Sujith Xavier

Third World Approaches to International Criminal Law

A pattern of affording impunity to local power brokers throughout Africa pervades the application of international criminal law (ICL) in Africa. The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Uganda is a notorious but representative example, although similar analyses can be made of the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Libya. In Uganda, only members of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have been indicted for international crimes, even though the United Nations, international human rights groups, and local NGOs have documented years of abuses perpetrated by government troops and local auxiliary units, often against the same populations victimized by the LRA. The ICC is thereby implicated in the power structures and political arrangements of a repressive state that both combats the LRA and often brutalizes the civilian populations of northern Uganda. Inserting itself into Uganda, the ICC becomes a partisan player in the endgame of a civil war that extends back over a generation, and is itself rooted in ethnic and tribal animosities cultivated through 19th century Euro-colonial benedictions of favor. Here, the ICC and the war it adjudicates become surprising bedfellows, repurposed by local elites for the consolidation of domestic power.

Theorising Global Governance Inside Out: A Response to Professor Ladeur

Abstract Professor Ladeur argues that administrative laws postmodernism (and by extension Global Administrative Law) necessitates that we move beyond relying on ideas of delegation, accountability and legitimacy. Global Governance, particularly Global Administrative Law and Global Constitutionalism, should try to adapt and experiment with the changing nature of the postmodern legality and support the creation of norms that will adapt to the complexities of globalisation. Ladeurs contestation, similar to GALs propositions, can be challenged. By taking the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a significant contributor to the field of international criminal law, as an example, it is suggested that the creation of networks that Ladeur makes visible may not account for ‘regulatory capture’. This paper will argue that from the outside, the proliferation of networks may suggest that spontaneous accountability is possible. A closer look, however, drawing on anthropological insights from the ICTR, reveals that international institutions are susceptible to capture by special interests. Furthermore, there are two central themes that animate the response to Professor Ladeur: the political nature of international institutions and the history of international law, and the role of institutions in this history.

Introduction: TWAIL - on praxis and the intellectual

Abstract This Special Issue emerges from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Cairo Conference in 2015 and addresses the conference theme, ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, by focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as a political actor. In introducing this Issue, we provide some background to the TWAIL network, movement, event, and publications; and delineate our own understandings of scholarly praxis as editors and conference organisers. Broadly, we understand praxis as the relationship between what we say as scholars and what we do – as the inextricability of theory from lived experience. Understood in this way, praxis is central to TWAIL, as TWAIL scholars strive to reconcile international law’s promise of justice with the proliferation of injustice in the world it purports to govern. Reconciliation occurs in the realm of praxis and TWAIL scholars engage in a variety of struggles, including those for greater self-awareness, disciplinary upheaval, and institutional resistance and transformation.