Bowring: What is Radical in 'Radical International Law'?

Bill Bowring (Birkbeck, Univ. of London - Law) has posted What is Radical in 'Radical International Law'? (Finnish Yearbook of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

In this article I explore some answers to the question whether there could or ought to be a radical international law, or even, more modestly, a radical approach to international law. Paavo Atiaho has referred to 'the left wing international law project.' My own answer to my investigations is that almost all 'critical' or 'radical' international law is firmly located in the academy, or the 'discipline' or the 'field' as it is often called. It is too often marked by eclecticism and the closely related pragmatism which traditionally emanates from the United States, just as British mainstream thinking is often termed 'empiricism.' I criticise the part of this large corpus of work which I have selected in some detail, on its own terms.In this article I will explore the reasons why the NAIL and even the TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) approaches, and David Kennedy’s curiously unpolitical critique, cannot provide a 'radical international law' in the sense intended by the call for papers to which this article is a response.