The concept of rupture straddles the space between revolution and reform, anarchy and order—a paradoxical term to demarcate, on the one hand, the possibility of a complete falling away of one systematization, without necessarily initiating some new regime, and on the other hand, the conditions of improvement and renewal, an opportunity of reassessment, and quite often re-entrenchment. Thus, rupture is not necessarily the same as speaking about revolution, or even emancipation for that matter, because it does not necessitate any giving up of a certain system of ideas or authority, at least not in any longstanding sense. To put it bluntly, it is neither progressive nor reactionary, but in some sense, perhaps best understood, and I will expand on this shortly, as simply the very conditions of establishing and/or maintaining any symbolic order (by which I mean the albeit uneasy synthesis of political, social, economic, religious relationships that constitute what ends up getting called a ‘system’ or ‘order'). Rupture is a strategy, in other words, of both understanding and political action, but which itself carries no necessary affiliation with any ideological disposition. We might say, therefore, to speak of rupture is to enlist a set of concerns, disagreements, traditions, ideas, and so on, that are useful when attempting not just to describe a situation, but to move towards some political decision as a group, though what exactly that would be is open to contestation.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship (TWAIL) destabilized the mainstream narrative within international law that its doctrines were constituted by the historic search for order between formally equal state sovereigns. Instead, TWAIL scholars argued that the key constitutive dynamic of the discipline was the colonial experience, which continues to hold powerful sway over the legal architecture of global regulation whereby international law functions to perpetuate inequality and oppression. At the same time, however, TWAIL scholarship regularly posits international law as an emancipatory force that may be mobilized on behalf of former colonized populations and other marginalized social identities. The rise of post-Marxist scholarship, and more generally, the turn to interdisciplinary within the profession in recent years offers an opportunity to analyze this curious paradox and construct alternative modes of analysis for future TWAIL scholarship. In the first section, the paper draws upon a diverse array of TWAIL scholars over the last thirty years to map the argumentative logic within TWAIL literature. In the second section, the paper incorporates debates and insights from complimentary academic disciplines to illuminate some blind spots within TWAIL’s central arguments, and potentially ‘radicalize’ its future possibility of critique against the growing inequality within global governance.