The In- or Ex-clusiveness of International Law

Abstract

I am joining you remotely from Los Angeles, in the United States, and I would like to begin by acknowledging my presence on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Gabrielino-Tongva, the peoples indigenous to this territory.1 In beginning with a land acknowledgment, there is a sense in which I have foreshadowed my reflections on the questions posed to us panelists in this session, on the in- and exclusiveness of international law. One could visit Los Angeles, and indeed one could even live in Los Angeles, but remain entirely oblivious to the ways in which doctrines of inclusion and exclusion in international law have shaped its geography, its demography, its trajectory and, without exaggeration, the totality of this city. But for the Gabrielino-Tongva, however, the indigenous peoples who are the traditional caretakers of this land, the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of international law, its history of excluding non-Europeans for sovereign status,2 its doctrine of discovery that permitted dispossession and exclusion from property regimes, its ongoing failure to deliver reparations for colonial domination, genocide and enslavement, notwithstanding reparations that were paid to former enslavers and to former colonial powers such as France,3 inclusion and exclusion quite obviously sit at the very core of international law.