Encountering a counter question
“When we think of international law, which city do we imagine?” “Rome?” “Osnabrück?” “Versailles?” “Paris?” “The Hague?” “New York?” “Washington?”
This question comes from my interviewing of a set of students studying international law, for a paper. With my interview questions, while I was trying to understand the possible difficulties that students and teachers face, that often manifests in their dissonance with international law, a female student from the State of Rajasthan in India said something that haunts me even today. When asked whether she considered a career in international law, she had a counter question for me— “I can think of a career in a field with which I can associate to or be exposed to. For association or exposure or both, I need to do an internship. If I have to intern at Mumbai [around 1700 kilometers away from her home city], my parents would not allow, how can I even think of interning at any of the United Nations Head Offices?”
As I soul-searched my hollow and superficial frames of “important” “scholarly” questions on approaching international law teaching, I was engulfed in the depth of a profound, and organic halt of distance. I felt so small and shallow to be oblivious to not have factored distances and placement of cities of the map and of our minds in featuring international law. This question was not just a question of city but also of gender.
Centering the decentered: Bandung
With the participating newly independent Asian and African States, the 1955 Asian-African Conference—more popular as the Bandung conference—was a foreground in promoting South-South cooperation and anti-imperial new world order. Bandung’s emphasis on political, cultural, social and legal cooperation among Asian-African States reflects through its legacy including the Non-Alignment Movement (political), the 1956 Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization (legal), the 1960 UNGA Declaration (politico-legal), the 2005 New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (politico-economic), and others. Ever since then, Bandung has remained as political and historical highlight in international law, and a crest in the global anti-imperial discourse. Besides its applauded legacies, it displayed an exceptional geo-political location for a conference—an alternative to the Parises, Romes, Berlins, The Hagues, and New Yorks of the international law world.
The choice of situating international institutions and their head offices, international courts, international bank, and international law deliberations and conferences, has been the Euro-American cities. From the early Rome to the contemporary The Hague and Geneva, these cities have enveloped disproportionately higher episteme than the rest. Their geo-political relevance catapults their epistemic mileage, that also subtly ensures the debates in international law to be physically placed there. Even the alternative approaches to international law, such as the Third World Approaches to International law ( TWAIL)—one that aspires as anti-imperial and anti-hegemonic international society— is often seen through the 1997 Harvard conference as its indispensable highlight. From decolonial, anti-imperial, neo imperial to tribal discourse in international law, the scholars, scholarships and academic institutions often, while remaining in these Euro-American cities, adjust their postures to zoom in into the Global South.
International law- relevant cities belong to Europe and America. The placement of international institutions (and ‘reputed’ academic institutions) in these cities cultivates academic access and corresponding organized circles of recognition, better exchange and the overall higher and dense (density in terms of cite-ability) visibility of scholars and scholarships. The locational advantages of the scholarships from these cities translate, in non-explicit ways, to their epistemic heights—the “stalwarts”. Not much coincidentally, these stalwarts or the protagonists of international law, are the pool from where the “most highly qualified publicists” are chosen. In (and against) this context, the symbolism of Bandung is noteworthy. While the world of international law gravitates to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Brussels, The Hague, Geneva, and New York, holding a conference that would later become a defining moment, and thereby shifting the limelight—even momentarily— to any non-European city was bound to disturb many.
Bandung —an “extra-Euro-American” place— bespoke of the courageous locational choice of the “weak” newly independent States. The epistemic positioning of Bandung must enable us to look beyond the centers—not only beyond Rome and The Hague, but also beyond Delhi and Dhaka— because Bandung was not merely a non-European locational choice but also a non-capital choice. Delhi’s and Dhaka’s epistemic positioning within India and Bangladesh respectively as their national capitals is levered on their political relevance. Bandung was an exception even in this respect as it was not the national capital of Indonesia. This dual exceptionality of Bandung’s epistemic positioning makes it a memoir of criticality amid the inabilities of the underrepresented groups pushed away from international law by its distances.
Weights of disadvantages and distance
Though patriarchy is omnipresent— across societies and States in differing shapes and forms—its presence in Asian and African societies is nuanced. This picture shapeshifts when the weight of distance (from international law) is exerted upon it. The constraints exerted by distance and location amplify when combined with the issues of one’s gender. For the women of the third world, these economic and financial burdens (for instance, multiple travels to another city for visa process) that also transcend to political ones, are mutually reinforcing. “Whether I can afford a travel to Lucknow for my visa application to attend a conference in Oxford” is often outweighed by “whether there is a flight or train connectivity between my city of residence and Lucknow”. The affordability or the accessibility— precocious and precursor questions — arise way before my affordability and accessibility of reaching the Oxford conference should arise, pushing the location of Oxford even further. The superimpositions—of caste, indigeneity and poverty disadvantages—on these affordability and accessibility question are further epistemically limiting in ways that are unexplainable. The digital divide and the resulting access to information add unimaginably multiplied foreclosures for the indigenous, poor, and other minority groups.
Locational inequalities epistemically limit women, marginalized and disadvantaged castes, tribal and poor scholars in blatant ways and push them even beyond the peripheries of international law. The locational inequalities and corresponding disadvantages when superimposed with issues of gender, indigeneity, caste, and poverty, have rarely been considered “concern” of international law. It is imperative for the international law agents and actors to ask themselves: “Disadvantages are omnipresent, is international law too omnipresent?” And, in that sense, Bandung is a reminder and a call to international law to have pre-emptive frames of structural inequalities.
The political, legal and locational subversion of Bandung was revisited in 2023 during the 9th Biennial Conference of the Asian Society of International Law. Although that may not be considered spectacular given Bandung’s obviousness to the Asian locational choices’ pool, what would be ‘extra’ ordinary is when Bandungs, Lucknows, Chittagongs, Jaffnas, and Lahores will enter the international law locational choices’ pool.
Concluding remarks
Besides revealing and redressing the political, social, cultural, economic and epistemic injustices, international law (and its scholars) as an embodiment of emancipation, must advance decentering of centers and centering of peripheries locationally too. The financial incurring of conferences for the Global South, women, and minority groups is seen in the glimpse at the backstage fee-waiver applications and can rarely crawl up to the center-stage of international law scholarships.
Bandung, that had audience across the seas, is a reminder to look beyond the Euro-American stasis of international law for locational choices. Bandung is a remembrance that the questions of equality and justice are often moored to locations. Bandung’s locational symbolism reveals the pretense of universality of international law (and its agencies and actors) and calls for the subversion of the idealistic city status in international law.
Author
Swati Singh Parmar is an Assistant Professor in International Law at Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur, India.
