SPLITTING TWAIL?

Abstract

Periodizations are political acts. They produce temporalities that do not necessarily coincide with chronology. TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholars have generally endorsed the division of TWAIL into two generations. Whereas TWAIL I was composed by scholars that thought and wrote about international law during the decolonization process, TWAIL II began at the end of the 1990s. Although there are common features between the generations, a number of differences are also identified and emphasized by TWAIL II scholars. In this article, I advance the argument that such periodization is problematic for four reasons: anachronism, progressivism, a difficult self-identification of past third world legal scholars with TWAIL and the image made of TWAIL by non-TWAILers. Instead of periodizing TWAIL in two successive generations, I argue that identifying it as part of a larger tradition of third world international legal scholarship is more productive for the inner coherence of the intellectual movement and, consequently, for its success in the international legal academia.