Teaching International Law as World-Making

In the spring of 2024, I participated in a series of teach-outs on international law and Palestine at the student encampments that spread across university campuses in the United Kingdom and beyond, demanding that universities divest from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Teaching and learning in spaces occupied and repurposed by students in the service of liberation – both in and against the university –  prompted me to reflect more critically on my role as a legal scholar and educator within a Western institution. I use “Western” here not as a straightforward geographical category, but to describe institutions situated within, and shaped by, European imperial and colonial histories and the epistemic traditions they have produced and sustained.

That critical reflection became all the more necessary as universities sought to dismantle the encampments and intimidate the students involved, shattering any illusion of universities as politically neutral institutions standing outside the worlds they study. Their response made clear that universities are deeply implicated in producing and reproducing the political and legal orders within which they operate. Within this context, teaching cannot be understood as a politically neutral act.

This raises important questions for educators across the sector but perhaps carries particular urgency for those of us teaching international law. As international law became one of the principal languages through which the Palestinian cause was articulated, contested, and imagined, it became increasingly necessary to ask what responsibilities we bear as educators teaching it from within institutions that are themselves entangled in the struggles our students are seeking to understand and transform.  Much of my scholarship has sought to move beyond asking what international law says to examining what it does. Rather than treating law as a framework that simply regulates a pre-existing political reality, I have been invested in how international law participates in producing the worlds it claims merely to govern. The encampments compelled me to centre those questions in the classroom. If international law is a form of world-making – that is, if we reject the idea of law as a neutral framework operating upon a pre-existing social and political world, and instead understand legal categories as constituting subjects, relations, institutions, and political possibilities – what are the stakes and responsibilities involved in teaching it?

Questioning Disciplinary Authority

Since the encampments, I have found myself having more open conversations with colleagues and comrades teaching across different Western law schools about curriculum design, particularly in relation to mandatory and introductory law courses. One thing that repeatedly emerged from these conversations was a shared experience of encountering the view that such courses should focus on the “real law”, “the foundations”, or “the basics”, by which is generally meant core legal principles, doctrines, and institutions. Feminist, decolonial, Marxist, and other critical approaches could come later, towards the end of the course or at the close of individual seminars, if time permitted. Perhaps they could be included as further reading for those interested. The underlying assumption is that these approaches, these worldviews, may enrich students’ understanding of international law, but they are not considered foundational to it.

The more I reflect on these conversations, the more I come to see them as revealing the disciplinary and disciplining practices through which international law (and other fields of law) reproduces particular forms of knowledge, legitimacy, and authority. As educators, we are implicated in those practices and in the reproduction of that authority, requiring us to rethink the assumptions that organise the legal education we offer in the first place. If doctrine is presented as neutral, universal, and self-contained, while the histories of empire, patriarchy, and capitalism appear only as supplementary critiques, students are encouraged to understand these structures as external to the discipline rather than constitutive of it.

The distinction between “real law” and critique is therefore not simply a pedagogical choice, nor is it a neutral one. It works to shape what counts as legal knowledge, who is authorised to produce it, and whose epistemologies and experiences are centred, relegated to the margins, or excluded altogether. Critical legal scholarship has long challenged these forms of epistemic hierarchy and erasure, demonstrating that structures of power and domination are not external contexts against which international law operates but are constitutive of the international legal order itself, and therefore of the discipline (see, for example, Anghie, Tzouvala, and Kapur). Treating them as supplementary not only narrows the curriculum but also reproduces the fiction that international law exists independently of the political projects through which it has been constituted and continues to operate.

Importantly, the consequences of these disciplinary practices are not experienced equally. They are often felt most acutely by early-career scholars, particularly those on precarious contracts, and by women and racialised and other marginalised colleagues whose authority in and outside the classroom, and whose curricular choices are more readily questioned because they are presumed to speak from a particular political position, while others continue to be treated as though they speak from a position of universality. The expectation that some scholars must justify their pedagogical choices as political, while others are permitted to present theirs as neutral, is itself one of the ways disciplinary authority is reproduced. Taking responsibility for the politics of teaching therefore also requires recognising that the conditions under which different scholars teach, and the authority they are afforded to shape the curriculum and the discipline, are profoundly unequal.

None of this is, of course, an argument against teaching doctrine. Students must learn and master the legal concepts that structure international legal argument. My argument is rather about how it should be taught. It is an argument against separating the teaching of doctrine from critique, and for taking critique as a condition for understanding what international law is and how it operates.

The teaching of recognition and statehood provides a helpful illustration, particularly at a time when Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people has shattered any pretence of a viable two-state solution. In November 2024, I was invited to reflect on how to teach recognition at a public event at a UK university, given that this topic forms part of most introductory international law courses. I began by reminding the audience of what most students and teachers of international law already know: that recognition is often introduced as a foundational doctrinal topic, organised around the four criteria for statehood set out in the Montevideo Convention and the constitutive and declaratory theories of recognition, before being situated within contemporary debates over contexts such as Palestine. Underlying these discussions is often an explicit or implicit assumption that statehood marks full inclusion and equality within the international community, and that once recognised, international law treats states as sovereign, independent, and equal. What is often missing from this, however, is an account of the political and historical conditions through which these concepts have developed and continue to structure power and hierarchy today.

Approaching recognition solely as a technical question about statehood leaves little room to ask how international law came to determine whose political existence counts in the first place. A pedagogy attentive to our political responsibilities invites students to understand recognition as a practice through which international law has organised political community, legitimised some claims to sovereignty while denying others, and participated in the production and maintenance of a colonial international order.

Palestine makes this especially clear. As the Palestinian people are being killed and their land destroyed, it is neither enough nor appropriate to ask only whether Palestine satisfies the legal criteria for statehood or to stage debates over whether it is, or should be, recognised as a state based on competing theories of recognition. Students should be encouraged to ask why and how recognition has become the dominant language through which Palestinian political existence is made legible. What possibilities does recognition open, and what forms of political imagination does it foreclose? What does it mean to teach students that justice is to be pursued through the acquisition of legal status within an international legal order that is itself implicated in sustaining colonial relations?

From this we see that teaching international law cannot be understood as a neutral exercise in transmitting legal knowledge. If students encounter sovereignty without colonialism, recognition without the realities of dispossession, legal personality without questions of race and gender, or the law governing the use of force without the histories of imperial violence that shaped it, they are not simply learning doctrine. They are being introduced to a particular account of international law that presents its categories as abstract and universal, obscuring the political histories through which they have emerged.

Towards Politically Responsible Pedagogies

One of the questions students frequently ask me while learning critical approaches to international law is whether it is worthwhile, or even responsible, to engage with international law at all if it is so deeply implicated in colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and other structures of domination. These are difficult questions to sit with, particularly given that many students come to international law hoping to find a language of justice. Part of our pedagogical responsibility, therefore, is to hold space for the confusion or disappointment that such encounters may produce while also guiding students to consider alternative paths in the pursuit of political transformation.

Teaching the limits and violence of international law is therefore not an invitation to despair but to think more expansively about justice itself. International law is one site of political struggle, but it has never been the only one. Indigenous resistance, feminist organising, abolitionist movements, anti-colonial struggles, and countless other forms of collective action remind us that transformative politics has never depended exclusively on legal recognition or legal reform. A pedagogy attentive to those struggles does not simply teach students how to inhabit the existing legal order; it must also invite them to imagine how it might be transformed or exceeded.

I often think back to the student encampments that prompted these reflections as pedagogical interventions in their own right. They invited those of us teaching and learning within universities to confront forms of knowledge that exceeded the disciplinary boundaries through which we are taught to understand the world. They reminded us that a politically responsible pedagogy requires more than diversifying reading lists or reserving critique for the final weeks of a module. It requires rethinking the stories we tell about international law from the outset and equipping students to understand legal argument as one mode of political practice rather than as a neutral language standing outside politics. Teaching students how to master the art of legal argument without also being honest about the violent histories that shape it, and the political stakes of those arguments, risks reproducing the epistemic hierarchies that structure international law rather than enabling students to interrogate them.

The encampments also reminded us that universities are not simply places where knowledge is transmitted but institutions in which knowledge, authority, and political possibility are continually contested. The international law classroom is no exception. If we understand international law as a technology of world-making, then teaching it also shapes how our worlds are understood and possibly even transformed. Our responsibility as educators is therefore not only to equip students to navigate the concepts and practices of international law, but also to recognise its limits and imagine, and struggle for, liberatory futures beyond the existing legal order.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to our students. I have learned so much from you, not least how to become a better teacher. I am also deeply grateful to Dr Francesco Amoruso for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this, and for our countless conversations about Palestine, politics, and pedagogy. I continue to learn from you every day.