Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Pahuja: Letters from Bandung: Encounters with Another Inter-National Law

Sundhya Pahuja (Univ. of Melbourne - Law) has posted Letters from Bandung: Encounters with Another Inter-National Law (in Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri & Vasuki Nesiah eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:
Between 1921 and 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru was imprisoned many times for ‘crimes’ related to India’s struggle for independence. Cumulatively, he spent many years in prison. Whilst in prison for the second or third time, Nehru began to write a series of letters to his then ten year old daughter, Indira. This chapter takes those letters as a point of departure for reflecting on the political work of history-telling in international law, and on the ways in which the ‘people’ in the Third World may be called by their leaders into relation, with each other, and with the world. In consideration of these questions, this essay is speculative rather than biographical, reflective rather than historical. What I seek to do here is to tease out a juridical-political imaginary of a certain moment, which the reader may juxtapose with what is imagined to be possible now for international law for, in and of the Global South.