Since the mid-twentieth century, 'international law' and 'international development' have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which aspirations about a better world are articulated.. They have shaped the both the treatment and self-understanding of the 'developing' world, often by positing the West as a universal model against which developing states, their citizens, and natural environments should be measured and disciplined. In recent years, however, critical scholars have investigated the deep linkages between the concept of development, the doctrines and institutions of international law, and broader projects of ordering at the international level. They have shown how the leading models de-radicalise, if not derail, initiatives to redefine development and pursue other forms of global well-being. Bringing together scholars from both the Global South and the Global North, the contributions in this Handbook invite readers to consider the limits of common normative and developmentalist assumptions. At the same time, the Handbook demonstrates how disparate but still identifiable set of ideas, imaginaries, norms, and institutional practices - related to law, development and international governance - shape today's profoundly unequal material conditions, threatening the future of human and nonhuman life on the planet. The book focuses on five distinct areas: existing disciplinary frameworks, institutions and actors, regional theatres of international law and development, competing social and economic agendas, and alternative futures. Offering a unique overview of the field of international law and development and assembling major critical, historical, and political economic insights, this Handbook is an unmissable resource for scholars of international law, international relations, development studies, and global history, as well as anyone interested in the past, present, and future of our world.

The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (Oxford Handbooks)

Business & Money

Eslava, Luis

Pahuja, Sundhya

Buchanan, Ruth

Economics

Oxford University Press

International Development (Critical Approaches to Law)

This book contests current approaches to law and development insofar as these depend upon two premises: first, that development is the means by which global human well-being is to be achieved; and, second that law – both domestic and international – may be used to affect that development.  Asking not how law may effect development but rather how development discourse sustains (international) law itself, this book argues that what is at stake in the idea of ‘development’ is the legitimization of an increasingly forceful homogenization of the political, economic and social spheres. Developmentalism, it is further argued, provides normative ‘objectivity’ to the foundational assumptions of international law (including human rights, trade and international financial law). And, as law thus becomes both a normative and an instrumental discourse, what it overlooks is the violence of developmentalism’s transformational project.

Reference

Routledge-Cavendish

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.

Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, Series Number 86)

Foreign & International Law

Cambridge University Press

This book how addresses how international law is ‘placed’ in the world. International lawyers have long acknowledged the significance of space and place to their work, often in a territorial register. As this book demonstrates, however, the repertoire of international legal techniques for determining law’s spatiality, and for attaching law to place, is far broader than commonly acknowledged. Adopting a jurisdictional orientation, this book provides insights into how techniques and practices of legal ‘placement’ are carried out, how they assume authority, and how they relate to one another. Whilst drawing on the burgeoning field of legal geography, the book does not simply apply its insights to international law. Rather, in examining five techniques of placement and areas of substantive concern for international lawyers – (1) longitudinal placement in relation to time; (2) state placement in relation to economy; (3) city placement in relation to crime; (4) associational placement in relation to data; (5) placement of international encounter in relation to the sea – the book demonstrates law’s role in establishing its own spatiality. An original analysis at the intersection of international law and legal geography, this book is intended to appeal to both scholars and students in these fields.

Placing International Law: The Techniques of Jurisdiction (Space, Materiality and the Normative)

McVeigh, Shaun

Johns, Fleur

Skouteris, Thomas

Wai, Robert

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pahuja, Sundhya. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pahuja, Sundhya