This post introduces the Symposium \u201cInternational Law and the Global South: Operating Behind Solidary Lines\u201d. It brings together some of the wonderful contributions from Postgraduate students from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), \u201cInternational Law and the Global South\u201d, a module that we have been running, in different iterations, since 2020. During the first year of the course, we held online seminars due to the pandemic. Challenging as that was, it allowed Luiza Le\u00e3o Soares Pereira, then a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK, to develop the course together with Fabio Costa Morosini, here at UFRGS. Since then, she returned and joined the Postgraduate Programme in Law at UFRGS as a Guest Professor, and we continued to offer the course. We held editions in 2023 and 2024, and were joined by Postdoctoral Fellow Matheus Gobbato Leichtweis for the 2025 edition, from which the symposium posts that follow arose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Module: \u201cInternational Legal Orders: International Law and the Global South\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The module was created as a place in which to discuss, at postgraduate level, international law issues through a critical perspective, but more importantly from the standpoint of the Global South. The reading materials in the syllabus have shifted since its first edition: we built the structure of the seminar collectively, in light of our own research agendas, discussions about international law in critical circles in Brazil and across the world, and the feedback received from students during and after each semester. We have also brought in external speakers, both practitioners and academics, engaged in thinking about international law and the Global South. This year, we were joined by Luis Eslava<\/a> and Fabia Fernandes Carvalho<\/a>, who generously shared with students some of their most recent written pieces, which we had the opportunity to read and discuss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year, we pored over some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between the Global South and International Law. We discussed classical TWAIL texts, such as Tony Anghie\u2019s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law<\/em><\/a>, B.S. Chimni\u2019s TWAIL Manifesto<\/a>, among many others, but also ventured into meta-visions of TWAIL, that seek to historicize the movement, such as George Galindo<\/a> and James Gathii<\/a>. Gender<\/a>, race <\/a>and class <\/a>featured prominently in our discussions, as did visions for the Global South that go<\/a> around <\/a>or even challenge <\/a>TWAIL. We ended the reading portion of the course with an in-depth analysis of Anghie\u2019s magnificent TWAIL Retrospective<\/a>, and <\/a>responses <\/a>thereto<\/a>, recently published in the European Journal of International Law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A change we made this year was to hold discussions in English, for the first time. This might seem like an idiosyncratic choice, especially given the subject-matter of the course, but we believe the experiment was successful: the proof of the pudding is the excellent output published here. The goal was to create an environment that allowed students to speak a different language in a safe and supportive environment, and demystify the daunting task of speaking English in a professional setting. We hope this empowers them to take part in conferences abroad, to publish in English, and to better disseminate their ideas to a broader audience. Our choice was also partly motivated by recent guidelines from the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education, that seek to promote internationalization of post-graduate education, facilitating exchange between Brazilian and foreign institutions. We benefitted from this immediately, as we were joined by two exchange students from Moscow State University. At the end of the day, we believe the module has succeeded in equipping this group of students to hold discussions in what has become for better or for worse<\/a> international law\u2019s lingua franca<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rethinking international law from the Global South <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The international legal order that emerged after the Second World War is undergoing a profound transformation, marked by a global redistribution of economic and political power. If once economic power, geopolitical influence, and academic knowledge production in international law used to be exclusively concentrated in Europe and the United States, now, increasingly, actors from Asia, Africa and Latin America are participating more actively in the shaping of international law agendas and institutions. In this context, the notion of the Global South has become an unavoidable reference point in contemporary debates about a new international legal order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Global South was treated in the module as an analytical category aimed at revealing asymmetries and inequalities in the international legal order. If historically international law has been theorized and practiced in and by the Global North, the Global South has now asserted itself as a site of intellectual production about international law. In this context, critical scholarship emerging from the Global South has been able to expose these imbalances, question the hierarchies of knowledge production, and open space for alternative ways of thinking about international law and its possible futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The course approached these questions through a series of critical perspectives that interrogate the intellectual foundations of international law. A central reference point was TWAIL, whose scholars have long argued that the discipline developed alongside colonial expansion and imperial structures of power, while also seeking to challenge these hierarchies and articulate alternative visions of the global order. The course treated TWAIL not as a unified doctrine but as an open and evolving intellectual tradition. The readings therefore explored different generations of TWAIL scholarship, internal debates within the movement, and even critiques directed at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More broadly, the module encouraged students to approach international law through critique. Rather than treating the discipline as a neutral body of rules, discussions focused on the historical and political conditions under which international law developed and on the interests it has historically served. Alongside TWAIL, the course engaged with other critical approaches, including Marxist perspectives, feminist scholarship and contributions from Critical Race Theory. Together, these perspectives highlight how international law intersects with broader structures such as class, gender and race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A recurring question throughout the course concerned the relationship between critique and practice. For scholars and practitioners working from the Global South, international law often appears both as a structure that has historically reproduced global hierarchies and as a potential instrument for transformation. Much of our discussions therefore revolved around how to engage critically with the discipline while still believing that its institutions and doctrines can be used in more progressive ways. This tension became a central thread throughout the module and shaped many of the reflections that emerge in the contributions collected in this symposium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A note on situatedness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brazil offers a particularly interesting vantage point from which to engage with these debates. Historically shaped by colonialism and deeply embedded in the structures of the global economy, the country occupies an ambivalent position in the international legal order, participating in Western legal and institutional traditions while simultaneously engaging in forms of global diplomacy and coalitions such as BRICS, the G77, and various South-South cooperation frameworks. As Arnulf Becker Lorca<\/a> has argued, international lawyers from semi-peripheral contexts such as Brazil\u2019s often operate between centers and peripheries of knowledge production, navigating different traditions while attempting to change them from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The notion of positionality in the production of international legal knowledge was present in the classroom throughout the course. Many of the discussions revolved around how scholars and practitioners located in the Global South engage with international law. A recurrent concern was that this engagement should understand international law not only as an object of critique, but also as a field of practice and institutional participation. This tension between critique and engagement\/participation ran through and shaped the atmosphere of the seminars, as students were invited to reflect on their own place within these debates and on the possibilities of producing knowledge about international law from outside its traditional centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something quite distinctive about discussing the relationship between international law and the Global South in the Global South<\/em>, and particularly in Brazil. In our case, most students that were being introduced to critique in general, and to TWAIL authors in particular, for the first time. We had a diverse group of students, most of whom were not public international lawyers, plus two visiting Russian International Relations students, here in an exchange programme with UFRGS from Moscow State University. The results were rich, often challenging discussions, where no proverbial stone was left unturned, and no \u201csacred text\u201d left unquestioned. The preoccupations voiced by students were numerous, and instinctively informed by their situatedness. They included questions about the place of TWAIL in relation to practice, whether or not one could \u201csolve\u201d international law\u2019s history of injustice in the present, and whether certain countries \u201cfit\u201d stereotypical understandings about the Global South, particularly China, but also Brazil. We must confess we were not able (or willing) to provide definitive answers to any of these questions. What discussions demonstrated, in any event, was that there was an instinctive understanding of the place of international law in underdevelopment we all shared, one that, in our experiences teaching elsewhere, cannot be replicated in Global North classrooms. There was a palpable sense of solidarity amongst students, a desire to question but also salvage international law from its wreckage, and to use it in progressive ways, to varying degrees. Discussions often left us with a sense of anger, but anger of a productive kind, a form of realistic optimism. This can be seen between the lines of each individual post we share with you here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The posts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The blog posts presented in the symposium are the result of a collective process of reading, discussion and critical engagement with the literature. From a situated perspective, they approach the topic \u201cinternational law and the Global South\u201d from different angles, drawing on theoretical frameworks explored during the course while also engaging with contemporary questions that continue to shape the field. Some contributions revisit foundational TWAIL debates while others seek to apply this perspective to specific legal regimes, institutions and questions. Together, they show how a new generation of international legal scholars trained in Brazil is engaging with critical traditions while positioning their reflections within broader global conversations about international law. We had a hard time selecting the five best contributions from the participants of the course. They were chosen on the basis of their academic rigour and quality, innovative nature, and representativeness of our class discussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin with Pedro Henrique Pereira Santos\u2019 provocative \u201cFrom Hauntology to Utopia: TWAIL and its Ghosts<\/em><\/a>\u201d. In his piece, Pedro seeks to grapple with TWAIL literature\u2019s \u201cself-mythologizing rewriting of history\u201d. Drawing from the interdisciplinary concept of \u201cHauntology\u201d, focused on \u201cspectral frequencies, where the voices of the past and the not yet formulated possibilities of the future have an open channel to dialogue\u201d, he proposes an alternative engagement with history in order to transcend preoccupations with re-telling history and self-mythologising the movement itself, that \u201chaunt\u201d TWAIL scholarship. That allows, in his argument, for a transformative use of history that reverberates in the present and the future of international law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Konstantin Gaidarov\u2019s post, \u201cMoving TWAIL Hubs from North to South: Empowering Global South Voices in International Law\u201d, is a meditation on how to bring the insights of TWAIL \u201chome\u201d, closer to the Global South that it seeks to emancipate. Engaging with critics that argue that TWAIL\u2019s networks are \u201cNorthern-centric\u201d, he defends \u201c[r]elocating TWAIL\u2019s hubs to the Global South is not just symbolic; it is strategic and essential for the movement\u2019s vitality\u201d, which can \u201cenergize the scholarship with new voices, perspectives, and legitimacy\u201d. Although the piece discusses issues of epistemology and the politics of knowledge production, it is also a call to action. Konstantin proposes ways of \u201c[s]hifting TWAIL hubs from North to South\u201d through \u201cconcerted efforts and innovative strategies\u201d, and argues that through \u201c[t]he journey from Harvard to Cairo and beyond\u201d, \u201cTWAIL can continue to reinvent international law in the pursuit of a more just and inclusive world\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mariana Bettiol, B\u00e1rbara Cunha Mello, Tainara C\u00e1ceres Rodrigues, and Elina Gaidarova\u2019s posts go from theory to practice: they bring Global South sensibilities to discussing international investment law reform, international environmental protection, racial discrimination, and BRICS governance, respectively. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mariana Bettiol\u2019s post \u201cInternational Investment Agreements between Developing Countries: The Global South Strikes Back\u201d turns the TWAIL critique of international investment law\u2019s northern bias on its head, proposing we shift our point of view to see how Global South countries are organizing investment governance amongst themselves. She compares Brazil\u2019s Cooperation and Facilitation Investment Agreements and South-South BIT\u2019s, and arrives to the conclusion that \u201cthe success of South-South cooperation, and whether it will ultimately contribute to a more equitable global investment order, depends on the ability of developing countries to coordinate efforts to resist reproducing the legal structures that historically limited their own autonomy\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n B\u00e1rbara Cunha Mello\u2019s contribution, \u201cThe Role of International Law in Environmental Protection: A Global South Perspective\u201d, discusses the timely issue of environmental protection – the post was written in the immediate aftermath of the COP in Bel\u00e9m, in the Brazilian Amazon. She defends one cannot uncouple the current regime of international environmental law from the discipline\u2019s colonial extrativist roots, and powerfully argues that \u201c[a] decolonial ecology\u2014rooted in historical justice, recognition of Indigenous and marginalized communities, and genuine ecological reparation\u2014offers pathways for reimagining the role of law in environmental protection\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tainara C\u00e1ceres Rodrigues turns to sustainable development and racial discrimination, in her post entitled \u201cBetween Discourse and Reality: Race and Development in the 2030 Agenda\u201d. She calls our attention to Brazil\u2019s proposal of including Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 18, \u201cEthnic-Racial Equality\u201d, and reads it in line with UN Special Rapporteur on Racism Tendaye Achiume, in her 2022 Report<\/a>. Tainara defends that SDG 18 \u201cpoints to a possible path of transformation, a global agenda that integrates perspectives produced by racialized peoples, inaugurating a horizon of development truly committed to racial equality and global justice\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, Elina Gaidarova\u2019s post, \u201cSouth-South Cooperation as TWAIL in Practice: BRICS and the New Development Bank\u201d, looks at whether \u201cinitiatives like BRICS (the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and their New Development Bank (NDB) show TWAIL\u2019s ideas moving from theory to reality\u201d. She compares the initiative to the famous Bandung conference of 1955, and identifies TWAIL values in the NDB\u2019s inception. She nonetheless recognizes some potential limitations in the Bank\u2019s model, and concludes that \u201cthe NDB should uphold high standards (on transparency, environmental protection, human rights) voluntarily, or else it could face the same criticisms once leveled at Western lenders\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These posts reflect the questions that animated the module. They move between theory and practice; between critique and institutional practice; and between historical reflections on the past of the discipline and speculations about its possible futures. Taken together, they illustrate how new sites of knowledge production and new voices from the Global South can and do creatively attempt to rethink the discipline from the margins as well as from within. <\/p>\n\n\n\n