Introduction: International Law and Inequalities
| DOI | 10.1093/ejil/chac012 |
| Date | 05 June 2022 |
| Pages | 11-14 |
| Year | 2022 |
| Published By | Oxford University Press |
Equality is both a premise and a promise (or at least much lip service is paid to such) of today’s international law. Customary international law and instruments such as the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other foundational treaties of the multilateral system are premised on the equality of states, the right to self-determination and the fundamental equality of human beings. With the era of decolonization, international law also became a battleground for material equality.1 In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, (economic in-)equality once again entered the limelight in a number of disciplines, not as a premise or promise but as a challenge. In the field of international law, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship had already been pushing equality to the centre of attention. There is good reason indeed to subject the relationship between international law and (in)equality to critical interrogation.
In September 2019, the pre-COVID era, we therefore issued a call for papers in which we invited submissions for a Symposium reflecting on the ways that international law – its practice and scholarship – relates to inequalities.2 We chose the plural – inequalities – as we did not want to narrow the Symposium’s scope to particular forms or actualizations of inequality. As examples we mentioned phenomena as diverse as inequality in access to, or enjoyment of, public resources; the state’s duties to ensure equalities of opportunity regardless of, among others, gender, religion, nationality, birth; North/South disparities and distribution among states and inequality in countries with affluent or weaker economies. We also raised the issue of inequalities in the external relationships of states with other actors (state and non-state) in the international system, as enduring legacies of colonialism and in post-conflict peacebuilding; as ongoing asymmetries in the efforts to achieve accountability and international justice for victims of internationally wrongful acts; as well as through contested modes of governance of the world’s environment, global commons and natural resources.
We invited contributions that would conceptualize and problematize the notion of inequality and that would examine its doctrinal significance and its usefulness and appropriateness as an analytical concept or as a common concern in international law. We further called for papers that would address questions regarding empirical, quantitative and qualitative assessments of inequality within and across societies and states and that would assess international law and institutions as...
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