Beyond the Formalist Illusion

To teach international law, including international human rights law, from a critical perspective is to confront a foundational paradox immediately. The discipline routinely presents itself as a universal framework of justice, human rights, and global order. Yet, its very normative architecture remains deeply entangled with the colonial project, structural subordination, and patriarchal power. When we step into the classroom to teach this discipline, we are not merely transmitting a neutral body of black-letter rules and treaties; we are navigating an intensely curated archive of knowledge that has systematically marginalized alternative ways of understanding the world.

The Classroom as a Site of Power and Translation

For legal scholars and practitioners committed to human rights, the international law classroom must become a space where students feel empowered to challenge and transform. As someone born, raised and legally trained across the African continent, with subsequent advanced doctoral training in the United States and research affiliations shaping my socio-legal work, I carry an acute awareness of how the discipline’s foundational promises often diverge from its material realities. As I argued in Choice and Conscience: Lessons from South Africa for a Global Debate (PULP 2023), engaging with decolonial feminist legal theory and critical race frameworks is not an optional curricular “add-on,” but it is an epistemological necessity that compels students to interrogate whose voices count as law; whose suffering is formally recognized; and how legal methodologies either entrench or dismantle hierarchies.

Yet, bringing these frameworks into the contemporary university can feel daunting amid escalating political backlash. Recognizing these challenges can inspire educators to find innovative ways to interrogate demands for “neutrality” and to reaffirm their commitment to contextualized, politically aware teaching.

Grounded in the lived experiences of the Global Majority, this post examines the epistemic violence embedded in conventional legal education and the urgent need for a decolonial feminist pedagogy. Drawing on my scholarship and advocacy in gender equality and reproductive justice, I show how translating this framework into applied, socio-legal practice directly counters curricular narrowing in the classroom.

Grounding the Pedagogy: Critical Race, Feminist Legal Theory, and Socio-Legal Practice

In my own research and teaching, I reject the formalist illusion that law exists as a static, self-contained system of abstract dogmas. Instead, I approach law as a dynamic, deeply embedded socio-legal practice. Law is a living social artifact that shapes, and is shaped by, power dynamics, empirical realities, and historical injustices. When we merge a socio-legal lens with critical race and feminist legal theories, our analytical focus shifts decisively from state-centric, Eurocentric doctrines toward the lived, material realities of marginalized populations across the Global South.

Within this symposium’s focus on decolonial feminist legal pedagogy, the classroom serves as an essential site to interrogate how imperial histories continue to govern doctrinal international law. A decolonial feminist framework demands a fundamental re-evaluation of international law’s structural origins. In practice, this means centering the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, colonial conquest, and the violent extraction of critical minerals. Engaging contemporary scholarship on reparatory justice and post-colonial accountability — work I advance collaboratively with colleagues in Africa and across the African diaspora — the course exposes sovereignty not as an inherently neutral or liberating shield, but as an exclusionary legal construct historically denied to colonized peoples and weaponized to maintain racialized and gendered hierarchies.

Grounding this pedagogy requires bringing key areas of international human rights law that traditional curricula frequently relegate to the periphery. These areas include, first and foremost, gender equality and women’s rights, where students move beyond superficial statutory inclusion to interrogate how regional and international mechanisms, such as  the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol) and the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), can be mobilized to dismantle systemic patriarchal dominance.

Second, the inclusion of archival excavation and colonial architecture of law in curricula is of pivotal importance. Teaching students to read legal history as an imperial archive rather than a neutral progression enables them to understand the colonial roots of human rights law. Drawing on my archival and comparative work on the colonial architecture of exclusion and personal law exemptions, we examine how British colonial authorities in West Africa and the Caribbean deliberately institutionalized legal pluralism. By embedding personal law exemptions into constitutions, imperial administrations insulated family, marriage, and inheritance laws from non-discrimination standards, consigning women’s rights to subordinate customary spheres under the guise of “respecting tradition”. Unearthing these archival origins allows students to see contemporary constitutional carve-outs not as indigenous culture, but as deliberate colonial statecraft.

Third, attention is also drawn to reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Examining how global economic structures, criminalization of harmful practices, colonial penal codes, and modern aid conditionalities dictate body politics shifts the classroom conversation from abstract legal entitlements to concrete structural justice.

Fourth, intersectionality can be used as an indispensable diagnostic tool in class. Analyzing legal instruments by interrogating how race, age, gender, geography, and socioeconomic status intersect to determine an individual’s material access to justice highlights the exclusionary effect of international law. In researching the human rights of women and girls of African descent through an intersectional framework, this diagnostic approach exposes the layered exclusions that single-axis legal doctrines routinely fail to address.

In my work teaching at the University of Dayton and leading the International Law for Local Impact practice area at the Human Rights Center, I operationalize this through experiential learning that restructures the syllabus archive itself. Rather than relegating these critiques to a token single-week reading, doctrines of sovereignty, constitutionalism, law and politics are paired directly with student-led research jurisprudence mapping. Students engage decisions from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the ECOWAS Court of Justice, alongside community-led legislative reforms and activist resistance methodologies. In doing so, students learn that international law’s genuine normative evolution often happens beyond Western legislative and judicial capitals.

Ultimately, this framework insists that legal education must teach students to translate empirical data into policy, budgeting, and legislative reform. International law is only as valuable as its transformative material impact on grassroots communities.

The Violence of Absence: Epistemic Exclusion and Knowledge Production

What happens when universities sanitize or exclude these critical frameworks? The absence of decolonial feminist and critical race approaches does not produce an “objective” education. Instead, it perpetuates epistemic violence, and the erasure of subaltern knowledge systems, thereby distorting analysis and starving the discipline of vital insights.

When law faculties rely exclusively on traditional, Western legal canons, they reinforce a unidirectional epistemic flow: theory is manufactured in the Global North and merely exported as an applied case study to the Global South. This erasure starves the discipline of vital insights. Without critical frameworks, students graduate with blind spots. They are trained to treat international law as an inherently benevolent, colorblind, and gender-neutral enterprise. When faced with the manifest failures of international institutions to arrest mass atrocities, secure reproductive freedom, or redress climate devastation, they lack the structural vocabulary to understand why.

For students from marginalized backgrounds, this exclusion is profoundly alienating, signaling that their histories, communities, and lived realities lie outside the boundaries of “serious” international legal jurisprudence. Recognizing their experiences as vital to understanding law can foster a sense of belonging and validation.

The contemporary academic landscape presents pronounced challenges to this pedagogical work. Across higher education, escalating institutional pressures and legislative measures aimed at enforcing a prescribed curricular ‘neutrality’ risk creating a profound chilling effect. When legal curricula are subjected to external political pressures, faculty, particularly junior scholars and international researchers navigating complex institutional and immigration realities, face acute professional tensions between maintaining doctrinal completeness and conforming to risk-averse administrative mandates. Yet treating structural inequalities and imperial legal histories as mere ideological preferences ignores their status as verifiable historical and legal phenomena.

Law in Action: Empirical Evidence and Classroom Simulation

How, then, do we deliver rigorous, uncompromised international legal education in a constrained institutional climate? We do so through methodological precision: grounding the classroom in empirical socio-legal evidence and active, participatory practice. When legal instruction centers verifiable socio-legal data tracing how colonial penal codes, structural adjustment programs, or aid conditionalities correlate directly with contemporary health disparities and access to justice, structural inequality ceases to be an abstract ideological assertion. It emerges, as documented legal reality, that any competent practitioner must confront.

From this empirical base, I shift students from passive consumers of doctrine into active participants through simulation. I seek to engage them in the identification of means of implementation of international treaties. Students examine where treaty obligations break down domestically by mapping and translating international commitments into concrete protections for women and girls of African descent in collaboration with students and faculty from the University of the Bahamas.

Moreover, I encourage them to observe treaty body negotiations. By stepping into simulated sessions of regional expert bodies, such as the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and international treaty mechanisms like the UN Human Rights Council, students can debate instruments like the Draft International Covenant on the Right to Development, which involves negotiating legally binding state obligations while bridging across Global North-South divides.

I further encourage critiquing state compliance. Rather than parsing abstract appellate decisions, students review state party reports, draft general comments, and synthesize interventions on gender-based violence, child rights, and reproductive health. In responding directly to a state’s compliance record, students immediately confront the chasm between formal legal text and the material realities of enforcement.

This decentering also requires shifting our pedagogical points of reference. Connecting the classroom directly to transnational networks, grassroots organizers, and human rights defenders disrupts Eurocentric legal hegemonies. It teaches students to look for international law’s vital development not in distant international courtrooms, but in the communities where everyday people organize, forge intergenerational solidarity, and draft transformative community-led reforms. Building sustained alliances between academic classrooms, civil society organizations, and international mechanisms breathes vital air into otherwise constrained institutional spaces.

Conclusion

Teaching international law through critical, decolonial feminist frameworks is vital precisely because it insists on doctrinal and historical accuracy. The pressure toward curating away difficult truths under the rubric of neutrality reflects an acute discomfort with legal education that pierces the formalist illusions of global power. Our responsibility to our students, the discipline, and the communities affected by international law requires us to reject this historical omission. By treating international law as a social practice – demystifying distant legal instruments to make them actionable tools for local movements – we transform the classroom into a site of translation and accountability. Grounded in empirical analysis, treaty-body simulations, and transnational solidarity, this pedagogy prepares students not simply to memorize legal doctrines in a vacuum, but to activate them in service of social justice.