Sundhya Pahuja

• Ba/LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD (Lond)
• Managing Director at University of Melbourne

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law introduces students, scholars, and practitioners to the theory and history of the rule of law, one of the most frequently invoked-and least understood-ideas of legal and political thought and policy practice. It offers a comprehensive re-assessment by leading scholars of one of the world's most cherished t...

Cold War International Law has conventionally been structured around a historiography of hiatus. A “gap” is posited as inhering in international law sometime between 1948 and 1989. In this gap, there is very little international law—or there is an international law of suspension or crisis or deferral. Some of the present editors (Craven, Pahuja, Si...

Forthcoming, Nicholas Tsagourias (ed.), Handbook on Methodologies in International Law, (Elgar, 2020) Penultimate Draft.

Images are powerful. They shape how we see and understand the world, in the process challenging (or reinforcing) our assumptions and perspectives. The images we use in the classroom are no exception, whether used passively as visual aids or as a 'medium through which active learning is energized'. In this article we embrace the 'pictorial turn' in...

In this chapter, I draw on the idiom of jurisdictional thinking to re-describe the Peace of Utrecht, and the events leading up to it, in terms of the rivalry in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in England, between the sovereign-territorial arrangements we now call the state, and commercial-political groupings of merchants associated in the ju...

The ‘rule of law’ is a relatively recent addition to the development project. Only after the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War was over, history had ended, and three worlds had putatively become ‘one’, did it also become commonsensical for law, institutions and ‘governance’ to be understood as integral to ‘development’. Since that time, not only...

International Law and the Cold War - edited by Matthew Craven December 2019

Struggles ‘over’ international law in the period between 1955 and 1974 should be understood not as a battle to control a pre-existing international law, but as marking a series of encounters between rival practices of world-making, each travelling with rival accounts of international law. The question of how to conceptualize the corporation, and it...

International Law and the Cold War is the first book to examine the relationship between the Cold War and International Law. The authors adopt a variety of creative approaches – in relation to events and fields such as nuclear war, environmental protection, the Suez crisis and the Lumumba assassination – in order to demonstrate the many ways in...

In this chapter, I will contrast two normative approaches to the question of justice between peoples which emerged during the period of decolonization in the Twentieth Century, and which circulate in international law and institutions. These approaches have struggled through the period of the 'Cold War' to the present day. The first, underpinned by...

This interview was conducted with Upendra Baxi in early October, 2015 as part of the authors’ Eminent Jurists Video Archive Project. The interview covers Baxi’s formative early years in Rajkot, his education and taking up of a life of a legal scholar, including his basic legal training at the Government Law College in Bombay, graduate education at...

This article does two main things. First, it records and shares a methodology for running a writing workshop in the context of transnational doctoral and post-doctoral legal education. Second, it offers a critical reflection on this methodology, and in doing so draws out some more general lessons for thinking about our roles as scholars and teacher...

This chapter is published in It offers a re-reading of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Case as not the dry, procedural dispute it is commonly understood to be, but as an instance of the intense project of world making being undertaken in the middle of the twentieth century.

Between 1921 and 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru was imprisoned many times for ‘crimes’ related to India’s struggle for independence. Cumulatively, he spent many years in prison. Whilst in prison for the second or third time, Nehru began to write a series of letters to his then ten year old daughter, Indira. This chapter takes those letters as a point of de...

There is currently, in rich countries and poor, a groundswell of activism, activity, protest and popular engagement directed at creating a better world. Everywhere we look, people are singing, dancing, shopping (or not shopping), blogging, protesting, writing, performing, sponsoring and volunteering in the name of global justice. It is obvious that...

In this chapter I argue that international institutional attempts to address poverty (re)iterated in the idiom of development are likely to make the problem worse, rather than better. The international development project can be understood as a continuation of ‘the benevolence of empire’ in which interventions were conducted ‘in the service of enab...

Drawing on the jurisprudential tradition of jurisdictional thought, this article critically redescribes international law as a law of encounter. The article shows how the actualisation of the state is an ongoing project of international law, and raises the question of the responsibility of the international lawyer in that actualisation.

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...

Central to the question of how we live is how we share the earth. From conflict over territory, to passage over the high seas, to the quest for raw materials, to disputes over water and oil, to dams and development, to methods of agriculture, food security and to negotiations over climate change, the question of resources lies at the heart of many...

Reading Modern Law identifies and elaborates upon key critical methodologies for reading and writing about law in modernity. The force of law rests on determinate and localizable authorizations, as well as an expansive capacity to encompass what has not been pre-figured by an order of rules. The key question this dynamic of law raises is how legal...

Does International Law have anything to offer to the 'poorest of the poor'? The short answer to this question is: yes, potentially. So far, however, it has offered very little. Indeed, international law is unlikely to offer very much at all if we continue to approach the question of poverty in the way we have for the past sixty years, let along sin...

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'. A...

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...

Events: The Force of International Law presents an analysis of international law, centred upon those historical and recent events in which international law has exerted, or acquired, its force. From Spanish colonization and the Peace of Westphalia, through the release of Nelson Mandela and the Rwandan genocide, and to recent international trade neg...

Recent attempts to integrate human rights and development have come from several quarters. However, in contrast to this ascendant orthodoxy and the increasingly ‘commonsensical’ understanding that human rights and development should be integrated as deeply and as quickly as possible, this chapter will argue that their integration should be understo...

For the last sixty years, the concept of development has operated as a proxy for conversations about global inequalities. However its transformative logic ultimately implies that the West is the only legitimate source of models for social, economic and political organization. The understanding of law and legal systems is part of this broader tenden...

"Divining the Source: Law's Foundation and the Question of Authority" is a collection of exciting essays by leading international scholars in the fields of critical legal theory and international law. It both critiques and moves beyond the law discipline's anxiety about the moral foundations of international law and human rights and places struggle...

In recent critically inclined texts on human rights, we find a desire to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the human rights regime, to consider the colonial origins of international law and to take account of the putative axiom of globalization. This trilogy is often accompanied by an asserted faith (however vestigial) in the human rights reg...

Although it was published more than 20 years ago, in a world that was geopolitically dramatically different from our own, it is difficult to approach the subject of nation without invoking Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This small book has come to serve as an almost mandatory point of reference for academic discussions of the modern nati...

This afternoon, a student came to visit me in my office .... "What I wanted to talk about," he says, settling into the chair opposite me, "is the paper that's due next Thursday, I am not exactly sure what you're looking for." ... Throughout his schooling, he has learned that the "right answer" is the one the teacher is "looking for." It has been a...

In this article, the authors use our experience of collaboration as a vehicle for thinking critically about the uneasy relationship between the practices and products of internationally oriented legal scholars situated in the North. They use tools drawn from feminist theory to tease out, in particular, some of the perils in the turn to cosmopolitan...

This article seeks to complicate conventional understandings of the way in which IMF conditionality operates in relation to North/South relations. It begins with a genealogy of how the Fund became involved in lending to the South and argues that the Fund was transformed from an essentially monetary institution concerned with the industrialised stat...