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...
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. Proposes a sophisticated theory of international law that will appeal to those who are critical of international law but do not wish to abandon it as a site of political struggle. Proposes a new theory of the relationship between international law and development that does not give up on the promise of global justice. Interdisciplinary approach to international law, combining postcolonial, historical and political-economic theories, provides readers with a sense of the interaction between the intellectual and institutional developments of the international domain over the past seventy years.