Balakrishnan Rajagopal

International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance

The emergence of transnational social movements as major actors in international politics - as witnessed in Seattle in 1999 and elsewhere - has sent shockwaves through the international system. Many questions have arisen about the legitimacy, coherence and efficiency of the international order in the light of the challenges posed by social movements. This ground-breaking book offers a fundamental critique of twentieth-century international law from the perspective of Third World social movements - the first ever to do so. It examines in detail the growth of two key components of modern international law - international institutions and human rights - in the context of changing historical patterns of Third World resistance. Using a historical and interdisciplinary approach, Rajagopal presents compelling evidence challenging current debates on the evolution of norms and institutions, the meaning and nature of the Third World, as well as the political economy of its involvement in the international system.

Counter-Hegemonic International Law: Rethinking Human Rights and Development as a Third World Strategy

Abstract The very meaning of the term ‘Third World’ has become disarticulated, with corresponding changes to the politics and structure of international law. At stake is the question: is international law of any use to the Third World, and if it could be so, how must one rethink it? This article argues that there is now a distinction between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic international law, and that the future of international law and the Third World are intricately intertwined in contributing to a counter-hegemonic international law. But, in order to achieve this goal, the past strategies of Third World engagement through international law, for example through the discourses of human rights and development, need to be seriously rethought. The article offers a critical analysis of the hegemonic nature of human rights and development discourses in contemporary international law.

The Role of Law in Counter-Hegemonic Globalization and Global Legal Pluralism: Lessons from the Narmada Valley Struggle in India

The multiplication of legal orders is characteristic ofwhat one could call anage of globalization and counter-hegemonic globalization. In this age, the relationship between international law and other normative orders is increasingly important. The dominant disciplinary frameworks that provide explanations of such a relationship are focused on compliance with and/or the effectiveness of international norms in domestic legal orders and are derived from international relations. In this article, I examine the limits and possibilities of such approaches through a case study of the use of law (at multiple levels) by one of Indias most prominent social movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada). The article argues that the use of law by a social movement is a concrete instance of counter-hegemonic globalization in which international law is one of many different legal orders, a situation of global legal pluralism, in which it is impossible to tell in advance which normative orderwill best advance cosmopolitan goals such as human rights.

Academic Freedom as a Human Right: An Internationalist Perspective

The university as a transnational community of professors and students poses challenges to traditional conceptions of academic freedom. What if we rethought academic freedom as part of a human right to education?

Reshaping justice: International law and the third world: an introduction

This special issue of Third World Quarterly is devoted to exploring critically the past, present and future relevance of international law to the priorities of the countries, peoples and regions of the South. Within the limits of space it has tried to be comprehensive in scope and representative in perspective and participation. The contributions are grouped into three clusters to give some sense of coherence to the overall theme: articles by Baxi, Anghie, Falk, Stevens and Rajagopal on general issues bearing on the interplay between international law and world order; articles highlighting regional experience by An-Na’im, Okafor, Obregon and Shalakany; and articles on substantive perspectives by Mgbeoji, Nesiah, Said, Elver and King-Irani. We think this collective effort gives an illuminating account of the unifying themes, while at the same time exhibiting the wide diversity of concerns and approaches. It is evident that, from times past, international law has provided the powerful with a series of instruments by which to exploit and control the weak, and even provided legal cover for colonial rule. With this historical awareness, it is evident that there is no necessary linkage between international law and global justice; indeed, it is more convincing to claim that the historic experience, with some exceptions, most clearly expresses the reinforcing interconnections between law, power and injustice. But international law, as with all law, is a two-edged reality and, with political and moral imagination, can be used advantageously by the weak to resist the plunder and invasions of the strong. Domination by the powerful has always produced resistance, and international law has been crucially shaped by it. The struggle against colonialism and economic imperialism was waged not only on battlefields and through diplomacy, but also in arenas where new norms of legitimacy were established. The United Nations, despite its frequent subservience to geopolitical manipulations, did lend an aura of legitimacy to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, and helped confirm the legality of Third World claims to sovereignty over natural resources and foreign investments. International law has also been a very useful tool in the hands of a global civil society and social movements in making concrete progress towards equity, democratisation and accountability. And, by so doing, it did manage selectively to reconnect international law with some important issues of global justice. At the same time, as with the backlash against efforts by the South to legislate ‘a new international economic order’, it has not been possible to A R T IC L E S Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 5, pp 711 – 712, 2006

Decolonizing resistance: human rights and the challenge of social movements

“Civilization must, unfortunately, have its victims” Part II offered an analysis of how the disciplines of international law and international institutions shaped and were shaped by Third World resistance to the deployment of ‘development’ beginning with the Mandate system and accelerating during the post-War period – in short, how development was ‘received’ – and how this process has generated the apparatuses of international law and development. This Part proposes to describe and analyze how development, as an ensemble of practices and discourses of a particular form of western modernity, has been ‘resisted’ by the Third World through international law, and what the limitations of that resistance has been. Specifically, I am interested in investigating the constitution of the modern human-rights discourse as the sole approved discourse of resistance, and the peculiar blind spots and biases towards the violence of development that this resulted in. The limitations to the human-rights discourse as a complete liberatory and emancipatory discourse that could tame the violence of development has been reflected in the range of resistance encountered by development in the Third World. Much of this resistance has been in the form of popular movements against the cultural, economic and political effects of modernization and development since the 1970s in the Third World. Despite this, these “other” forms of resistance to development are not cognizable within the apparatuses and discourse of human rights, even though they form an increasingly important source of identity formation for individuals and communities, and have begun to have significant influence on the making of states and the practices of international organizations.