Vasuki Nesiah
Biographic Data
| ID | 1317805 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vasuki Nesiah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vasuki |
| FAMILY NAME | Nesiah |
| SIGNATURE | NESIAH V |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York Law School |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
‘Re-enchanting the World’
This chapter highlights feminist critiques of liberal theories of international law in relation to three arenas of global law and policy: decolonization, human rights, and development. These challenges have accreted into new ways of envisioning the history of international law, the structure of the world it inhabits, and the political subjectivities it interpolates into being. Thus re-enchanting the world has entailed a search for alternative pol…
Unfinished
This essay examines the unfinished as both a diagnostic and a tactic for how we engage with the terrain of international criminal law (ICL). The diagnostic: recognizing that justice struggles against a five-hundred-year racial-capitalist world order are unfinished and ongoing. The tactic: seeking opportunities for strategically interrupting ICL procedures to keep the ends of justice an open question. In articulating this notion of the unfinished,…
After Gaza
Transitional Justice and Development
In the post-Cold War period, in societies and spaces deemed conflict zones, in a moment deemed ‘the end of history’, the reigning logics of the human rights and development fields develop a symbiotic relationship captured in the liberal internationalist discourse of good governance. Good governance in conflict zones referenced the transitional justice processes delivering stability and closure, and the institutional reform and economic restructur…
Roundtable
The Zionist settler colonization of Palestine was, alongside apartheid in South Africa, one of the paradigmatic global issues that animated discussions among Global South anti-colonial scholars and leaders in the Bandung–Tricontinental era of the 1950s–1970s. While processes of formal decolonization have since played out across most of the Global South—notwithstanding the inequalities and violence of the postcolonial state and the neocolonial ord…
Slavery's Afterlives
In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal archite…
Human shields, human heresies
Decolonial CIL
In advancing a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) analysis of customary international law (CIL) and its dominant doctrinal conceits, B.S. Chimni shows how the jurisprudence of custom has been co-constitutive with colonization and capitalism. He contends that CIL's most fundamental assumption-the "supposed distinction between 'formal' and 'material' sources of CIL"-privileges Western states while legitimizing CIL as a neutral and …
Bandung, Global History, and International Law
In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imaginati…
Newer is Truer
To critical scholars of international law, the demands of the newly independent states represented at the Bandung Conference can appear somewhat less than radical. If analysed not only in terms of their substance but also in terms of their (narrative) form, however, these demands take on a far more revolutionary aspect. This chapter mobilises Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to focus on the relationship between time and space, as constructed b…
Theories of Transitional Justice
This chapter examines the utopias called forth by the marriage of human rights accountability mechanisms on the one hand, and, on the other, arguments about the practical significance of these initiatives as preconditions for development, democracy, and political society. Transitional justice is seen to marry the ethical charge of the human rights field’s march against impunity, with an instrumental potential facilitating transition from the rule…
Local Ownership of Global Governance
Arguments for local ownership are often associated with a language and modality for resistance to a global order, and invocations of the local are often seen as a productive route for Third World Approaches to International Law. However, the core argument of this article is that the local is also constituted globally. Accordingly, the terrain of resistance and third world approaches has become much more complicated. The International Criminal Cou…
Human Shields/Human Crosshairs
The nomenclature of human shields did not exist in 19 th century colonialism, but one can find its proxies in the debates regarding the principles of distinction and proportionality when defining legitimate targets. Its specters appeared in the discussions weighing human life and moderating warfare, revealing how the imperatives of colonial conquest inflected “ humanitarian reason ” and its epistemic and political investments. The colonized terri…
Nathaniel Berman. Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law
This quotation lends a title to the third chapter, But the Alternative is Despair, that in some ways captures the core compulsion of Nathaniel Berman's book, Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law. Warding off despair through a ground clearing operation for a more imaginative and hopeful future seems to fuel Berman's own passions in the series of dazzling readings of international legal history that make up this b…
Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Crisis
Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Crisis Vasuki Nesiah (bio) Malathi de Alwis and Eva-Lotta Hedman's Tsunami in a Time of War: Aid, Activism, and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka and Aceh (Colombo: ICES, 2009) From 1967 to 1970 the war catalyzed by the secession of the republic of Biafra became the stage for a massive transnational humanitarian relief effort. These efforts not only brought "aid" to the Biafrans, but also initiated a new role on the…
Fault Lines of International Legitimacy
Fault Lines of International Legitimacy deals with the following questions: What are the features and functions of legitimacy in the international realm? How does international legitimacy, as exemplified in particular by multilateral norms, organizations, and policies, change over time? What role does the international distribution of power and its evolution have in the establishment and transformation of legitimacy paradigms? To what extent do d…
Resistance in the age of empire
What is the Zeitgeist of resistance in the present moment-the age of empire? This paper examines key contemporary interventions that invoke international norms to temper and rein in intervention and occupation. Even as they signal dissent, the paper concludes that these interventions turn away from the historical, deny ideological conflict and fail a counter-hegemonic politics. They return to an ahistorical domain of international law and humanis…
Placing International Law
Focusing particularly on the moment of decolonization, in this article I look at the paradoxes attending the endurance of the statist framework in conceptualizing territorial self-determination as well as in curtailing it. A range of protagonists in the decolonization drama, from the departing colonial powers to Third World nationalists to international jurists, have all clung to the modern nation-state as the means through which self-determinati…
Overcoming tensions between family and judicial procedures
Les disparitions ont des effets dévastateurs sur les familles des victimes. Le traumatisme est exacerbé lorsque les besoins qu'engendre la situation sont négligés ou niés. Le CICR recense trois catégories de besoins: information, responsabilité et reconnaissance. Cet article examine les mécanismes qui couvrent ces trois catégories en détail, et formule des recommandations à l'intention des acteurs étatiques, non étatiques et internationaux.Les fa…
Newer is Truer
To critical scholars of international law, the demands of the newly independent states represented at the Bandung Conference can appear somewhat less than radical. If analysed not only in terms of their substance but also in terms of their (narrative) form, however, these demands take on a far more revolutionary aspect. This chapter mobilises Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to focus on the relationship between time and space, as constructed b…
Roundtable
The Zionist settler colonization of Palestine was, alongside apartheid in South Africa, one of the paradigmatic global issues that animated discussions among Global South anti-colonial scholars and leaders in the Bandung–Tricontinental era of the 1950s–1970s. While processes of formal decolonization have since played out across most of the Global South—notwithstanding the inequalities and violence of the postcolonial state and the neocolonial ord…
Resistance in the age of empire
What is the Zeitgeist of resistance in the present moment-the age of empire? This paper examines key contemporary interventions that invoke international norms to temper and rein in intervention and occupation. Even as they signal dissent, the paper concludes that these interventions turn away from the historical, deny ideological conflict and fail a counter-hegemonic politics. They return to an ahistorical domain of international law and humanis…
Decolonial CIL
In advancing a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) analysis of customary international law (CIL) and its dominant doctrinal conceits, B.S. Chimni shows how the jurisprudence of custom has been co-constitutive with colonization and capitalism. He contends that CIL's most fundamental assumption-the "supposed distinction between 'formal' and 'material' sources of CIL"-privileges Western states while legitimizing CIL as a neutral and …
Local Ownership of Global Governance
Arguments for local ownership are often associated with a language and modality for resistance to a global order, and invocations of the local are often seen as a productive route for Third World Approaches to International Law. However, the core argument of this article is that the local is also constituted globally. Accordingly, the terrain of resistance and third world approaches has become much more complicated. The International Criminal Cou…
Placing International Law
Focusing particularly on the moment of decolonization, in this article I look at the paradoxes attending the endurance of the statist framework in conceptualizing territorial self-determination as well as in curtailing it. A range of protagonists in the decolonization drama, from the departing colonial powers to Third World nationalists to international jurists, have all clung to the modern nation-state as the means through which self-determinati…
Slavery's Afterlives
In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal archite…
Human Shields/Human Crosshairs
The nomenclature of human shields did not exist in 19 th century colonialism, but one can find its proxies in the debates regarding the principles of distinction and proportionality when defining legitimate targets. Its specters appeared in the discussions weighing human life and moderating warfare, revealing how the imperatives of colonial conquest inflected “ humanitarian reason ” and its epistemic and political investments. The colonized terri…
Overcoming tensions between family and judicial procedures
Les disparitions ont des effets dévastateurs sur les familles des victimes. Le traumatisme est exacerbé lorsque les besoins qu'engendre la situation sont négligés ou niés. Le CICR recense trois catégories de besoins: information, responsabilité et reconnaissance. Cet article examine les mécanismes qui couvrent ces trois catégories en détail, et formule des recommandations à l'intention des acteurs étatiques, non étatiques et internationaux.Les fa…
Placing International Law
Focusing particularly on the moment of decolonization, in this article I look at the paradoxes attending the endurance of the statist framework in conceptualizing territorial self-determination as well as in curtailing it. A range of protagonists in the decolonization drama, from the departing colonial powers to Third World nationalists to international jurists, have all clung to the modern nation-state as the means through which self-determinati…
Resistance in the age of empire
What is the Zeitgeist of resistance in the present moment-the age of empire? This paper examines key contemporary interventions that invoke international norms to temper and rein in intervention and occupation. Even as they signal dissent, the paper concludes that these interventions turn away from the historical, deny ideological conflict and fail a counter-hegemonic politics. They return to an ahistorical domain of international law and humanis…
Fault Lines of International Legitimacy
Fault Lines of International Legitimacy deals with the following questions: What are the features and functions of legitimacy in the international realm? How does international legitimacy, as exemplified in particular by multilateral norms, organizations, and policies, change over time? What role does the international distribution of power and its evolution have in the establishment and transformation of legitimacy paradigms? To what extent do d…
Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Crisis
Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Crisis Vasuki Nesiah (bio) Malathi de Alwis and Eva-Lotta Hedman's Tsunami in a Time of War: Aid, Activism, and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka and Aceh (Colombo: ICES, 2009) From 1967 to 1970 the war catalyzed by the secession of the republic of Biafra became the stage for a massive transnational humanitarian relief effort. These efforts not only brought "aid" to the Biafrans, but also initiated a new role on the…
Nathaniel Berman. Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law
This quotation lends a title to the third chapter, But the Alternative is Despair, that in some ways captures the core compulsion of Nathaniel Berman's book, Passion and Ambivalence. Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law. Warding off despair through a ground clearing operation for a more imaginative and hopeful future seems to fuel Berman's own passions in the series of dazzling readings of international legal history that make up this b…
Theories of Transitional Justice
This chapter examines the utopias called forth by the marriage of human rights accountability mechanisms on the one hand, and, on the other, arguments about the practical significance of these initiatives as preconditions for development, democracy, and political society. Transitional justice is seen to marry the ethical charge of the human rights field’s march against impunity, with an instrumental potential facilitating transition from the rule…
Local Ownership of Global Governance
Arguments for local ownership are often associated with a language and modality for resistance to a global order, and invocations of the local are often seen as a productive route for Third World Approaches to International Law. However, the core argument of this article is that the local is also constituted globally. Accordingly, the terrain of resistance and third world approaches has become much more complicated. The International Criminal Cou…
Human Shields/Human Crosshairs
The nomenclature of human shields did not exist in 19 th century colonialism, but one can find its proxies in the debates regarding the principles of distinction and proportionality when defining legitimate targets. Its specters appeared in the discussions weighing human life and moderating warfare, revealing how the imperatives of colonial conquest inflected “ humanitarian reason ” and its epistemic and political investments. The colonized terri…
Bandung, Global History, and International Law
In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imaginati…
Newer is Truer
To critical scholars of international law, the demands of the newly independent states represented at the Bandung Conference can appear somewhat less than radical. If analysed not only in terms of their substance but also in terms of their (narrative) form, however, these demands take on a far more revolutionary aspect. This chapter mobilises Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to focus on the relationship between time and space, as constructed b…
Decolonial CIL
In advancing a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) analysis of customary international law (CIL) and its dominant doctrinal conceits, B.S. Chimni shows how the jurisprudence of custom has been co-constitutive with colonization and capitalism. He contends that CIL's most fundamental assumption-the "supposed distinction between 'formal' and 'material' sources of CIL"-privileges Western states while legitimizing CIL as a neutral and …
Human shields, human heresies
Transitional Justice and Development
In the post-Cold War period, in societies and spaces deemed conflict zones, in a moment deemed ‘the end of history’, the reigning logics of the human rights and development fields develop a symbiotic relationship captured in the liberal internationalist discourse of good governance. Good governance in conflict zones referenced the transitional justice processes delivering stability and closure, and the institutional reform and economic restructur…
Roundtable
The Zionist settler colonization of Palestine was, alongside apartheid in South Africa, one of the paradigmatic global issues that animated discussions among Global South anti-colonial scholars and leaders in the Bandung–Tricontinental era of the 1950s–1970s. While processes of formal decolonization have since played out across most of the Global South—notwithstanding the inequalities and violence of the postcolonial state and the neocolonial ord…
Slavery's Afterlives
In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal archite…
‘Re-enchanting the World’
This chapter highlights feminist critiques of liberal theories of international law in relation to three arenas of global law and policy: decolonization, human rights, and development. These challenges have accreted into new ways of envisioning the history of international law, the structure of the world it inhabits, and the political subjectivities it interpolates into being. Thus re-enchanting the world has entailed a search for alternative pol…
Unfinished
This essay examines the unfinished as both a diagnostic and a tactic for how we engage with the terrain of international criminal law (ICL). The diagnostic: recognizing that justice struggles against a five-hundred-year racial-capitalist world order are unfinished and ongoing. The tactic: seeking opportunities for strategically interrupting ICL procedures to keep the ends of justice an open question. In articulating this notion of the unfinished,…
After Gaza
Political science (15 works) · Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · History (5 works) · International Law and Human Rights (5 works)