From Poverty and Development to People’s International Law

Poverty is the direct consequence of property accumulation masked by the rhetoric of growth, development, and shared prosperity. International law has played a decisive role in the design of this schema, as a powerful engine for the transformation of commons into capital. This chapter undresses international law, exposing it as a depoliticised technology that has served as a powerful transnational vehicle to globalise exploitive practices of humans and commons. The chapter posits that nothing less than a critique of the phenomenology of international law and its substitution with a commons-based approach to institutions will allow the poor to recover. From there this work presents the commons alternative, a turning away from the logic of domination and consumption, and a repatriation of the law to sovereign communities and the conditions under which a new and legitimate people’s international law can emerge.

Commons · International law · Law and economics · Nothing · Political science · Poverty · Prosperity · Rhetoric · Sociology · Sovereignty · Treaty · Corporate Law and Human Rights · Human Rights and Development · International Law and Human Rights · Law