The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development

Abstract The intertwined relationship between ‘development’, ‘law’, and the ‘international’ is rooted deeply in the formation of the contemporary world. Since the end of the Second World War, ‘international law’ and ‘international development’ have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which competing aspirations about a better world are articulated and put into practice, especially in terms of the ‘developing’ world. Regardless of decades of critical scholarship, however, these fields continue to operate according to a universal and transcendent normative model in which a set of imagined (Western) standards provide a reference point against which developing states, their citizens, and natural environments are measured and disciplined. This commensuration has tended to deradicalise, if not derail, endogenous initiatives to redefine development, or to pursue other forms of global well-being. Offering the first overview of the field of international law and development of its kind, and bringing together scholars from both the Global South and the Global North, this Handbook is an unmissable resource for those interested in the past, present, and future of the world.