Tuesday, August 1, 2023 - 09:30
For the week of 17-21 July 2023, the inaugural TWAILR Academy on international law took place at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. It was organised by the editorial collective of the TWAIL Review journal (Third World Approaches to International Law Review) - including our own John Reynolds, Associate Professor at the School of Law & Criminology.
The Academy was a great success, bringing together 55 participants (doctoral & early career researchers) and more than 30 faculty from all around the world and primarily from the global South, for vital discussions under an overall thematic banner of ‘Democratizing International Law’. It featured keynote sessions and plenary panels through the week organised in a series of four clusters: international economic law & economic injustice; migration & displacement; peace & transitional justice; climate & environmental justice.
Speakers included leading international law scholars like Antony Anghie, James Gathii, Liliana Obregón, Usha Natarajan and Kamari Clarke; Indigenous activists and lawyers from Latin America like Dayanna Palmar, Amaya Alvez and Kelly Quilcué; judges in the Colombian constitutional and transitional justice courts such as Julieta Lemaitre and Natalia Ángel; and scholars from across Latin America including Nicolas Perrone, Enrique Prieto-Rios, Lina Céspedes, Sergio Lattore, Juan Manuel Amaya, João Roriz and Paulo Bacca.
The participants also all submitted written papers in advance of the Academy and engaged in a series of writing workshops through the week, where they received close readings and feedback on their papers from their peers and faculty discussants.
The aims of the Academy were:
1. To provide participants the opportunity to share Third Worldist perspectives rooted in histories of colonialism and imperialism, and the uses of TWAIL for more effective knowledge production, policymaking, and teaching across the Global South and beyond;
2. To build solidarity and connection among junior and senior scholars across the Global South and North, with particular attention to the Latin American scholarly community, especially those left out of knowledge mobilization activities due to financial resources;
3. To create opportunity for scholars from the Global South to produce knowledge that will be fully and freely accessible around the world.
The Academy in Bogotá is part of a wider year-long project entitled ‘TWAIL 2023: Democratizing International Law' which also featured an event in Maynooth, and has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, University of Windsor Law School, la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Los Andes, and Maynooth University School of Law & Criminology. A series of publications coming out of the Academy will appear in the TWAIL Review and AfronomicsLaw.
