Roundtable: Locating Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law

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 order—Palestine remains a quintessential site of ongoing settler colonialism and apartheid. This roundtable brings together scholars of Palestine and international law in discussion about the place of Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship. Among other queries, it asks: Where and how is Palestine present and absent in TWAIL scholarship? How has international law been complicit in histories and legacies of settler colonization? What role has the UN played in perpetuating the settler colonization of Palestine?