A new book by Kent international law expert Dr Luis Eslava offers an innovative account of the operation and everyday effects of international law and the development project.
In his book Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development, published by Cambridge University Press, Dr Eslava adopts an ethnographic methodology to examine the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Using Bogotá’s recent development experience and the city’s changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods as an ethnographic case study, Dr Eslava interrogates the rationale that cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development.
Dr Eslava is a lecturer in international law at Kent Law School, a senior fellow at Melbourne Law School, an international professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia and Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy. He teaches and writes in the areas of international law, international legal theory and history, anthropology of international law, public law, law and development, and urban law and politics. His research focuses on the relationship between international and domestic legal orders, and the effects of this relationship both on our jurisprudential understanding of these areas of law, and on the constitution of everyday life in today’s global order.
Other areas of research include: the long-standing relation between imperialism and international law; ‘new constitutionalism’ in the Global South; international economic law and institutions; postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL); the changing dynamics of occupation law and humanitarian intervention; contemporary practices in the field of law and development (including corporate social responsibility); and new approaches to urban law.
Dr Eslava is the Co-Director of the Centre for Critical International Law at Kent and the Co-Organizer of of the International Law and Politics Collaborative Research Network.
Read more about Dr Eslava’s research online at The Everyday Operation of International Law and view more of his publications on his staff profile page.