Decolonizing Law

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

The universal promise of contemporary international law has long inspired countries of the Global South to use it as an important field of contestation over global inequality. Taking three central examples, Sundhya Pahuja argues that this promise has been subsumed within a universal claim for a particular way of life by the idea of 'development'. As the horizon of the promised transformation and concomitant equality has receded ever further, international law has legitimised an ever-increasing sphere of intervention in the Third World. The post-war wave of decolonisation ended in the creation of the developmental nation-state, the claim to permanent sovereignty over natural resources in the 1950s and 1960s was transformed into the protection of foreign investors, and the promotion of the rule of international law in the early 1990s has brought about the rise of the rule of law as a development strategy in the present day.

This thorough legal resource guides those pushing the frontlines of the nation's oldest battle: the fight to protect indigenous cultures.

Some assume that Canada earned a place among postcolonial states in 1982 when it took charge of its Constitution. Yet despite the formal recognition accorded to Aboriginal and treaty rights at that time, Indigenous peoples continue to argue that they are still being colonized. Grace Woo assesses this allegation using a binary model that distinguishes colonial from postcolonial legality. She argues that two legal paradigms governed the expansion of the British Empire, one based on popular consent, the other on conquest and the power to command. Ghost Dancing with Colonialism casts explanatory light on ongoing tensions between Canada and Indigenous peoples.

This book advances practical protection of human rights, and challenge claims of western monopoly of human rights discourse.

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is concerned with the powerful states and actors in the global political economy and dominated by North American and European scholars. This book exposes the ways in which IR has consistently ignored questions of colonialism, imperialism, race, slavery, and dispossession in the non-European world.

Against the backdrop of decolonisation and the territorial adjustments of the 1990s, the issue of state succession continues to be a complex focal point for public international law. This book re-assesses the foundations of the law of succession, assessing the attempts, and failures to achieve a codified body of law.

Taking the postcolonial – or, more specifically, the post-apartheid – university as its focus, the book takes the violence and the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference. Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines – law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy – in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. Oriented around an important lecture by Jacqueline Rose, the volume contains contributions from world-renowned authors, such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, as well as numerous legal and other theorists who share their concern with interrogating the contemporary crisis in higher education. This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law.