Europe’s borders are racial borders. The European Union’s external border regime underpins continuing forms of European imperialism and neocolonialism. It reinforces a particular imaginary of Europeanness as whiteness, euphemistically dressed up as a European Way of Life to be protected. It nonetheless sits comfortably within the permissible parameters of international law. This Article...
Racial Valuation of Diseases
Scholars have paid inadequate attention to how racial valuation influences what actors prioritize or deem worthwhile. Today, racial valuation of diseases informs the stark global health inequities seen worldwide. As a concept, racial valuation refers to how racialized societies assign differing values to an individual or group based on their racial designation and the position within the social...
Race as a Technology of Global Economic Governance
This Article offers an account of the role of race in global political economy—in particular, how to understand racialization as part of the process by which institutions of economic hierarchy not only were created but continue to be legitimated. It offers the conception of race as a technology: the product of racialized forms of knowing, which serve the practical goal of maintaining and...
Keynote Speech, UCLA Law Review Symposium 2020: Law and Empire in the American Century
This keynote speech was delivered on January 31, 2020. It argues that dominant narratives of American legal liberalism and global exceptionalism increasingly find themselves under real political and intellectual strain, even among mainstream scholars and practitioners of constitutional law and public international law.
An Un-American Story of the American Empire: Small Places, From the Mississippi to the Indian Ocean
This intervention gestures to histories of American empire from a perspective born outside America’s shores—in other words and other worlds, an un-American story of American empire. Seen from elsewhere, American empire appears both intimate and distant, at once singular and multiple, a vast terrain and a small place. For instance, how can we supplement a story of race and racial capitalism that...
Unsettling the Border
When scholars and lawmakers ask who should be allowed to cross borders, under what circumstances, on what ground, they often leave unexamined the historical formation of the border itself. National borders are taken for granted as the backdrop against which normative debates unfold. This Article intervenes in contemporary debates about border crossing by bringing the border itself into the frame...
Genres of Universalism: Reading Race Into International Law, With Help From Sylvia Wynter
Taking note of the relatively limited accounts of race in contemporary international legal doctrine, this Article posits a thought experiment: What would international legal theorizing look like not from the place of the metropole or the colony, but rather from the journey of the enslaved, from the barracoon to the hold of the slave ship to the plantation?
“Unwhitening the World”: Rethinking Race and International Law
International law was invented in 1789 when Jeremy Bentham introduced the term to replace the outmoded “Law of Nations.” Since then, international lawyers have spent a lot of time thinking about whether international law is in fact law, and little or no time considering how international law is international, or what international actually means. In this Article, I want to suggest that, with the...
Writing Race and Identity in a Global Context: What CRT and TWAIL Can Learn From Each Other
This Article argues that issues of race and identity have so far been underemphasized, understudied, and undertheorized in mainstream international law. To address this major gap, this Article argues that there is an opportunity for learning, sharing, and collaboration between Critical Race Theorists (CRT) and scholars of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
A Prolegomenon to the Study of Racial Ideology in the Era of International Human Rights
Through a study of racial ideology in the history of international legal thought, this Article offers the beginnings of an explanation for how this lack of attention to race and racism came to be, and why it matters today.
Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: U.S. Prison Labor and Racial Subordination Through the Lens of the ILO’s Abolition of Forced Labor Convention
This Article calls for a recalibration, arguing that transnational labor law is deeply historicized, rooted in the persisting presence of a racial capitalism that is too easily relegated to a distant past.
Critical Race Theory Meets Third World Approaches to International Law
By and large, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) exist in separate epistemic universes. This Article argues that the borders between these two fields are unwarranted.
Race and Empire: Legal Theory Within, Through, and Across National Borders
Mainstream and official analysis casts the international system and its hegemonic actors in the role of humanitarian responders to a Libyan crisis not of their making. Instead, we draw attention to the ways in which the racial framing of Libya—and its subordination to imperial prerogatives—proved critical to international governance regimes for managing the country—and the bodies and territory...
Human Rights on the Border: A Critical Race Analysis of Hernandez v. Mesa
Abstract This Comment presents a historical investigation of the violence that establishes nationstate borders. The analysis deconstructs the U.S.–Mexico border through the 2010 shooting of Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, and asks how the framework of human rights may provide justice for this tragedy. In 2015, the Fifth Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals heard his parents’ legal case en banc...