Newness, Imperialism, and International Legal Reform in Our Time: A Twail Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter offers my reflections, grounded in part on the relevant empirical evidence, on how my 2004 journal article that goes by the same title has influenced the field of international law, and especially the development of ‘Critical Third World Approaches to International Law’ (TWAIL). The article at issue is concerned with how claims regarding the supposedly radical or highly significant ‘newness’ of certain crises are deployed to legitimise international legal reform projects that have had, or are likely to have, a tendency to facilitate or justify longstanding imperial ambitions. The article argues that: (a) the deeply political practice of asserting the kinds of newness claims discussed above allows its proponents to better justify the implementation of longstanding, but previously far less tenable, international law reform projects; (b) it is only through the displacement of third-world suffering from internationalist consciousness that the construction of this ‘post-9/11’ world as a significantly new world order has been made possible; and (c) TWAIL analysis is extremely useful international law optic/methodology with which to better understand and deal with the processes through which these newness claims are deployed to render significantly more tenable the international law-reform projects that are thus undergirded.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".