Resistance and Change in Form and Content of International Law: A Third World Perspective on Commodity Form Theory of International Law

Year 2024, , 153 - 170, 12.06.2024

Muhammed Azeem

https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.1496712

Abstract

Can Marxists, especially in the Third World, use international law for progressive social change? Responding
to the Soviet Union's context and its jurisprudential challenges in constructing socialism, Pashukanis's
seminal work on commodity form theory is nihilistic, assuming the very nature of form of international
law as bourgeois with limited possibilities of radical change as its new content. European Marxism, on the
other hand, in its context of revolutionary defeat and consequent postmodernist pessimism of cultural
Marxism, either relies on Pashukanis's nihilistic position or a pragmatist and realist posture, insisting on
staying within the law's bourgeois form and being content with social democracy. As opposed to this,
Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars, while exploring the imperialist nature of
international law and representing one variant of Third World Marxism, have been more optimistic, wanting
to use international law to restrain and shield against powerful Western states, i.e., they believe that the
content of Third World resistance can change the form of international law. This article deconstructs this
class “content” of international law in the understanding of TWAIL and shows the postcolonial Third World
states, and even in the yet to be independent states, were dominated by their dependent local elite, which
had compromised by the ex-colonizers and had started blocking radical structural changes in Third World.
Soon, the target of imperialism and the Third World elite became radical movements in the Third World,
and this struggle of the marginalized shaped international law. Therefore, relying on the radical tradition
of Third World Marxism and taking the right of self-determination as an example, this article argues that
both the content and form of international law were simultaneously used, subverted, and changed in a
dialectical and dynamic way by the resistance of the people of the Third World.

Keywords

resistance, right of self-determination, Third World Marxism, Western marxism, Soviet Official Marxism

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