Decolonising International Law Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality

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.

1. Introduction; 2. Inaugurating a new rationality; 3. From decolonisation to developmental nation state; 4. From permanent sovereignty to investor protection; 5. From the rule of international law to the internationalisation of the rule of law; 6. Conclusion.

Decolonising International Law unravels the imperial and emancipatory nature of international law, showing how the idea of economic growth forecloses law's promise of justice, and how the concept of development interacts with the structure of international law to maintain global inequality.

Sundhya Pahuja is the Director of the Law and Development Research Programme at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.