Profile
 

Professor Luis Eslava teaches and researches in the areas of International Law, International Development, and International Legal Theory and History. Luis is teaching the course International Law and Development: Global South Perspectives at the Graduate Institute in Spring 2023 and Spring 2024.

Bringing together insights from anthropology, history, political economy and legal and social theory, his work focuses on the multiple ways in which international norms, aspirations and institutional practices, both old and new, come to shape people’s everyday life. Paying attention to the global legal and economic order and its relation to precarity and violence in the Global South, his work argues that closer critical attention needs to be paid to the co-constitutive relationship between international law ‘up there’ and life ‘down here’.

Luis is a Research Professor of International Law at La Trobe Law School, La Trobe University (Australia), and Professor of International Law at Kent Law School, the University of Kent (United Kingdom). He is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia, and a teaching faculty of the Global Workshops organised by the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.

He is currently a member of WIEGOs Law Programme Advisory Committee – the largest global network focused on improving conditions for workers in the informal economy, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development’s Advisory Academic Circle. Luis co-directs the International Law and Politics Collaborative Research Network at the Law & Society Association (LSA), and he is a member of the steering committee of the IEL Collective, and a director of the international socio-legal action research initiative Ruptures21. He is a member of the editorial boards of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development; the Human Rights Law Review; the Latin American Law Review; Revista Derecho del Estado and Contexto: Revista de Derecho Económico.

Selected Publications
 

Books

• L Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Edited Books

• R Buchannan, L Eslava, S Pahuja, The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (OUP, 2023).
• L Eslava, V Nesiah, M Fakhri, Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
• L Eslava, L Obregón, R Ureña (eds), Imperialismo y Derecho Internacional: Historia y Legado (In English: Imperialism and International Law: History and Legacy) (Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2016).

Special Issues

• Citizen (In)Security. 7 Latin American Law Review (2021). Editor: L Eslava.
• Imperial Locations. 31(3) Leiden Journal of International Law (2018). Editors: L Eslava, M Koskenniemi, L Obregón.
• History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law. 31(3) Leiden Journal of International Law (2017). Editors: M Chiam, L Eslava, G Painter, R Parfitt, C Peevers.

Articles

• D Alessandrini, J Cortes, L Eslava and A Yilmaz, ‘The Dream of Formality: Racialisation Otherwise and International Economic Law’ (2022) 25(2) Journal of International Economic Law, pp. 207-223. Open access: https://bit.ly/3BHIpGb
• L Eslava, S Pahuja, ‘The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South’ (2020) 11(1) Humanity, pp. 118-138.
• L Eslava, ‘The Teaching of (Another) International Law: Critical Realism and the Question of Agency and Structure’ (2020) 54(3) The Law Teacher 368.
• L Eslava, L Buchely, ‘Security and Development? A Story about Petty Crime, the Petty State and its Petty Law’ (2019) 67 Revista de Estudios Sociales, pp. 40–55.
• L Eslava, ‘The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment’ (2018) 31(3) Leiden Journal of International Law, pp. 539-567.
• L Eslava, ‘The Materiality of International Law: Violence, History and Joe Sacco’s The Great War’ (2017) 5(1) London Review of International Law, pp. 49–86.
• L Eslava, ‘Istanbul Vignettes: Observing the Everyday Operation of International Law’ (2014a) 2(1) London Review of International Law, pp. 3–47.
• L Eslava, M Dias, ‘Horizons of Inclusion: Life Between Laws and Developments in Rio de Janeiro’ (2013) 44(5) Inter-American Law Review, pp. 177–218.
• L Eslava, S Pahuja, ‘Beyond The (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law’ (2012) 45(2) Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America - Verfassung und Recht in Übersee (VRÜ), pp. 195–21.
• L Eslava, ‘Decentralization of Development and Nation-Building Today: Reconstructing Colombia from the Margins of Bogotá’ (2009) 2(1) Law and Development Review, pp. 281–366.
• L Eslava, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility & Development: A Knot of Disempowerment’ (2008) 2(2) Sortuz: Oñati Journal of Emergent Socio-Legal Studies, pp. 43–71.

Book Chapters

• L Eslava, ‘Trigueño International Law: On (Most of the World) Being (Always, Somehow) Out of Place’ in L Chua and M Massoud (eds), Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (CUP, 2024), pp. 160-187. Open access
• R Buchanan, L Eslava, C Murphy and S Pahuja, ‘Making and remaking the world anew: International Law and the Development Project’ in R Buchanan, L Eslava and S Pahuja (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (OUP, 2023), pp. 1-32.
• R Buchanan, L Eslava, C Murphy and S Pahuja, ‘Development,  International Law, and the State’ in R Buchanan, L Eslava and S Pahuja (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (OUP, 2023), pp. 121-140.
• L Eslava, G Hill, ‘Cities, the Global South and International Law’ in H Aust, J Nijman (eds), Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Elgar, 2021), pp. 77-89. L Eslava, ‘The Developmental State: Dependency, Independency and the History of the South’ in P Dann and J von Bernstorff (eds), The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 71-100.
• L Eslava, ‘Dense Struggle: On Ghosts, Law and the Global Order’ in A Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed), Routledge Research Handbook on Law & Theory (Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–48.
• L Eslava, ‘Urban Law in a Global World’ (In Spanish: ‘El Derecho Urbano en un Mundo Globalizado’) in M Rengifo, J Pinilla (eds), La Ciudad y el Derecho: Una Introducción al Derecho Urbano Contemporáneo (Bogotá, Temis & Universidad los Andes, 2012), pp. 23–57