'Rethinking International Law's Role in the Climate Crisis: A TWAIL Analysis of the Coloniality of Global Climate Responses'

Speaker: Visiting PhD researcher Maryam Yabo

Abstract: This research applies a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens to the international community's responses to the climate crisis. It argues that while these responses aim to advance decarbonisation and global justice, they often reproduce the epistemic, economic, and racial hierarchies that TWAIL has long critiqued, a phenomenon increasingly described as climate coloniality. Using the global energy transition as a point of focus, it examines how international climate law, while normatively progressive, is structurally complicit in sustaining green extractivism and replicating the same extractive capitalist model that underpins the carbon economy. It highlights the contradictions and challenges in relying on so-called green energy minerals such as lithium and cobalt for climate solutions. By situating the Paris Agreement and the broader architecture of international climate governance within the longer history of racial capitalism, extractivism, and epistemic injustice, this research highlights the distributive consequences that arise from the Paris targets. The central question it poses is whether the project of international law can truly deliver a just transition, or whether a TWAIL-informed reimagining of legality is needed to address the climate crisis in transformative ways that do not reproduce new sacrifice zones in the Global South.

As a special welcome to everyone attending, we will have coffee and cake at this session.