Sociology of Law Research Seminars - A Radical Turn in International Law and Development? Corporations, States and Imperial Governance

Radha D’Souza

Doctor of Geography and Law, Westminster Law School, University of Westminster

This paper describes how orthodoxy in the field of Law and Development (L&D), as a field of knowledge, renders contemporary imperial and neo-colonial governance practices opaque. Through the metaphor of the disciplinary ‘picket fence,’ and engagement with three nodes of tension from colonial governance reproduced today, L&D’s limited and partial production of knowledge on governance by two key actors - transnational corporations and imperial states – is revealed. This paper argues for a new, more explicitly critical, trajectory of research that foregrounds the corporation-nation governance relationship within a more radical international Law & Development (ILD) field.

Radha D’Souza is a critical scholar, social justice activist, barrister and writer, from India. She is Professor of Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster.  Radha’s research and writing focuses on the Global South, law colonialism and neo-colonialism, history of imperialism in South Asia, and comparative theory and philosophy.  She has written and published extensively on a range of subjects and issues concerning social and global justice. Her recent book What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto, 2018) maps the transformations in the regime of international rights to the transformations in post-World War imperialism. She has written on activism and the security state, anti-colonial movements in South Asia, and on militarisation and ethno-national conflicts in South Asia. Her most recent article ‘Law and Development: From ‘company raj’ to UN System via indirect rule’ examines how legal principles of colonial governance under the British Empire have come to be elevated as international law.

This is a digital seminar. Follow this link at 14:00 (UTC+1) on March 31 to join.