Luis Eslava – författare

Since the mid-twentieth century, 'international law' and 'international development' have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which aspirations about a better world are articulated.. They have shaped the both the treatment and self-understanding of the 'developing' world, often by positing the West as a universal model against which developing states, their citizens, and natural environments should be measured and disciplined. In recent years, however, critical scholars have investigated the deep linkages between the concept of development, the doctrines and institutions of international law, and broader projects of ordering at the international level. They have shown how the leading models de-radicalise, if not derail, initiatives to redefine development and pursue other forms of global well-being.Bringing together scholars from both the Global South and the Global North, the contributions in this Handbook invite readers to consider the limits of common normative and developmentalist assumptions. At the same time, the Handbook demonstrates how disparate but still identifiable set of ideas, imaginaries, norms, and institutional practices - related to law, development and international governance - shape today's profoundly unequal material conditions, threatening the future of human and nonhuman life on the planet. The book focuses on five distinct areas: existing disciplinary frameworks, institutions and actors, regional theatres of international law and development, competing social and economic agendas, and alternative futures.Offering a unique overview of the field of international law and development and assembling major critical, historical, and political economic insights, this Handbook is an unmissable resource for scholars of international law, international relations, development studies, and global history, as well as anyone interested in the past, present, and future of our world.

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.

In 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European empires, Asian and African leaders forged new alliances and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference came to capture popular imaginations across the Global South and, as counterpoint to the dominant world order, it became both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. In this book, leading international scholars explore what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. It analyzes Bandung's complicated and pivotal impact on global history, international law and, most of all, justice struggles after the end of formal colonialism.

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.