Critiquing TWAIL

Umut Özsu

Chapter 10 in Research Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), 2025, pp 105-111 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: There are many critiques of TWAIL. Some are searching and rigorous, others pedantic and uncharitable, still others openly hostile and reliant upon caricature. In this intervention, I begin with a brief discussion of TWAIL's history and politics. I then outline my own critique of TWAIL. The term ‘TWAIL’, I contend, is best understood as an umbrella category for a range of different ways of conceiving international law, organized mainly around the activities of a loose network of legal scholars, students, and activists. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines, modes of legal analysis, and traditions of social critique, TWAIL is distinguished by a remarkably high level of theoretical and methodological eclecticism. This eclecticism, I argue, is ultimately rooted in and reflective of a fundamentally bourgeois politics.

Keywords: Marxism; International law; TWAIL; Development; Critical legal studies; Legal theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781789901511
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