The aim is to look at the tangible experiences and encounters of international law in local contexts like courts, contestations, activism, and narratives to see how both such claims and futures are articulated through or against international law, and how international law is shaped by such local engagement.

Consider, for example, the restitution of Indigenous Wampum belts in museum contexts. The Wampum belts are made from woven shell beads, primarily by the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations of the Eastern Woodlands (North America), such as the Anishinaabe. These traditional belts serve as records of agreements, treaties, history, and spiritual or cultural teachings. Should the restitution of these belts be seen simply as the return of cultural artifacts, or as a broader recognition of their legal status, equal to treaties under international law?

Or, how can we understand Vanuatu’s initiatives for an Advisory opinion on climate change as a decolonisation initiative for the environment? Colonial relationships are challenged in everyday life, through what may seem mundane and banal – but it is through these challenges that futures are forged, contested and re-imagined in international law.

Tim Lindgren is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and a member of the Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL) research project. He researches and teaches in international law. His research lies at the intersection of public international law, the environment and colonialism, with a particular attention to reparations for climate change and the performance of international law in informal spaces. 

Lys Kulamadayil is an international law scholar and a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow, serving as principal investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism.  She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (Hart Publishing 2025).

Debadatta Bose is The Robbins Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law working on a postcolonial articulation of private law theory. Beyond legal theory, his expertise lies in Third World Approaches to International Law and critical approaches to business and human rights.

Kanad Bagchi is a Postdoctroal Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law and a member of the  Decolonial Futures Research Group at the University of Amsterdam. His research lies in the intersection of of public international law, international economic and monetary law, critical legal theory, including decoloniality and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).