In This Issue

This issue, and this Volume, open with the EJIL Foreword by Antony Anghie. Anghie walks us through the long march of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship and offers a sweeping, systematic, and personal account of TWAIL’s evolution and its restoration and rethinking of international law. Looking towards the future, Anghie argues that TWAIL concerns not only the Third World but aims at addressing historical, present, and new forms of inequality and suffering in the world, with the goal of achieving global solidarity and justice.  

In our Articles section, Anne Saab contributes a critique of the discourse of fear invoked in international human rights law to frame climate change. While fearful representations of climate change are justified, Saab argues that such discourses have the adverse effects of generating fatigue and denialism and concealing questions about agency and responsibility.

In the next section, we commence a year-long Symposium, titled ‘Re-Theorizing International Organizations Law’. This Symposium, convened by Devika Hovell, Jan Klabbers and Guy Fiti Sinclair, is a sequel to the Symposium on Theorizing International Organizations Law, published in EJIL Issue 31:2 in 2020. As the call for papers at the origins of the present symposium reveals, the editors take up the challenge to bring to light reconsiderations, hidden gems and new perspectives in international organizations law. Following the introduction by the organizers, the first instalment of the Symposium contains two articles. The first one, by Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, critically explores the legacy of Anne-Marie Leroy at the World Bank. Van Den Meerssche identifies a paradigm shift of professional practices of World Bank lawyers instilled by Leroy, a shift from concerns over legality and accountability to informed risk-taking. He argues that the new mode of lawyering driven by the ‘risk appetite’ deformalizes international organizations law.

The second article in this Symposium is a contribution by Fernando Lusa Bordin, focusing on Finn Seyersted. Seyersted’s work is commonly cited in international organizations law literature but mostly in a pro forma manner. Revisiting Seyersted’s contribution and legacy, Bordin shows that Seyersted’s ‘objective theory’ has been largely vindicated in practice and explains the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of Seyersted’s work that have contributed to his limited influence.

Our Roaming Charges photograph in this issue takes us to a wall in Singapore, suggesting that there are as many kinds of fashion as there are ‘contemporary women’.

The issue continues with the rubric A Fresh Look at Old Cases. Sarah Lattanzi zooms in on the Commission v. the United Kingdom case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and analyses the CJEU’s engagement with the travaux préparatoires of the Euratom Treaty. Delving into the treaty archive, Lattanzi shows that while the CJEU’s reconstruction of the drafting history is incomplete, the Court is innovative in treating the travaux as offering evidence to guide treaty interpretation rather than presenting clear outcomes of interpretation.

The last section in this issue is dedicated to the European Society of International Law (ESIL), reflecting the special, collaborative relationship between ESIL and EJIL. This ESIL Corner focuses on the Society’s 17th Annual Conference, dedicated to ‘In/Exclusiveness of International Law’, convened in Utrecht, in September 2022. Organizers Seline Trevisanut, Machiko Kanetake, and Cedric Ryngaert reflect on the organizational process, the choice of the theme, and the outcome of the conference. Tendayi Achiume and Namira Negm’s remarks stem from, respectively, the inaugural and concluding panels. The section concludes with Alfred Soons’s speech at the welcome reception, which connects the venue with the theme of the conference.

The Last Page resonates with some aspects of the opening article, the Foreword, with a poem by the Nobel-winning Indian author, Rabindranath Tagore, who describes his hope of freedom for his country. ‘Freedom from fear’, he exhorts, ‘is the freedom I claim for you my motherland!’