Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

Taking Palestine as the focus of inquiry, and drawing on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative focused on dignity, we reflect on the attributes of colonisation and the possibilities of decolonisation in Palestine through development aid. We conclude that decolonisation is possible even within development aid frameworks. We envision the current colonial condition in Palestine as a multi-faceted, complex and dynamic mesh that tightens and expands its control over the coveted colonial subject but that also contains holes that offer opportunities for resistance or refusal. We turn to Karamah to illustrate how some judges have insisted on a professional identity that merges the concepts of human dignity and self-determination and ultimately rejects the colonial condition inherent in both occupation and development aid. We conclude that in this process of professional identity (re)formation, members of the Palestinian judiciary have helped reveal the demands of decolonisation by demonstrating their commitment to realising human dignity through institutional power, and bringing occupation back into international development discourse.

This book addresses the themes of praxis and the role of international lawyers as intellectuals and political actors engaging with questions of justice for Third World peoples. The book brings together 12 contributions from a total of 15 scholars working in the TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) network or tradition. It includes chapters from some of the pioneering Third World jurists who have led this field since the time of decolonization, as well as prominent emerging scholars in the field. Broadly, the TWAIL orientation understands 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. The rich diversity of contributions in the book engage these themes and questions through the various prisms of international institutional engagement, world trade and investment law, critical comparative law, Palestine solidarity and decolonization, judicial education, revolutionary struggle against imperial sovereignty, Muslim Marxism, Third World intellectual traditions, Global South constitutionalism, and migration. The book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Contents
1. Foreword: Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)
Richard Falk

2. Introduction: TWAIL - on praxis and the intellectual
Usha Natarajan, John Reynolds, Amar Bhatia and Sujith Xavier

3. The Third World intellectual in praxis: confrontation, participation, or operation behind enemy lines?
Georges Abi-Saab

4. On fighting for global justice: the role of a Third World international lawyer
M. Sornarajah

5. Regulation of armed conflict: critical comparativism
Nesrine Badawi

6. Decolonisation, dignity and development aid: a judicial education experience in Palestine
Reem Bahdi and Mudar Kassis

7. The conjunctural in international law: the revolutionary struggle against semi-peripheral sovereignty in Iraq
Ali Hammoudi

8. Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev and the idea of Muslim Marxism: empire, Third World(s) and praxis
Vanja Hamzic

9. International lawyers in the aftermath of disasters: inheriting from Radhabinod Pal and Upendra Baxi
Adil Hasan Khan

10. The South of Western constitutionalism: a map ahead of a journey
Zoran Oklopcic

11. Disrupting civility: amateur intellectuals, international lawyers and TWAIL as praxis
John Reynolds

12. Migration, development and security within racialised global capitalism: refusing the balance game
Adrian A. Smith