The centrality of colonialism in the emergence and functioning of international law has been at the forefront of “postcolonial” and “third world” interventions to the discipline. These interventions have highlighted the need to depart from international law's Eurocentric underpinnings and pluralize its normative framework. However, distinct from this tradition, Colonial Wrongs and Access to International Law identifies historic “colonial wrongs” and highlights the urgent need to address these through available or suitably forged frameworks within existing international law. Several authors of this anthology are thus international (criminal) lawyers or scholars who focus on resolving the issue of “double standards” or (il)legitimacy that results from the selective application of the law on contemporary wrongs, which are, in fact, preceded by prolonged colonial violence.
In Part I, the authors recommend employing enhanced transitional justice mechanisms that provide attention to socio-economic violence and offer spaces to voice and hear colonial grievances. Part II evaluates the existing international legal notions of subjugation or continuous/continuing crimes vis-à-vis a colonial wrong. The overlooked colonial context of the violence against the Rohingyas in contemporary Myanmar was central to the Centre for International Law Research and Policy (CILRAP) led conference that preceded this book, and is expansively captured in Part III. This book, however, is not exclusively focused on Myanmar and, in Part IV, foregrounds the legacy of colonial wrongs occurring in other former colonial territories, including China, Cambodia, Africa, and by Belgium – as a liable former colonial state. Part V seeks to account for the harm done to indigenous communities in Canada and Norway, and ends with outlining the need to decolonize approaches to environmental protection and redress the victimization of indigenous peoples.
Eighteen chapters of this book constitute a remarkable attempt to acknowledge unaddressed colonial atrocities. Yet they also demonstrate a narrow understanding of “colonial wrongs” that can be mapped within the extant structures and functioning of international (criminal) law. Fully confronting the colonial context would necessarily call into question the legal categories through which “wrongs” are conceptualized, and whether they can be capacious enough to acknowledge the pervasive and multidimensional nature of colonial domination perpetuated in the Global South through international law and its structures both before and after “formal independence”. In this book, identifying colonial sites where unaddressed colonial wrongs pose a problem for realizing international justice rests on an episodic understanding of colonialism. This leaves unattended the pervasive structure of global (post)coloniality, amid which colonial harms continue to be perpetrated and resisted. This not only problematizes the prospect of indicting responsible actors, it also implicates the colonial onto-epistemologies on which international law is predicated. These aspects point towards the parochial nature of the international legal framework, for which several aspects of colonial domination remain incommensurable.
Despite its limitations, this book makes crucial headway in beginning to address the impacts of colonialism by offering implementable tools. It remains a useful resource within the ongoing discourse of international (criminal) law reform. A second volume of this anthology will certainly be welcome.
Competing interests
None.
