Recovering the Radical Tradition in the International Legal History of Decolonisation

Abstract Despite growing interest in the international legal history of decolonisation, significant elisions remain. Through a ‘symptomatic reading’ of recent engagements with that history, this article argues that such work contributes to an erasure of the Marxist tradition in the history of the Third World movement. It argues that Marxism and a Marxist theory of imperialism were important influences on anti-colonial political thought and practice, while also shaping radical Third World lawyers’ attitudes towards the relationship between international law and imperialism and the uses and limits of the former in challenging the latter. Against the erasure of this tradition, the article calls for a recovery of silenced histories of radicalism and anti-imperial thought and of a tradition that still offers resources for an emancipatory politics grounded in a critique of international law, imperialism and global capitalism.