Luis Eslava

• University of Kent

The chapter builds an “out of place” theory for international law. The author, Luis Eslava, a scholar of international law and development, draws on postcolonial legal theory, history, and ethnographic research in Colombia and elsewhere to show how the field of international law produces and is produced by “out-of-placeness.” The result is an inter...

The intertwined relationship between ‘development’, ‘law’, and the ‘international’ is rooted deeply in the formation of the contemporary world. Since the end of the Second World War, ‘international law’ and ‘international development’ have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which competing aspirations about a better world ar...

The intertwined relationship between ‘development’, ‘law’, and the ‘international’ is rooted deeply in the formation of the contemporary world. Since the end of the Second World War, ‘international law’ and ‘international development’ have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which competing aspirations about a better world ar...

A batalha pelo direito internacional durante a era da descolonização foi, em grande parte, uma batalha travada tendo como alvo a natureza, função e objetivos do Estado. Já o ponto final pré-determinado da emancipação política de acordo com a ordem legal de meados do século XX, a tarefa enfrentada pela primeira geração de líderes pós-coloniais, era...

The intertwined relationship between ‘development’, ‘law’, and the ‘international’ is rooted deeply in the formation of the contemporary world. Since the end of the Second World War, ‘international law’ and ‘international development’ have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which competing aspirations about a better world ar...

This article explores the central role of formalization in the history and functioning of international economic law. International economic law, in constituting and managing a ‘modern’ world economy, has relied on what we call ‘the dream of formality’. This dream gives a sense of internal coherence and future totality to international economic law...

Esta quinta historia de vida se enfoca en la difícil situación de las comunidades indígenas en Colombia, la cual se ha complicado aún más durante la pandemia. Afectados por el desplazamiento interno, y muchos obligados a migrar hacia las ciudades, los miembros de las comunidades indígenas encuentran refugio en la economía informal para suplir sus n...

This first report highlights the need for a new social policy starting from the assumption that informality is the norm and formality the exception in Colombia. The figures in this report are from the database on the informal economy in Colombia produced by the RUPTURES21 team. Sources of information include the Large Integrated Household Survey (G...

Esta tercera historia de vida evidencia los mecanismos de subsistencia y ayuda que resultan en escenarios de necesidad, tanto en términos de seguridad alimentaria, económica, habitacional y física. Aun cuando eficientes en términos de su respuesta a adversidades tanto inmediatas como estructurales, estos mecanismos son incapaces de soportar por si...

En esta segunda historia de vida buscamos resaltar las dificultades enfrentadas por grupos de trabajadores en situaciones no solo de informalidad pero también de irregularidad en terminos migratorios. Para estos trabajadores las crisis de salud pública implican enfrentarse a mayores dificultades para conseguir su sustento, al igual que a dinámicas...

Este informe se concentra en la necesidad de una nueva política de seguridad social teniendo en cuenta como las precariedades que usualmente acompañan el trabajo informal se convierten en momentos de crisis de salud pública en lo que aquí identificamos como ultra-precariedades. La cifras de este informe provienen de la base de datos sobre la econom...

Esta primera historia de vida resalta las codependencias y relaciones dentro de las economías no formales y entre las economías formales e informales. En tiempos de crisis de salud pública, estas codependencias y relaciones se pueden ver afectadas de tal modo que pueden poner en riesgo mecanismos de reproducción social y de supervivencia que son vi...

Este segundo informe recomienda la generación de un nuevo modelo de economía social basado tanto en la relación estrecha entre la economía formal e informal, como en el dinamismo propio de la economía informal. Atendiendo a estas realidades, al igual que a las precariedades que acompañan la economía informal, el objectivo es apoyar procesos económi...

Este primer informe resalta la necesidad de una nueva política social partiendo del presupuesto que la informalidad es la norma y la formalidad la excepción en Colombia. La cifras de este informe provienen de la base de datos sobre la economía informal en Colombia elaborada por el equipo RUPTURAS21. Entre las fuentes de información se encuentran la...

In this second life history we seek to highlight the difficulties encountered by groups of workers who are not only in situations of informality, but also have an irregular migratory status. For these workers, the health crisis means facing tougher challenges to earn a living, and facing aggravated exploitation dynamics which are found in the inter...

This first life history highlights the co-dependencies and relationships within informal economies, and between formal and informal economies. In times of public health crisis, these co-dependencies and relationships can be affected in such a way that they can put at risk social reproduction and survival mechanisms which are crucial for low-income...

This second report recommends the creation of a new social economy model based as much on the close relation between the formal and informal economy, as on the informal economy’s dynamism. Taking into account these realities and the precarities that accompany the informal economy, the aim is to support localised economic processes which recognise t...

This statement makes practical proposals to address serious environmental issues raised by the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement (EUMAA). The EUMAA fails to adequately address issues of climate change and environmental degradation, both in the EU and the Mercosur countries, which poses an unprecedented challenge for these regions. It thereby fails...

In this essay we re-describe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the usual imagined directionality of the flow between the two. At its most provocative, our argument is that rather than international law being a creation of the state, making the state is an ongoing project of international law. In the essay, we pay p...

In this article I explore the potential of a critical realist approach to the teaching of international law. Critical realist scholars have advanced a compelling account of the importance of paying attention – in designing educational curricula, delivering materials and classroom interactions – to the close relationship between agency and structure...

En este artículo examino la génesis e importancia del estado desarrollista para nuestro estudio del periodo de la descolonización –el cual tuvo lugar desde mediados de los años 1950 hasta la década de 1970– y, de manera más general, para nuestro entendimiento de la historia del orden global. Tomando como punto de partida la historia –mucho más temp...

In this article we engage with the promises and limits of the “Security and Development” discourse. Using Cali (Colombia)as our case study, we show how initiatives associated with this discourse, instead of helping States move beyond insecurity, exclusion and low levels of development by strengthening social relations, official institutions and leg...

Between 1935 and 1937, the International Missionary Council conducted the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment . The objective was to produce silent educational films and screen them to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. Embracing the principle of ‘indirect rule’, and its role in training coloni...

Thinking through Joe Sacco’s The Great War (2013) and adopting a materialist approach to the international legal order and its history, this article re-maps both the temporal scope and the actual location of the violence endured in the First World War and calls attention to its ongoing everyday material manifestations.

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferre...

Through a series of photographic vignettes of everyday life in Istanbul, this article explores international law beyond the exceptional events and sites often associated with it. The article challenges international law’s enframing as a narrow field of action and instead highlights its expansive role in the constitution of our world.

A review essay discussing Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 288 pp, ISBN: 978-1844677450. With thanks to David Kennedy and the Institute for Global Law and Policy for the opportunity to discuss this text and issues arising from it at the IGLP 2013 Workshop, Doha, Qatar, 5-14 January 2013, and to th...

In recent decades, the local, the municipal and the city have emerged as virtuous spaces where development and global integration can be achieved in the Third World. In this chapter I argue, however, that this move to the local through the idea of decentralization has had serious political, administrative, financial and jurisprudential implications...

Third World Approaches to International Law, or ‘TWAIL’, is a response to both the colonial and postcolonial ethos of international law. It is also one of the most explicitly articulated juridical and political spaces in which to think about an international law beyond its (post)coloniality. In this article, we describe TWAIL as having a characteri...

Este capítulo hace un recuento del actual interés internacional por nuestras ciudades, municipios y jurisdicciones locales y se pregunta cuál debería ser nuestro entendimiento y uso del derecho urbano en este contexto. Examinando de manera crítica la evolución de la relación entre las jurisdicciones locales y el nivel nacional e internacional, el c...

In this article we explore the relationship between TWAIL scholarship and the universality of international law. In particular, we offer an account of this relation as the outcome of what we describe as TWAIL’s characteristic double engagement with the attitudes of both reform and revolution vis-à-vis international law and scholarship. In being tho...

A public legal order that aspires to be global must involve the possibility of the sacred. The international legal system should thus be open to the sacred if it strives to create order among states in global governance. These claims arise from a reflection on international law in which we have tried to move beyond imperialistic conceptions of orde...

Book Review: Arvonne S. Fraser and Irene Tinker (eds.), Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development, New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2004, 372 pp, ISBN: 1-55861-4850

This article introduces the key thematics of this special edited collection within a frame of critical legal scholarship. How do lawyers constitute, question and re-make their relation to law and to legal writing? What is at stake in displacing or in claiming law? In co-writing this article, the editors have found it helpful to narrate their own jo...

It is a delicate and pretentious endeavour to examine Iraq in current times. It is delicate in the sense that new facts and consequences of the Coalition’s presence in Iraq are broadcast on a daily basis and discussed worldwide. Yet it is also pretentious because of the impressive volume of academic work about Iraq that has appeared during the last...

Considerada fuera de contexto, la Constitución colombiana de 1991 es leída como la materialización de una tendencia reformista mundial que, desde la década de los setenta, ha pretendido renovar los compromisos estatales a través del modelo de Estado social de derecho y la protección de los derechos humanos. En este sentido, la reforma constituciona...

Responding to an international trend that regards the state as an oversized, unsustainable and uneven jurisdiction that cannot effectively intervene in the economy to promote development objectives, nor impose a proper presence over its territory and population, the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991 installed local development as one of...

This paper presents a discursive analysis of the arrival, operation, and effects of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on international development from a socio-legal perspective. CSR has become a priority on the international development agenda as frameworks for development promote the contraction of the state's role and seek to encourage corpo...

It is a delicate and pretentious endeavour to examine Iraq in current times. It is delicate in the sense that new facts and consequences of the Coalition’s presence in Iraq are broadcast on a daily basis and discussed worldwide. Yet it is also pretentious because of the impressive volume of academic work about Iraq that has appeared during the last...

El autor se aproxima al Análisis Económico del Derecho como herramienta para estudiar fenómenos complejos, como el mercado de órganos. La explicación de la cercanía entre las dos disciplinas y su mutuo influjo deja entrever lo útil que resulta este método.

The paper engages with the expansion of economic analysis into the social sciences, especially in the realm of legal studies. The paper pays particular attention to the recent use of microeconomic analysis as an explanatory avenue to approach human behavior in conditions of scarcity. In the first part, the paper offers a review of the substantive a...

El autor se aproxima al análisis jurisprudencial para estudiar el caso concreto de las controversias entre la CAN y Venezuela. El trasfondo y explicación del sistema de creado en los países de la comunidad andina dan cuenta del contexto que rodea el escenario de integración regional.