How International Law Began in Singapore:
or An Introduction to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)

4:30pm - 7:30pm, 15 February 2024, YWCA Fort Canning, 6 Fort Canning Rd, Singapore 179494
Sophia Cooke Ballroom on Level 2

This lecture based on the Annual EJIL Foreword (May 2023) is a personal retrospective by one of the founding fathers of the critical global South political and intellectual movement – Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) – that emerged during the 1990s and is hotly debated in today’s ‘decolonization’ debates.

Launching off the pivotal episode of the capture of a Portuguese vessel off the coast of Singapore in 1603, Anghie uses the legal controversies that followed to illumine how some of the key themes of TWAIL relating to the history and theory of international law, political economy, rights, and war arose and evolved. 

Anghie underscores how the distinction between the ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds remains pertinent to many fields of international law today. He urges the international community to consider TWAIL as a cosmopolitan project relevant not simply for the ‘third world’, but for the entire globe. He concludes by considering TWAIL approaches to contemporary debates in the rights and imperialism and race and reparations arenas.