Tan, Celine (2004) Editorial. Law, Social Justice and Global Development, 2 . doi:10.2316/Journal.201.2014.2.201-0001

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Abstract

This second issue of 2004 (2) comes belatedly at the start of the new year of 2005 due to unforeseen technical difficulties with our transition to our new website. The new URL address for our journal is: http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd We hope you will be pleased with our new layout which encompasses much of our old design but looks and feels more streamlined. The new site for the Law, Social Justice and Global Development (LGD) journal uses Sitebuilder, an online editing software developed by the E-Lab team at the University of Warwick and it is hoped that this more user-friendly editing tool will enable the LGD to function more effectively as an Internet-based academic journal. The LGD and our sister journal the Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) remain free-to-access for all users and we hope to welcome another new journal to our stable very soon (watch this space).

The 2004 (2) issue of the LGD kicks off with Sebastian De Brennan’s critique of what he views as the polarising discourse prevailing in international legal theory today, as personified in the ‘Savage-Victim-Saviour’ metaphor that draws a dichotomy in human rights discourse between the liberal western state and the draconian non-west and which reduces the construction of international human rights regime into a means by which the west disciplines and rehabilitates the non-west. De Brennan argues that this approach to human rights fails to account for the universalism of the human rights corpus nor does it ‘accurately capture the diversity intrinsic to the human rights enterprise’ (p 7). While not dismissing the polarisation that exists in international law today - in the context of ‘North/South, East/West, EU/Non-EU’ divisions -De Brennan argues that critical scholarship on international human rights law must go beyond a simplistic and dichotomous construction of the postcolonial international legal order that ignores the evolutionary nature of human rights and the shifting nature of international law of states. An international law approach premised on the violence of colonial legal relations is at danger of itself falling into the trap of what De Brennan terms ‘reverse Orientalism’ and essentialist conceptions of the postcolonial nation state. This construction cannot address the multiplicity of voices that employ the conceptual and operational instrumentality of the human rights regime today, for example, in the realm of indigenous peoples’ rights where ‘[f]rustrations at working within the nation state have led some indigenous communities towards establishing international linkages and relations with other indigenous communities’ (p 8).

Item Type:	Journal Item
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law
Journal or Publication Title:	Law, Social Justice and Global Development
Publisher:	Electronic Law Journals Project
ISSN:	1467-0437
Official Date:	2004
Dates:	Date Event 2004 Published
Volume:	2
DOI:	10.2316/Journal.201.2014.2.201-0001
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)

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