Luis Eslava

Bandung, Global History and International Law : Critical Pasts and Pending Futures

In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. In this book, leading international scholars explore what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. It analyzes Bandungs complicated and pivotal impact on global history, international law and, most of all, justice struggles after the end of formal colonialism. Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/law/public-international-law/bandung-global-history-and-international-law-critical-pasts-and-pending-futures#GD8uZuZHXoxv2emy.99To critical scholars of international law, the demands of the newly independent states represented at the Bandung Conference can appear somewhat less than radical. If analysed not only in terms of their substance but also in terms of their (narrative) form, however, these demands take on a far more revolutionary aspect. This chapter mobilises Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to focus on the relationship between time and space, as constructed by the delegates at Bandung. They made use, the chapter argues, of certain chronotopic devices in order to narrate – and constitute – a particular kind of international legal subjectivity for their states. In doing so, they made a rhetorical-political move against the superpowers and their allies, collectively the source of the two most important threats to the subjectivity of African and Asian states: colonialism and the Cold War. With this move, the delegates sought to challenge the identity of these powerful states as international law’s archetypal subjects, and in their stead to position their own states – international law’s newest subjects – as also, and for that reason, its truest.

(Post)Revolutionary Interlinkages: Labour, Environment and Accumulation

A review essay discussing Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 288 pp, ISBN: 978-1844677450. With thanks to David Kennedy and the Institute for Global Law and Policy for the opportunity to discuss this text and issues arising from it at the IGLP 2013 Workshop, Doha, Qatar, 5-14 January 2013, and to those who participated in our panel on the book: Dennis Davis, Sheila Jasanoff, Kerry Rittich and Hani Sayed.

Decentralization of Development and Nation-Building Today: Reconstructing Colombia from the Margins of Bogotá

Responding to an international trend that regards the state as an oversized, unsustainable and uneven jurisdiction that cannot effectively intervene in the economy to promote development objectives, nor impose a proper presence over its territory and population, the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991 installed local development as one of the primary strategies to recuperate the nation-building project in Colombia. Bogotá has greatly benefited from the introduction of this normative framework: within the spatial limits of its jurisdiction, Bogotá has been able to achieve a remarkable level of community engagement, measured urban growth and financial stability, as well as high per capita levels of education, health and public utility provision. However, the successful decentralization of state activity in Bogotá has implied an intensification of the systemic violence that traditionally accompanies nation-building projects. Through practices of classification, demarcation and disciplining of space and subjects, Bogotá has used a cartography of legal and illegal urban spaces in order to circumscribe its developmental target. Reflecting upon the contradictions that arise from the encounter between the weaknesses of Colombias sovereignty and Bogotás successful development, this paper examines the relationship between development and sovereign consolidation through the multiplication of levels of governance and the creation of increasingly smaller, more accountable sub-national jurisdictions in Third World states.

The Developmental State: Independence, Dependency and the History of the South

In this article I examine the genesis and importance of the developmental state for our thinking about the period of decolonization –which took place between the mid-1950s to the 1970s– and, more generally, the history of the global order. Using Latin America’s much earlier experience of European colonialism, together with the challenges later posed to this region by independence, I demonstrate how the developmental state that emerged there gradually came to define the outer limits of what was thinkable and doable in the rest of the postcolonial world. During the second half of the twentieth century, in particular, it became clear that the developmental state was a very difficult beast to harness in the interests of Southern populations, both in Latin America and beyond. Too much a part of the larger project of modernity, too close to the institutional machinery of the old colonial powers and too dependent to the ‘advanced’ economies, the developmental state promised much yet compromised more at every turn. This is a history that continues to mark the South, and increasingly those ‘southern’ parts of the Global North.