Emancipating International Law Confronting the Violence of Racialized Boundaries

While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern-or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed-this volume argues that racialisation is foundational to the discipline, underpinning its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors. Emancipating International Law explores the many ways racial hierarchy, systemic oppression, and global white supremacy shape international law. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, the collection moves beyond qualifying whether international law is racist to explore how racial hierarchies are embedded in its structures and continue to evolve through legal and institutional practice. Divided into five sections, the book begins by situating international law's racialised boundaries within its colonial, capitalist, and chauvinist afterlives, exposing how white ignorance and race-thinking underpin legal norms, from sovereignty to jus cogens. It then examines racial stratification across legal institutions, including investment law, refugee law, and the Genocide Convention. The third section extends this critique to human rights, revealing the ways in which even an emancipatory paradigm can bolster racial injustices. The penultimate section unpacks racial hierarchies in disparate societies, including Brazil, India, and Japan, as well as the frontiers of nation-states. The volume concludes with a powerful discussion of the role of activism and alternative epistemologies in racial justice struggles, and the limits of international law's capacity for anti-racist transformation. Aimed at scholars, practitioners, and students of international law, critical legal studies, and anti-colonial theory, this book advances an understanding of international law that is aimed at dismantling its racialised structures. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

1 - The Racialized Epistemology of International Law: From White Ignorance to Black Dignity
2 - Disrupting International Law's Colonial Afterlives of Human Property: Educating for a World Beyond Racial Capitalism and Unending Apartheids
3 - Racialized Extractivism: A Tale of Fetishism, Narcissism, Primitive Accumulation, and Expropriation
4 - The Inequalities of Sovereign Equality
5 - The Colour of Jus Cogens
6 - Race as Citizenship Personified: Illuminating the Ghosts of Racial Discrimination in International Law
7 - A Racialized Existence: Lessons from Palestine and the Genocide Convention
8 - Settler Colonialism, Race, and International Law: Lessons from the Frontier
9 - Survive the Journey Only to Succumb to International Refugee Law
10 - How the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement Fail Climate and Racial Justice: Time for the Kampala Convention?
11 - The Intersection of Race and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
12 - Racialized Ableism and the Need for Intersectional Discourse and Action
13 - De-essentializing Race: Intersectionality as a Feminist Approach in International Human Rights Law
14 - Colonial Fantasies in the European Court of Human Rights
15 - Indian Approaches to Racism and Related Forms of Subordination under International Law: A Question of Interest Convergence
16 - Japan: International Law as the Outward Looking Weapon
17 - Decolonial Fissures: Looking from and Beyond Brazil's Colour Lines
18 - Norm Entrepreneurship at the UN: Addressing Racial Equality Across Borders and the South-North Divide
19 - From Captives to Enslaved: International Law and the Making of the (Non)Human
20 - Bodies of Knowledge: Re-framing Emancipation in International Law through Dalit Praxis
21 - Racism, (Neo)Colonialism, and International Law: A Field in Search of a Philosophy?
22 - Conceptualizing Race and Resisting Racism in International Law
23 - Unburdening White Women: Antiracist Feminist Praxis as Revolution
24 - The Slow and Benevolent Violence of International Law: An Oceanian Perspective

Mohsen al Attar is a Reader in International Law, Head of the Department of International Relations, and Associate Dean at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. His research explores the power dynamics inherent in international law and the potential for other universals to emerge. His previous appointments were at the University of Auckland, Queen's University Belfast, Warwick University, and University College London. Claire Smith is an international lawyer specialising in accountability for gross violations of human rights and international crimes. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam researching the role of actors in the epistemological construction of victim participation at the International Criminal Court. She obtained her LLM (with distinction) from the University of Essex and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Otago.