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This Article explores the counterterrorism apparatus maintained by the United Nations from a critical perspective. It argues that the international counterterrorism regime reflects American and European priorities and structures to a significant degree, a situation that positions the threat of Islamist terrorism as preeminent. The existence of this regime results in significant distortion to...

Europe’s borders are racial borders. The European Union’s external border regime underpins continuing forms of European imperialism and neocolonialism. It reinforces a particular imaginary of Europeanness as whiteness, euphemistically dressed up as a European Way of Life to be protected. It nonetheless sits comfortably within the permissible parameters of international law. This Article...

Scholars have paid inadequate attention to how racial valuation influences what actors prioritize or deem worthwhile. Today, racial valuation of diseases informs the stark global health inequities seen worldwide. As a concept, racial valuation refers to how racialized societies assign differing values to an individual or group based on their racial designation and the position within the social...

This keynote speech was delivered on January 31, 2020. It argues that dominant narratives of American legal liberalism and global exceptionalism increasingly find themselves under real political and intellectual strain, even among mainstream scholars and practitioners of constitutional law and public international law.

This intervention gestures to histories of American empire from a perspective born outside America’s shores—in other words and other worlds, an un-American story of American empire. Seen from elsewhere, American empire appears both intimate and distant, at once singular and multiple, a vast terrain and a small place. For instance, how can we supplement a story of race and racial capitalism that...

When scholars and lawmakers ask who should be allowed to cross borders, under what circumstances, on what ground, they often leave unexamined the historical formation of the border itself. National borders are taken for granted as the backdrop against which normative debates unfold. This Article intervenes in contemporary debates about border crossing by bringing the border itself into the frame...

Taking note of the relatively limited accounts of race in contemporary international legal doctrine, this Article posits a thought experiment: What would international legal theorizing look like not from the place of the metropole or the colony, but rather from the journey of the enslaved, from the barracoon to the hold of the slave ship to the plantation?

International law was invented in 1789 when Jeremy Bentham introduced the term to replace the outmoded “Law of Nations.” Since then, international lawyers have spent a lot of time thinking about whether international law is in fact law, and little or no time considering how international law is international, or what international actually means. In this Article, I want to suggest that, with the...

This Article argues that issues of race and identity have so far been underemphasized, understudied, and undertheorized in mainstream international law. To address this major gap, this Article argues that there is an opportunity for learning, sharing, and collaboration between Critical Race Theorists (CRT) and scholars of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

Through a study of racial ideology in the history of international legal thought, this Article offers the beginnings of an explanation for how this lack of attention to race and racism came to be, and why it matters today.

This Article calls for a recalibration, arguing that transnational labor law is deeply historicized, rooted in the persisting presence of a racial capitalism that is too easily relegated to a distant past.

By and large, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) exist in separate epistemic universes. This Article argues that the borders between these two fields are unwarranted.

Mainstream and official analysis casts the international system and its hegemonic actors in the role of humanitarian responders to a Libyan crisis not of their making. Instead, we draw attention to the ways in which the racial framing of Libya—and its subordination to imperial prerogatives—proved critical to international governance regimes for managing the country—and the bodies and territory...