Associate Dean of International & Comparative Law Programs Adrien K. Wing’s introductory remarks during the “Diverse Perspectives on the Impact of Colonialism on International Law” panel at the American Society of International Law’s 2019 Annual Meeting were recently published in the Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting.

From the remarks:

Before our panelists begin, I am going to talk briefly about some theoretical aspects of this topic, including from liberalism, Critical Race Theory, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), and feminist theory perspectives. In the liberalism view of international law relating to colonialism, there is the standard story of the developed West which created international law principles wanting to impose certain aspects of their laws on the territories it controlled to “civilize” them. Implicit in the standard story is that the colonized were inferior and had nothing intellectually worth contributing to their colonial masters or the broader international community.

Nowhere in the standard story is there a serious examination of the negative aspects of colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, or imperialism. The colonial and ongoing plunder of Africa by the West remains unmentioned or underemphasized. The role of the African slave trade and its contribution to the cumulation of capitalist wealth is not sufficiently taken into account. The standard story may not really focus at all on the colonialization of the Americas or the British role in Indian exploitation.

Access the full remarks here.

Adrien K. Wing, Diverse Perspectives on the Impact of Colonialism on International Law: Introductory Remarks, 113 Am. Soc'y Int'l L. Proc. 60 (2019).

For more publications by Associate Dean Wing, visit the Law Library’s faculty bibliography.