The relationship between time and international law is intricate and multifaceted, long evading methodical analysis. However, recent years have seen a surge in scholarly efforts to address this relationship. Taking a broad view of this burgeoning literature, this article recounts the temporal assumptions, narratives, and dynamics at play in the international legal sphere, while highlighting their logics and limitations. In doing so, it develops a critical typology of international law’s temporalities, distinguishing between three overarching paradigms: modern, postmodern, and hypermodern. The modern temporal paradigm, commonly seen as dominating the discipline, views international law as progressing uniformly and linearly from a dark past toward a brighter present and future. In contrast, the postmodern paradigm challenges the modern narrative of universal progress over time, shifting the focus to the past and the ways in which international law allows past wrongs to reverberate into the present. While each of these paradigms serves important functions, the article argues that neither provides a sufficient framework for navigating international law in the current era of accelerated technological, social, and environmental change, where the future increasingly diverges from the known past and present. The article thus calls for greater incorporation into the discipline of a third, hypermodern temporal paradigm, which takes a sober look at the future and recalibrates international law’s temporal modalities in response to rapidly evolving and increasingly complex global challenges.

The use of amnesties in transitional justice remains a contentious issue. The fight against impunity at the international level has left little room for the application of amnesties for international crimes and human rights abuses. Nevertheless, amnesty measures continue to be applied in many jurisdictions and the permissibility of conditional amnesties enacted as part of wider processes of reconciliation remains under debate. This paper argues that the judicial discussion of amnesties under international law has followed dynamics of path dependence, where initial decisions adopted in very specific contexts have strongly determined the subsequent treatment of amnesties in completely different situations. The influence of early decisions rejecting blanket amnesties in the aftermath of autocratic regimes in Latin America pulled domestic and international courts towards a general rejection of amnesties. However, in more recent years, transitional justice ideas have influenced the trajectory of the discussion on amnesties, opening courts to the permissibility of conditional and negotiated amnesties accompanied by alternative mechanisms of accountability. Mapping the judicial dialogue on amnesties, this paper shows a cautious shift in the approach to conditional amnesties. This is significant because international courts have mostly engaged with the most problematic amnesties, leaving some uncertainty around the way conditional amnesties enacted as part of complex transitional frameworks will be evaluated. Reading a significant number of decisions from different jurisdictions, this essay aims to shed some light on the way domestic courts have addressed the discussion of amnesties when they are part of wider efforts to bring peace, reconciliation, and democracy.

This article examines the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (Directive) and its proposed amendment, especially from a Third World view. It establishes that, practically, the Directive has a limited value for Africans because it cannot stop corporate human rights abuses and economic exploitation in Africa. In contrast, the Directive entrenches neocolonial norms in the Business and Human Rights (BHR) field. This article also argues that it is futile for Third World Peoples to look to international law, given its capitalist history and the growing EU dominance in the BHR treaty discussions. Instead of looking to Europe or international law to save Africans from corporate abuses and economic exploitation, African states must look inward to create subsidiary norms that challenge and resist neocolonialism in the BHR field. To achieve this, it discusses the normative agency of the African Union in leading an Africanization agenda.