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Resources

We encourage reading and engaging with the works compiled below and to reach out to us with suggestions for amendments to this non-exhaustive collection of resources. 

Critiques of International Law and International Human Rights Law

Third World Approaches to International Law

  • Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  • Chimni, B. S. “Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the Twenty-First Century.” Oregon Review of International Law 14.1 (2012): 17–45.

  • Gathii, James Thuo. “Imperialism, Colonialism, and International Law.” Buffalo Law Review 54.4 (2006): 1013–1066.

  • Mickelson, Karin. “Taking Stock of TWAIL Histories.” International Community Law Review 10.4 (2008): 355–362.

  • Mutua, Makau, and Antony Anghie. “What Is TWAIL: Comment.” Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting 94 (2000): 31–40.

  • Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  • Reynolds, John. “Disrupting Civility: Amateur Intellectuals, International Lawyers, and TWAIL as Praxis.” Third World Quarterly 37.11 (2016): 2098–2118.

  • Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

 

Marxist Approaches to International Law

  • Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

  • Chimni, B. S. “Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the Twenty-First Century.” Oregon Review of International Law 14.1 (2012): 17–45.

  • Chimni, B. S. International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

  • Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 2004.

  • Gathii, James Thuo. “Neoliberalism, Colonialism and International Governance: Decentering the International Law of Governmental Legitimacy.” Michigan Law Review 98.6 (2000): 1996–2055.

  • Knox, Robert. “Valuing Race? Stretched Marxism and the Logic of Imperialism.” London Review of International Law 4.1 (2016): 81–126.

  • Neocleous, Mark. “International Law as Primitive Accumulation; or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization.” European Journal of International Law 23.4 (2012): 941–962.

  • Özsu, Umut. “‘In the Interests of Mankind as a Whole’: Mohammed Bedjaoui’s New International Economic Order.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6.1 (2015): 129–143.

  • Taha, Mai. “Reading ‘Class’ in International Law: The Labor Question in Interwar Egypt.” Social & Legal Studies 25.5 (2016): 567–589.


Feminist Approaches to International Law

  • Buss, Doris, and Blair Rutherford. “‘Dangerous Desires’: Illegality, Sexuality and the Global Governance of Artisanal Mining.” In Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks. Edited by Dianne Otto, 35–52. New York: Routledge, 2017.

  • Nesiah, Vasuki. “The Ground beneath Her Feet: Third World ‘Feminisms.’” Journal of International Women’s Studies 4.3 (2003): 30–38.

  • Orford, Anne. “Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law.” Nordic Journal of International Law 71.2 (2002): 275–296.

  • Otto, Dianne. “The Gastronomics of TWAIL’s Feminist Flavourings: Some Lunch-Time Offerings.” International Community Law Review 9.4 (2007): 345–352.

  • Taha, Mai. “Reimagining Bandung for Women at Work.” In Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures. Edited by Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, 337–354. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.


Indigenous Approaches to International Law

  • Behrendt, Larissa. “Home: The Importance of Place to the Dispossessed.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009): 71–85.

  • Bhandar, Brenna. “Status as Property: Identity, Law and the Dispossession of First Nations Women in Canada.” In Special Issue: Reflections on Dispossession: Critical Feminisms. Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Davina Bhandar. Darkmatter 14 (2016).

  • Bhatia, Amar. “The South of the North: Building on Critical Approaches to International Law with Lessons from the Fourth World.” Oregon Review of International Law 14.1 (2012): 131–175.

  • Black, Christine. The Land Is the Source of Law: A Dialogic Encounter with an Indigenous Jurisprudence. New York: Routledge, 2010.

  • Marin, Amaya Alvez. “Constitutional Challenges of the South: Indigenous Water Rights in Chile; Another Step in the ‘Civilizing Mission’?” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 33 (2016): 87–110.

  • Mawani, Renisa. “Specters of Indigeneity in British-Indian Migration, 1914.” Law and Society Review 46.2 (2012): 369–403.

  • Painter, Genevieve Renard. “‘Give Us His Name’: Time, Law and Language in the Settler Colony.” In Law and Time. Edited by Siân M. Beynon-Jones and Emily Grabham, 108–127. New York: Routledge, 2018.


From the ‘Colonial Encounter’ to Neocolonialism

  • Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  • Chimni, B. S. “Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the Twenty-First Century.” Oregon Review of International Law 14.1 (2012): 17–45.

  • Chimni, B. S. “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto.” International Community Law Review 8.1 (2006): 3–27.

  • Çubukçu, Ayça. “The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity.” Humanitarianism and Responsibility 12.1 (2013): 40–58.

  • Gathii, James Thuo. “Imperialism, Colonialism, and International Law.” Buffalo Law Review 54.4 (2006): 1013–1066.

  • Megrét, Frederic. “From ‘Savages’ to ‘Unlawful Combatants’: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law’s ‘Other.’” In International Law and Its Others. Edited by Anne Orford, 265–317. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 2006.

  • Miéville, China. “Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism.” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 19 (2008): 63–92.

  • Orford, Anne. “The Past as Law or History? The Relevance of Imperialism for Modern International Law.” International Law and Justice Working Paper 2.1 (2012): 1–17.

  • Özsu, Umut. Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

  • Pahuja, Sundhya. “The Postcoloniality of International Law.” Harvard International Law Journal 46.2 (2005): 459–469.

  • Pedersen, Susan. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

  • Reynolds, John, and Sujith Xavier. “‘The Dark Corners of the World’: TWAIL and International Criminal Justice.” International Criminal Justice 14.4 (2016): 959–983.

  • Shahabuddin, Mohammad. “The Colonial ‘Other’ in the Nineteenth Century German Colonisation of Africa, and International Law.” African Yearbook of International Law 18 (2010): 15–39.

  • Tzouvala, Ntina. “Food for the Global Market: The Neoliberal Reconstruction of Agriculture in Occupied Iraq (2003–2004) and the Role of International Law.” In Special Issue: Law and Boundaries Vol. 3. Edited by Tomaso Ferrando. Global Jurist 17.1 (2017).

  • Wilde, Ralph. International Territorial Administration: How Trusteeship and the Civilizing Mission Never Went Away. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Resources on Migrant Justice and Border Abolition

  • ​Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021).

  • Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (2013).​

  • Leah Cowan, Border Nation: A Story of Migration (2021).

  • Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha, Against Borders: The Case for Abolition (2022).

  • Marita Tazzioli, Border Abolitionism: Migrants' Containment and the Genealogies of Struggle and Rescue (2026).

  • Natasha King, No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance (2016).​

  • Marco Perolini, 'Limited Tools for Emancipation? Human Rights and Border Abolition' (2024) Sociology (Oxford) (1469-8684), 58 (2), p. 386.

  • Martina Tazzioli and Nicholas De Genova, Border Abolitionism: Analytics/Politics, Social Text (2023) 41 (3 (156)): 1–34.

  • Gracie Mae Bradley, 'Border abolition and the struggle against capitalism' (2023) Soundings (London, England) (1741-0797), 82 (82), p. 47.

  • Olivia Johnson, 'Border Control and Abolition' (2020), https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/11/border-control. 

  • Harsha Walia, 'Freedom to Stay, Freedom to Move: An Interview with Harsha Walia' https://roarmag.org/magazine/harsha-walia-interview/.

  • JCWI, 'The Hostile Environment Explained' https://www.jcwi.org.uk/the-hostile-environment-explained.

Resources on Prison and Police Abolition

Introductory Resources

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Books 

  • The Politics of Abolition Revisited, Mathiesen, T. 

  • The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, Anderson, W.

  • Police: A Field Guide, Correia, D. and Wall, T.

  • Brick by Brick: How we Build a World Without Prisons, Cradle Community

  • A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete, Maher, G.

  • We do this ‘til we free us, Mariame Kaba

  • Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson 

  • Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore

  • Prison by any other name, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law

  • Theoretical History of Abolition, R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy

  • Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom, Derecka Purnell

  • A Critical Theory of Police Power, Mark Neocleous

  • Disability Incarcerated, Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, Allison C. Carey

  • Are Prisons Absolete?, Angela Davis 

  • Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis

  • Abolition Democracy, Angela Davis

  • The End of Policing, Alex Vitale


Articles and Chapters

  • Giertsen, H., ‘’Abolitionism and reform: a possible combination? Notes on a Norwegian experiment’ in Thomas Mathiesen (ed.), The politics of abolition revisited (Routledge 2015).

  • Gilmore, R.W., ‘Race and Globalisation’ in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022).

  • Scott, D., ‘Regarding rights for the Other: Abolitionism and human rights from below’ in Leanne Weber, Elaine Fishwick, Marinella Marmo (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights (Routledge 2016).

  • ACLU, ‘Should We Abolish the Police?’ (ACLU, 24 July 2020) https://www.aclu.org/news/criminallaw-reform/should-we-abolish-the-police accessed 9 September 2023.

  • Chua, C., Linnemann, T., Spade, D. et al., ‘Police abolition’ (2023) Contemp Polit Theory.

  • Friedman, A., & Sow, A., ‘Police Abolition,’ (CALL YOUR GIRLFRIEND, 5 June 2020)

  • Gabriel, K., ‘Abolition as Method’ (Dissent, September 2022) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/abolition-as-method/ accessed 9 September 2023.

  • McLeod, A., ‘Envisioning Abolition Democracy’, (2019) 132 HARV. L. REV. 1613, 1617–18.

 

Resources on Non-Reformist Reform

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Resources on Community-Driven Litigation

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