International Law and the Global South Shubhangi Agarwalla

This is the audio of the session on Critical Perspectives to International Law that Sagnik Das and I, Shubhangi Agarwalla, took via Zoom. 

International law has been subject to so much well-deserved criticism, and yet remains a compelling moral language for issues of global justice. The Classical Understanding of International Law has had the unintended consequence of legitimising an expanding domain of international intervention into the Third World. Interesting, neither Sagnik nor I, both Indian students who completed our undergraduate law degrees from India, were introduced to Critical scholarship that challenges these interventions during our time at law school in India. Instead, he was introduced to it at Harvard during his Masters whereas I got introduced to it at the Max Planck Institute of International Law during an internship.

Hence, the session is partly in response to the inadequate attention that critical scholarship gets in Indian law schools. We were surprised to see the large turnout of people who chose to attend the session and found the engagement to be very rewarding.

The four texts that we asked everyone to read before joining us were:

1. Baxi's Remarks on Eurocentricism.

2. Antony Anghie's Introduction to his book Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law.

3. Sundhya Pahuja's Letters from Bandung. 

4. Joseph Slaughter's Hijacking Human Rights. 

I would suggest reading them before listening to the audio.