International Economic Law (IEL) Collective

Description

The International Economic Law (IEL) Collective is a forum for critical consideration of the intricate relationships within the expanding field of international economic law. It investigates how epistemological and methodological diversity can foster a more comprehensive landscape of scholarship on law and global economic governance. The Collective aspires to foster discussions on diversity, representation, and criticality in the research, teaching, and practice of international economic law, and to kindle fresh dialogues about the discipline's future.

Over the past three decades, international economic law has grown significantly, shifting from a subsidiary of public international law to a multi-layered, highly specialised discipline. This field includes an array of issues related to global economic law, regulation, and governance, such as trade, investment, finance, intellectual property, business regulation, energy, and competition law. Despite its expansion, the diversity and plurality of methodologies, perspectives, and voices within the discipline continue to be significant concerns.

Many IEL academics, practitioners, teachers, and students perceive the discipline to be limited by an orthodoxy that generates and perpetuates knowledge about the law and its operation, neglecting the broader socio-cultural, economic, political, geopolitical, and historical contexts. Ignoring these wider structural forces risks giving 'epistemological privilege' to traditional knowledge production sites and producers, rooted in historical and contemporary power and patriarchal imbalances.

Amid academic challenges to the lack of representation and diversity in gender, race, geographical locations, and general epistemologies, there is a call to reconsider how conventional international economic law is produced, both epistemically and operationally. The need to contextualise and historicise IEL scholarship, and highlight often overlooked perspectives, particularly those related to global economic vulnerability, inequality, and precarity, is urgent. This could lead to a deeper understanding of IEL and its impact on the groups it regulates and disciplines. Part of this project to disrupt, decolonise, and diversify IEL's epistemic landscape involves creating platforms to amplify traditionally neglected narratives and voices, such as women, ethnic and sexual minorities, indigenous peoples, and postcolonial communities.