International Human Rights Law and Diplomacy by Kriangsak KITTICHAISAREE. Principles of International Law Series. Cheltenham, UK; Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. xiv + 340 pp. Hardcover: £105.00; Softcover: £35.00. doi: 10.4337/9781839102196.

Abstract

mental protection and redress the victimization of indigenous peoples. Eighteen chapters of this book constitute a remarkable attempt to acknowledge unaddressed colonial atrocities. Yet they also demonstrate a narrow understanding of “colonial wrongs” that can be mapped within the extant structures and functioning of international (criminal) law. Fully confronting the colonial context would necessarily call into question the legal categories through which “wrongs” are conceptualized, and whether they can be capacious enough to acknowledge the pervasive and multidimensional nature of colonial domination perpetuated in the Global South through international law and its structures both before and after “formal independence”. In this book, identifying colonial sites where unaddressed colonial wrongs pose a problem for realizing international justice rests on an episodic understanding of colonialism. This leaves unattended the pervasive structure of global (post)coloniality, amid which colonial harms continue to be perpetrated and resisted. This not only problematizes the prospect of indicting responsible actors, it also implicates the colonial onto-epistemologies on which international law is predicated. These aspects point towards the parochial nature of the international legal framework, for which several aspects of colonial domination remain incommensurable. Despite its limitations, this book makes crucial headway in beginning to address the impacts of colonialism by offering implementable tools. It remains a useful resource within the ongoing discourse of international (criminal) law reform. A second volume of this anthology will certainly be welcome.