TWAIL and Critical Security Studies
Noha Aboueldahab
Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations’ Security Council passed resolution 661, authorizing what would become a devastating sanctions regime that destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Iraqis. In its resolution, the Security Council references its “responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security.” As an international legal institution with a mission to save the world from the “scourge of war” and to protect “the dignity and worth of the human person,” the United Nations’ pursuit of security is as fraught as its pursuit of the inherently contested goals of “peace” and “justice.” With the Security Council at its helm, this is of course hardly surprising.
However, international law is not simply complicit in structures of insecurity, death, and destruction. It also serves emancipatory objectives for those resisting oppression and injustice. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) already addresses these diverging and converging uses of international law.
This piece advocates for an expansion of scholarly and policy analyses that develop the debates concerning Critical Security Studies (CSS) and the role of international law. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) serves as a useful framework to examine challenges and opportunities for the pluralization of the security discourse. Before I discuss the ways in which TWAIL can provide an important contribution to CSS (and vice versa), it is worth briefly outlining the tenets of TWAIL.
TWAIL regards international law as an ongoing process that is informed by politics and history. It insists on the importance of understanding international law as a tool of power and a tool to critique power. It analyzes international law from the perspective of the Third World – also understood as most of the world, the rest and not just the West, the postcolonial world, the Global South. TWAIL scholarship largely identifies inequality as the key factor harming the development of the politically and, especially, economically ailing Third World. It denounces the differential treatment that the Third World receives from an international legal system whose formation it had little to do with.
TWAIL’s main dilemma is finding a middle ground between what Fidler describes as “the extremes of utopianism and realpolitik” from which to structure its calls for international legal reform. Importantly, TWAIL questions not only the function of international law, but also the role of international lawyers. Is it critique? Is it interpretation of international law? Is it resistance? Is it transformation? Or is it all those things? The ways in which international law is experienced is central to TWAIL’s concerns.
I now turn to four questions that a study of CSS informed by a TWAIL perspective could usefully generate.
First, TWAIL draws attention to the role of world history, and not solely Eurocentric history, in how international law and security are experienced by individuals and communities in the Global South. For example, the 9/11 attacks are not considered unique nor exceptional when viewed from a TWAIL perspective – there have been many 9/11s in world history. As Okafor explains:
“[I]t is only by heavily discounting third-world experience and history […] that the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be convincingly portrayed as unique. [9/11 is] neither profound nor significant enough to render it unique in world history.”
TWAIL, then, presents a challenge to the exceptionalizing of experiences such as 9/11 by demanding attention to the importance of placing attacks on security in historical and geographical context. Both TWAIL and CSS complicate the histories of (in)security, but what other questions emerge about those histories when both scholarships interact with each other? Resistance to Eurocentric notions of security and human rights in historical and contemporary contexts is an area where both TWAIL and CSS would easily converge.
Second, TWAIL also foregrounds the importance of such resistance by underscoring the role of solidarity – both among Global South peoples and through alliances they form with Global North allies. But what does such solidarity really look like? Can the differential treatment of marginalized peoples serve as a point of convergence, regardless of their race, the ideologies they espouse, and the types of insecurities they experience? The Black Lives Matter movement’s support for the Palestinian cause is one example of a solidarity movement between two different groups that transcends borders and produces powerful resistance strategies in the name of racial justice. But we haven’t seen similarly strong grassroots alliances calling for solidarity with the Rohingya or the Uyghurs, for instance – both of whom suffer from mass atrocities which many argue likely amount to genocide. What explains this inconsistency in the strength of solidarity movements for justice? Does anti-US imperialist resistance effect which solidarity movements activists deem worth supporting?
Solidarity, then, is not a uniform concept that can be applied to all contexts of marginalization impacting people from the Global South. This presents important questions concerning the pluralization of the security discourse: certain causes, ideologies, races, and ethnicities will enjoy a privileged position in the hierarchy of solidarity movements over others. What determines which ones come out on top? What solutions do TWAIL and CSS, which recognize the plurality of the Global South, offer to address such fragmented solidarity in the name of equality, security, and justice?
Third, TWAIL foregrounds how inequality, marginalization, and insecurity are experienced. CSS similarly draws attention to the (in)securities of everyday experiences. The state-centric framework of security invokes militarized images such as drone strikes, proxy wars, the arms industry, military operations, interventions, and occupations. These, however, are examples of fantastical, episodic practices of security that draw attention away from how (in)security is experienced in the daily lives of people and communities across time and space. In this roundtable, Ammar Shamaileh underscores the importance of examining micro-level security dynamics by, for instance, understanding why individuals risk insecurity by choosing to engage in protests with uncertain outcomes. How can we understand these experiences of (in)security differently when TWAIL and CSS engage and exchange ideas in a conversation about them?
The security of the few through the violation of the human rights of many – especially through the use of law - is a common protest among TWAILers and CSS scholars. Domestic and international laws that are driven by security interests and that cause mass death, destruction, and other injustices emerge on a number of legal and political planes. These include, for example, domestically enforced “emergency laws,” UN Security Council resolutions such as 661, which enforced crippling economic sanctions against Iraq, or War on Terror policies.
TWAIL is skeptical of international law’s claims to advance peace, security, and justice precisely for those reasons. At the same time, TWAIL seeks to advance peace, security, and justice through transformative ambitions that find potential in a reformed international legal system. A deeper exchange between TWAIL and CSS on these issues is, I argue, a worthwhile endeavor if we are to diversify our understanding of how law shapes everyday lived experiences of (in)security.
Fourth, the politics of knowledge production and dissemination plays a partial but influential role in which research ultimately shapes security policy and practice. TWAIL and CSS are important schools of thought where analyses of how this politics of knowledge production informs security policies would contribute to our understanding of their design and implementation. 3 TWAIL can usefully inform the CSS scholarship on these questions.
Ultimately, TWAIL scholarship contends that international law both fuels and challenges inequality, insecurity, and differential treatment. The political convictions of those who employ international law to pursue these opposing objectives is one reason the security discourse is an inextricable part of international legal praxis and international legal knowledge production. As Heath argues:
“Differing approaches to security…reflect a deeper struggle over whose knowledge matters when constructing and responding to the most pressing [security] threats.”
CSS and TWAIL scholarship share intellectual and practical relevance to the experiences of most of the world. Both challenge our understanding of the histories of (in)security. They also present difficult questions about the role of solidarity because of plural and/or competing ideologies among marginalized peoples and the resulting hierarchy of collaborative resistance strategies. TWAIL and CSS insist on the importance of understanding security by drawing attention to the everyday lived experiences of (in)security. Finally, an exchange between TWAIL and CSS could enhance our understanding of how the politics of knowledge production shapes security policies.
A CSS hub based within this part of the Global South would cultivate a rich scholarly engagement between CSS and TWAIL through a theoretical and empirical exchange of ideas about these questions.
references
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Al-Bulushi, Samar, Sahana Ghosh, and Inderpal Grewal. 2022. “Security from the South: Postcolonial and Imperial Entanglements.” Social Text 40, no. 3: 1-15.
Mutua, Makau. 2000. “What Is TWAIL?” Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting 94. Cambridge University Press: 31–38. doi:10.1017/S0272503700054896.
Chotiner, Isaac. 2022. “Why Hasn’t the U.N. Accused China of Genocide in Xinjiang?” New Yorker, September 13, 2022. Read More
DeFalco, Randle C. 2021. “Time and the Visibility of Slow Atrocity Violence.” International Criminal Law Review 21, no. 5: 905-934. Read More.
Fidler, David P. 2003. “Revolt Against or From Within the West?: TWAIL, the Developing World, and the Future Direction of International Law.” Chinese Journal of International Law 2, no. 1: 29-76. Read More.
Gathii, James T. 2011. “TWAIL: A Brief History of its Origins, its Decentralized Network, and a Tentative Bibliography.” Trade Law and Development 3, no. 1: 26-64.
Heath, J. Benton. 2022. “Making Sense of Security.” The American Journal of International Law 116, no. 2: 289-339. Read More.
Koskenniemi, Martti. 2010. “What is International Law For?” In International Law, edited by Malcolm D. Evans, 28-50. New York: Oxford University Press. Read More.
Mickelson, Karin. 1998. “Rhetoric and Rage: Third World Voices in International Legal Discourse.” Wisconsin International Law Journal 16, no. 2: 353-419.
Okafor, Obiora Chinedu. “The Third World, International Law, and the Post 9/11 Era: An Introduction.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 43, no. 1: 1-5.
Razavi, Negar. 2022. “Navigating the ‘Middle East’ in Washington: Diasporic Experts and the Power of Multiplicitous Diplomacy.” Social Text 40, no. 3: 105-123. Read More.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noha Aboueldahab is an assistant professor of International Law at Georgetown University in Qatar. Aboueldahab's work covers international law, foreign policy, human rights, and transitional justice.
citation
To cite: Aboueldahab, N. "TWAIL and Critical Security Studies." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.