Cosmopolitan International Law: Bad for Developing Countries?

The Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School will host the following panel:

“Cosmopolitan International Law: Empowerment or Disempowerment of Developing Countries?”

The central paradigm of cosmopolitan international law is human rights. While the international human rights movement has traditionally understood itself as articulating the concerns of the weak and the oppressed, this panel will attempt to probe “the dark sides of virtue” focusing on recent critiques by Professor D. Kennedy and Professor B. Rajagopal. The aim of the panel is to facilitate a nuanced but rigorous debate on some of the ways in which human rights law might be considered ‘as much a part of the problem as the solution’ even when used with the best of intentions. We wish to focus on the possible power imbalances created by the efforts of human rights practitioners in the areas of advocacy, litigation, etc. On the basis of an analysis of international human rights law as both empowering and disempowering, panelists will attempt to identify strategies for its use as a viable tool for development, particularly in the non-Western world.

The debate will explore the ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ of using the frame of international human rights for the attainment of various normative ends particularly in the ‘the developing world.’

PLEASE ATTEND NUMEROUSLY!