TWAIL’S OTHERS: A CASTE CRITIQUE OF TWAILERS AND THEIR FIELD OF ANALYSIS

Abstract

Third World Approaches to International Law [TWAIL] constitutes a significant method of analysis of contemporary international law. TWAIL as a methodological framework continues the tradition of critical scholarship in international law. Arguably it can be considered as a major methodological framework emerged in international law after the end of the cold war. Unlike some other critical traditions of international law scholarship, TWAIL claims to accommodate varying conceptual standpoints to reflect on international law critically. This feature of TWAIL scholarship seems to reflect the prevailing suspicion of conceptual metanarratives at the time when TWAIL as a methodological framework was emerging. A noteworthy feature of the TWAIL framework is that it broadly defines its field of analysis by claiming to represent the concerns of the global south.  However, a dispassionate interrogation arguably reveals that TWAIL, despite coming as a response to the colonialist and post-colonial hegemonic frameworks of international law, does not seem to capture the concerns of all the margins. In other words, TWAIL does not seem to reflect the multitude of mainstream international law’s others in terms of their subjective participation in knowledge production as well as in terms of their lived experiences becoming subjects of analysis. An example of this in the South Asian context is the marginalization of peoples of lower castes and indigenous peoples, who are historically kept away from knowledge production and whose lived experiences only recently received the attention as subjects of serious analysis. TWAIL scholarship does not seem to reflect this glaring reality. An attempt is made to analyze the probable reasons behind this exclusion, looking at the social being of the TWAIL intellectual, and to emphasize on the need of the organic TWAIL intellectual.