Ethical Dimensions of Third-World Approaches to International Law (twail): A Critical Review

Third-World Approaches to International Law (twail) represents an intellectual movement devoted to exposing the injustices, imbalances and contradictions inherent in international law that work against the interests of the Third World, especially Africa. As a deconstructive tool, it seeks to question the assumptions and claims of neutrality, fairness and orderliness that law is supposed to embody and thereby decentre the garb of coloniality, hegemony, eurocentricity and universality that defines and dictates the discourse and praxis of international law, especially international economic law. As a reconstructive tool, twail has the underlying commitment of developing and embedding the democratic ethos and norms that should regulate relations within and between the so-called developing and developed worlds and thus provide a new way of understanding and practising international law. TWAILism therefore represents an attempt to promote and inject an ethical dimension into international law that will ensure a fair playing field for all actors. However, placing the discourse of TWAILism within a global ethics context for analysis has not been the direct concern and focus of TWAILers. The contribution of this article, therefore, is to immerse the discourse of TWAILism into a global ethics matrix with the goal of measuring the extent to which its substantive elements, goals and ambitions match up to a well-founded standards of global ethics; and to fill in the gaps by proposing a theory. The theory of community emancipation seeks to support the need for a global distributive justice approach to addressing the inequities and injustices plaguing the international order.