In his seminal work From Apology to Utopia, Koskenniemi understands International Law’s practice in a binary logic of apology, the mere protection of States interests in a pragmatic way; and utopia, the moralist perspective which lacks grounding on effective actions. Starting from this binomial, I propose another approach in order to critique (what I diagnose as) the never-ending exercise of TWAIL self-mythologizing rewriting of history; not as a turn away from history and towards practice, as some have suggested, but as an engagement with the past in the present, through what researchers have called Hauntology*.
Hauntology had its first steps on Derrida’s Sprectres of Marx (1993), when the author answered Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man (1992) with an analysis of the absent, invisible or ghostly in opposition to the physical presences. In this scenario, marxism was the phantom framed by Derrida as a revenant that would keep haunting hegemonic capitalism and the free market.
How TWAILers approach History?
Antony Anghie’sImperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law and Becker Lorca’s Mestizo International Law attempt to build a more diverse canon to International Law’s discipline. When Becker Lorca (2015, p. 32) says that “[w]riting a historical narrative centred in the West was one of the core lawyers’ defense mechanisms”, it is implied that the current mainstream narrative is a western one. I can’t see how adding new characters and chapters to this story could alter the framework.
I do not condemn the canon expansion exercise, it is effectively important to recognize the colonial encounter as a bedrock of the field, or the importance of non-western internationalists in the development of ideas as the standard of civilization. Building a divrse archive of histories is central to the idea of provincializing the supposedly universal characteristic of International Law:
“This situation then also points to the importance of good contextualist histories and genealogies of international law. For some of these students and the lawyers they will become such studies can make a huge difference, not so much because they offer a neoformalist grounding for their post-realist field, but because they destabilize some of the conservative and teleological aspects of the traditions they were introduced toor incorporated into” (Quintana & Nouwen, 2025, p. 73)
However, TWAIL’s obsession with producing fissures on the progressive narrative of International Law also reinforces a linearity. It does not give up the idea of an evolutionary movement within the discipline, it just adds new characters to this development. Another origin story is still an origin story:
“[…] critical historians of international law constantly gravitate around the same periodizations, the same canonical authors, and the same debates that older narratives of international law revolved around […] the critical attitude is, many times, indebted to the very traditions it often seeks to destroy or question […]” (Galindo, 2021, p. 2)
This exercise (conscious or unconsciously) legitimates institutions, doctrines and practices as if those were, in fact, the products of compromises and, thus, valid emancipatory tools. It is a narrative that fetishizes the cracks in the structure and the violences produced by the system. As Tzouvala puts it:
“[…] critical international legal historians are trapped within a profoundly Eurocentric theoretical universe that assumes a single moral framework […] A particular version of global history is put forward as the solution. More specifically, the incorporation of multiple perspectives, an emphasis on new actors, and a certain anti-statist sensibility are identified as ways of ‘provincializing Europe.’ […] An approach that questions Eurocentrism exclusively by showing that non-Westerners also became competent users of the language of international law ends up implying that the language itself is truly universal, even if it originated in Europe.” (Tzouvala, 2021, p. 416-8)
As a product of TWAIL’s engagement in History, there is an apologetic perception of International Law as the product of deliberations that could provide a place for outsiders to contribute. Also, there is a utopian view that by retelling canonical events from new sources and perspectives it would be possible to use International Law in emancipatory forms.
If it is well-known among TWAILers that the problem of International Law is not simply the “distortion of the historical record of the discipline” (Tzouvala, 2025, p. 420), but its longstanding structures tied to colonial and neoliberal enterprises; why do they engage so much in crafting a supposedly historical justice to the colonial encounter? It can be very apologetic and utopian to think that in the fifth time that we narrate the dynamic of difference International Law could finally become recognized as a democratic and emancipatory discipline.
Why a spectral perspective?
Born in a time where the critical vocabulary was failing to communicate more subjective and radical perspectives, the Hauntology can be an alternative on how we face the failures of emancipatory projects without getting lost on the debate about International Law’s genealogy. It aims to navigate between the synchronical and the diachronical, in spectral frequencies, where the voices of the past and the not yet formulated possibilities of the future have a open channel to dialogue. Reverberations, outbursts, screams and specters haunt our imaginations of future.
Law does not operate in a simple temporal order, every legal argument invokes a series of past events and an authority that breaks the separation between past and present, provoking a layering of juridical memories that return every time they are conjured. To articulate the idea of self-determination is to mobilize the violences and sufferings that originated the concept and that were produced by it. As Tzouvala defines, ‘[i]t is precisely through these acts of reading and re-reading that lawyers practise the (dark) art of making meaning move across time and space”.
If “Diplomacy is haunted by death, by the possibility that dialogue will break down and war will break out, that ‘blood and iron’, rather than diplomatic words, will determine international outcomes, as Bismarck said” (Devetak, 2005, p. 630-1); International Law runs in a similar way. There is always the fear that institutions and norms will not be able to hold the impetus of imperialist endeavors. To embrace this gothic scenario of fantoms, death, blood and suffering is to be less cynical about what lies behind the self-enhancing portrait of the field.
Of course, it is not simple to catalogue all International Law ghosts. We can think of almost literal hauntings of the enterprises of slavery, colonialism, the Mandates system. But it is possible to see the failure of projects as Bandung, Non-Alignment Movement, NIEO, CEPAL, the Pink Wave as burdens that mark the inner experience of TWAILers as a lingering presence.
As Mark Fisher (2014, p. 14) said, “cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity”. Law is a perfect example of how the past is not stiff, but rather constantly reread in the present — it is necessary to detect the concurrence of temporal orders. The effects of brutality are not stuck in the colonial encounter, at the same that the colonial encounter is not stuck in centuries ago. We are always processing this events in individual and collective senses.
By acknowledging this strangeness and uneasiness of the long-standing effects of the past in our structure of feeling, as a pedagogical approach, we can face the power structures productions and echoes in a diffuse, branching manner. In order to proceed to a next step of TWAIL’s project, the process of listening and finding meaning of this aftershocks can be a exercise of deconstruction and reimagination of the discipline:
“Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (Gordon, 2007, p. 8)
New TWAIL approaches don’t need to be necessarily more practical ones. Also, they don’t need to be prescriptive. As the ghosts projections, TWAIL needs openness to the future rather than a closed syllabus, or already-made solutions. To confess the limitations of our visions and the thresholds of our language is a good starting point to build a more critical and a less dogmatic field.
Read the Introduction to this Research Symposium: “International Law and the Global South: Operating Behind Solidary Lines“
Bibliography
Anghie A, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press 2005)
Becker Lorca A, Mestizo International Law (Cambridge University Press 2015)
Davis C, ‘Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’ (2005) 59 French Studies 373 <https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/59/3/373/638853>
Devetak R, ‘The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime after September 11’ (2005) 31 Review of International Studies 621
Fisher M, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books 2014)
Galindo G, Direito Internacional No Brasil, vol. 1 (1st edn., Lumen Juris 2021)
Gordon A, Ghostly Matters : Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University Of Minnesota Press 2007)
Modirzadeh NK, ‘“[L]et Us All Agree to Die a Little”: TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise’ (2023) 65 Social Science Research Network
Quintana FJ and Nouwen S, ‘In Defense of International Law?’ (December 2022) <https://ssrn.com/abstract=4794205> accessed 4 December 2025
Tzouvala N, Capitalism as Civilisation : A History of International Law (Cambridge University Press 2020)
Tzouvala N,, ‘The Specter of Eurocentrism in International Legal History’ (22 February 2021) <https://ssrn.com/abstract=4064248> accessed 4 December 2025
