International Law and Neo-Colonialism: What Scope for New Decolonization?
*Call For Papers*
The international law profession has long prided itself on having liberated its practices from all traces of colonialism. Where the international law projects of the past had consistently served the demands and interests of the colonial powers, the public international law of today is believed to stand resolutely decolonized across all its substantive normative regimes and regulatory procedures, if not also its intellectual reflexes and background methods of reasoning.
It would be too easy and too irresponsible, both intellectually and ideologically, to reject the received wisdom as a shameless lie or an outright delusion. Lies and delusions do not survive for that long and do not become that popular among so many intelligent people if some broader historical logic does not work in their favour. What is that logic which has allowed the traditional story about the career of the decolonizing project in international law take root and become so deeply entrenched in the collective memory of the international law discipline? What are the historical factors – both within and outside the international law field – that have made this story so popular? Pushing the inquiry further: what evidence can we cite to prove the traditional story wrong/incomplete/incorrect? How exactly can we demonstrate the falseness of the sense of achievement it cultivates in its audiences or the ideological partiality of the cheerful picture it paints?
It is said sometimes that the late 1960’s saw the end of what was, in fact, international law’s ‘heroic age.’ The grand historical sequence referred to in the traditional story about international law’s anti-colonialist successes also culminates in more or less the same time frame. Is there any connection between the fall of international law’s heroism and the end of international law’s decolonization?
A decade ago, in the wake of the groundbreaking writings of Edward Said, critical international law scholars developed a set of strategies for unmasking the neo-colonialist credentials of the modern international law project by re-imagining it as a discursive phenomenon. Today, we would like to push the effort a little further. Without diminishing in any way the tremendous power of Saidian criticism, we would like to invite contributions, reflections, and proposals that also explore other critical traditions. Colonialism, after all, is a very multifaceted phenomenon.
We take as our starting point Kwame Nkrumah’s comment: ‘[i]n order to halt foreign interference in the affairs of developing countries, it is necessary to study, understand, expose and actively combat neo-colonialism in whatever guise it may appear. For the methods of neo-colonialists are subtle and varied.’ At the end of the 2000’s, what different methods of neo-colonialism can we identify at work in the modern international law project? What are our analytical instruments for performing that task? What are our strategies for a further counter-colonialist struggle?
Stream Organiser:
Akbar Rasulov
Send titles and abstracts to the organising committee by 15 June:
clc@lbss.gla.ac.uk