Finding a Place for TWAIL in African Studies

In March 2024, the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) launched a consultation on a new Policy on Slavery Crimes, to add to its policies on gender persecution (2022), gender-based crimes (2023), and children (2023).The ICC has prosecuted 32 cases since its establishment in 1998, the overwhelming majority against African defendants.July 2024 also saw the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issue a groundbreaking and historic Advisory Ruling (No. 186) against Israel, finding its occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to be contrary to international law-including the United Nations Charter, the Four Geneva Conventions, and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).Normally cases before the ICJ are between state parties but also include advisory opinions referred to it by the United Nations' (UN) General Assembly or other organs, as in this case.Not to be confused with its neighbour in The Hague (the ICC), the ICJ was established in 1945 by the UN.Both of these high-profile and much-criticized global bodies invite us to think about international law in relation to the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, legal imperialism, international justice, and reparations in African studies.Or more specifically, it has me reflecting, as I rotate off the editorial team for African Studies Review (ASR), about the place of critical scholarship on international law in African studies.A search of ASR found no references to "Third World Approaches to International Law" (TWAIL), a critical body of work analyzing the international world order from the perspective of the Global South. 1 Of course, ASR has published key pieces on peacebuilding, humanitarian law, international law, and reparations for slavery and colonialism.2 I am reflecting, however, as one of the only socio-legal scholars on the editorial team, on the dearth of critical articles on international law and policy or international human rights submitted to and published in the journal (Sesay 2024 and Ba 2020 are two exceptions).This short guest editorial is an invitation to critical international socio-legal scholars to think of African Studies Review readers as an important audience and interlocutors for our work, and for African studies scholars to engage with TWAIL scholarship.There are several important intellectual synergies between TWAIL and African studies.Roughly dating back to the 1990s, TWAIL has its roots in the anti-colonial independence movements of the post-World War II period (Mutua 2000).TWAIL was founded by progressive international law scholars influenced by critical race theory (Crenshaw 1989;Cover 1986), subaltern studies (Spivak

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