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Book Review: International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance
Abstract
Several years ago, the American Society of International Law published the proceedings of a panel that considered the relationship between social movements and international law. The influence of the “groundbreaking work” of Balakrishnan Rajagopal in this realm was explicitly acknowledged at the outset and permeated the themes addressed by the panellists. Informed by the fruitful coalescence of Rajagopal’s practical experience and progressive academic thinking, that groundbreaking work was to culminate in the publication of "International Law from Below", a significant piece of scholarship that is at once a pioneering contribution to, and trenchant critique of, international legal discourse. This review considers the core themes presented by Rajagopal, as well as relating some of the questions he raises about international law, generally, to the specific question of Palestine.
This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework and analyses the creation of new rights by the movement as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’. It concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges involved in the institutionalization of new rights.
This article recounts a clash between an establishment international nongovernmental organization (NGO), Amnesty International, and the government of Rwanda over the meaning of international human rights norms in a postconflict society. It offers a critical perspective on the mainstream human rights community's due process critique of Rwanda's gacaca - a system of over ten thousand local judicial bodies modeled on a precolonial communal dispute resolution the Rwandan government introduced to process the over one hundred twenty thousand suspects crowding its prisons following the 1994 genocide. This moment of norm contestation offers a lens to broader problems facing the human rights regime. The paper argues that Amnesty International's legalistic approach to the gacaca prevents it from appreciating its unique postcolonial hybrid form, and that other approaches, such as the one adopted by Penal Reform International, are perhaps better models for human rights praxis in the developing world.
