Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialised Boundaries

By Mohsen al Attar and Claire Smith

While mainstream international legal scholarship has long treated race as a peripheral concern-or a historic injustice to be remembered but not redressed-this volume argues that racialisation is foundational to the discipline, underpinning its doctrines, epistemes, and interlocutors. Emancipating International Law explores the many ways racial hierarchy, systemic oppression, and global white supremacy shape international law. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, the collection moves beyond qualifying whether international law is racist to explore how racial hierarchies are embedded in its structures and continue to evolve through legal and institutional practice.

Divided into five sections, the book begins by situating international law's racialised boundaries within its colonial, capitalist, and chauvinist afterlives, exposing how white ignorance and race-thinking underpin legal norms, from sovereignty to jus cogens. It then examines racial stratification across legal institutions, including investment law, refugee law, and the Genocide Convention. The third section extends this critique to human rights, revealing the ways in which even an emancipatory paradigm can bolster racial injustices. The penultimate section unpacks racial hierarchies in disparate societies, including Brazil, India, and Japan, as well as the frontiers of nation-states. The volume concludes with a powerful discussion of the role of activism and alternative epistemologies in racial justice struggles, and the limits of international law's capacity for anti-racist transformation.

Aimed at scholars, practitioners, and students of international law, critical legal studies, and anti-colonial theory, this book advances an understanding of international law that is aimed at dismantling its racialised structures.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198935579
• ISBN13: 9780198935575
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 496 Pages