Full Description
While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern-or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed-this volume argues that racialisation is foundational to the discipline, underpinning its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors. Emancipating International Law explores the many ways racial hierarchy, systemic oppression, and global white supremacy shape international law. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, the collection moves beyond qualifying whether international law is racist to explore how racial hierarchies are embedded in its structures and continue to evolve through legal and institutional practice.
Divided into five sections, the book begins by situating international law's racialised boundaries within its colonial, capitalist, and chauvinist afterlives, exposing how white ignorance and race-thinking underpin legal norms, from sovereignty to jus cogens. It then examines racial stratification across legal institutions, including investment law, refugee law, and the Genocide Convention. The third section extends this critique to human rights, revealing the ways in which even an emancipatory paradigm can bolster racial injustices. The penultimate section unpacks racial hierarchies in disparate societies, including Brazil, India, and Japan, as well as the frontiers of nation-states. The volume concludes with a powerful discussion of the role of activism and alternative epistemologies in racial justice struggles, and the limits of international law's capacity for anti-racist transformation.
Aimed at scholars, practitioners, and students of international law, critical legal studies, and anti-colonial theory, this book advances an understanding of international law that is aimed at dismantling its racialised structures.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Contents
Mohsen al Attar and Claire Smith: Beyond Silence: Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law Part I. Situating International Law's Racism Problem 1: Mohsen al Attar: The Racialized Epistemology of International Law: From White Ignorance to Black Dignity 2: Folúkẹ'& Ifejola Adébísí: Disrupting International Law's Colonial Afterlives of Human Property: Educating for a World Beyond Racial Capitalism and Unending Apartheids 3: Jason Haynes: Racialized Extractivism: A Tale of Fetishism, Narcissism, Primitive Accumulation, and Expropriation 4: Harrison Otieno Mbori: The Inequalities of Sovereign Equality 5: Sarah Riley Case and Frédéric Mégret: The Colour of Jus Cogens Part II. The Tools, Techniques, and Technologies of Legalized Racial Inequality 6: Shahab Saqib: Race as Citizenship Personified: Illuminating the Ghosts of Racial Discrimination in International Law 7: Dimitrios A Kourtis: A Racialized Existence: Lessons from Palestine and the Genocide Convention 8: Faisal al-Asaad: Settler Colonialism, Race, and International Law: Lessons from the Frontier 9: Jinan Bastaki: Survive the Journey Only to Succumb to International Refugee Law 10: Nciko wa Nciko: How the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement Fail Climate and Racial Justice: Time for the Kampala Convention? Part III. A Right to be Free From Racism 11: Raghavi Viswanath: The Intersection of Race and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights 12: Tess Sheldon, Ruby Dhand, and Roxanne Mykitiuk: Racialized Ableism and the Need for Intersectional Discourse and Action 13: Paulina Jimenez Fregoso: De-essentializing Race: Intersectionality as a Feminist Approach in International Human Rights Law 14: Karla Schröter: Colonial Fantasies in the European Court of Human Rights Part IV. Antiracism in the Pluriverse 15: Suraj Girijashanker: Indian Approaches to Racism and Related Forms of Subordination under International Law: A Question of Interest Convergence 16: Saul Takahashi: Japan: International Law as the Outward Looking Weapon 17: Henrique Weil Afonso: Decolonial Fissures: Looking from and Beyond Brazil's Colour Lines 18: Yang Han: Norm Entrepreneurship at the UN: Addressing Racial Equality Across Borders and the South-North Divide Part V. Taking the Struggle(s) Forward 19: Darryl Li: From Captives to Enslaved: International Law and the Making of the (Non)Human 20: Kamya Vishwanath: Bodies of Knowledge: Re-framing Emancipation in International Law through Dalit Praxis 21: Radha D'Souza: Racism, (Neo)Colonialism, and International Law: A Field in Search of a Philosophy? 22: E Tendayi Achiume, Asl)iÜ Bâli, and S Priya Morley: Conceptualizing Race and Resisting Racism in International Law 23: Claire Smith: Unburdening White Women: Antiracist Feminist Praxis as Revolution 24: Dylan Asafo: The Slow and Benevolent Violence of International Law: An Oceanian Perspective
