The High Tide of Anticolonial Legalism

For a time in the 1960s it seemed as if one domain in which the global south’s enthusiastic struggle to arrogate the mantle of universalism as an exercise in “worldmaking” was the transformation of international law. Though this struggle was ultimately circumvented by great power politics and newer forms of international law and organization, it was a crucial moment. The introductory prosopographical survey that follows seeks to recapture the consensus of a set of northern and southern international lawyers in the 1960s who saw potential in the project of transforming their field to register the aims of a new epoch – the aims of postcolonial states.