalise and normalise them. Thus, to engage with environmental challenges, disciplinary tenets would have to evolve in directions that radically transform the nature of law.

This chapter explores the relationship between human rights and the environment. It begins by asking ‘who we think we are’ to understand the forms of subjecthood and subjectivity produced by human rights. It argues that human rights normalize a series of false conceptions about our collective self that have detrimental social and ecological consequences. The chapter next examines the question of ‘where we think we are’, probing the ontological rift between humans as subjects of rights and ‘the environment’ as the repository of resources with which to satisfy human entitlements. The chapter challenges human rights as a hubristic organizing category and observes that the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions, artificially separated in the chapter, serve to show that the way humans treat each other is inextricable from the way we treat nature. To undo relationships of mastery, ownership, and violence between the subjects and objects of human rights law, projects for human wellbeing and environmental struggles need to engage with and understand each other outside the unproductive rubric of rights discourse.

Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.

Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global concerns for which peoples and states have turned to international law for solutions. This edited collection asks how international lawyers have understood the environment: What exactly is it and how do international lawyers purport to govern it? These seemingly straightforward questions have the potential to unmake our discipline through destabilizing formative assumptions about the separation between subjects and objects of governance, between the social and the natural, and between the human and non-human. We explain in this introductory chapter that reexamining international law assumptions about the natural world is not mere theoretical speculation. It is an urgent and necessary step for addressing pressing environmental challenges.

The introduction to the book presents the context, scope, normative framework, core arguments, and the general structure of the book. It identifies gaps in existing literature on statehood and minority rights and explains the way the book addresses those gaps. The introduction especially elaborates the background of case studies and their relevance for the book. My unique approach to the case studies that goes beyond the vulnerability framework and instead focuses on the ways minorities are marginalised through the ideological operation of postcolonial states, is also discussed in this part. To support my analysis throughout the book, I have relied mainly on primary materials and archival sources, whenever possible. The research is also informed by a series of interviews with national and international organisations working in Bangladesh. My analysis is influenced by critical, postcolonial, and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship. Although the historical context is South Asia and the specific focus is on colonial India and present-day Bangladesh and Myanmar, many of the arguments, observations, and findings of the book should be equally relevant to other postcolonial states. The normative and pragmatic significance of the book beyond the Rohingya or the CHT crisis lies in this fact.

Radha Binod Pal (1886–1967) was an Indian judge appointed to the international Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Sent in as a representative for the British Commonwealth prior to India’s independence, Pal wrote an extensive dissent rejecting the IMTFE as an intrument of victor’s justice. This chapter is divided into five parts and examines the significance of Radha Binod Pal and his dissent to the history and continuity of colonial hegemony in international criminal law and its institutions. The first part articulates the relevance of revisiting Pal’s dissent at this time. The second looks at Pal’s early years and his encounter with international law before and after the dissent. The third locates Pal in the historical-social context of colonial India. In part four, we look at the dissenting judgment, particularly his use of law as a technique despite the absence of any formal Western training in international law. This part also tries to respond to some of the critiques of the dissent. We conclude with a sketch of Pal as an ancestral voice in the critique of international criminal justice and as a proto-ideologue of Third World Approaches to International Law.