2025 Gillian White Lecture

Gillian White Lecture 2025 - ''Telling Different Stories: Overcoming Methodological Othering and Epistemological Silences in IEL Scholarship''

Celine Tan is Professor of International Economic Law. She is also the Co-Director of the Centre for Law, Regulation and Governance of the Global Economy (GLOBE)Link opens in a new window [go.warwick.ac.uk]based at Warwick Law School. Celine is a founding member of The IEL Collective [warwick.ac.uk], a community for scholars and practitioners interested in critical reflection of the interactions between law and the global economy. She is currently leading a project on Climate Finance for Equitable Transitions (CLiFT) [warwick.ac.uk], multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at exploring the climate finance supply chain within the context of the multilateral climate change regime, international financial architecture and the multi-layered landscape of international economic law.

Abstract:

The field of international economic law (IEL) have been transformed over the past three decades from a subset of public international law into a multi-layered, highly specialised field of academic study and legal practice, covering a range of specialist expertise, including trade, investment, finance and intellectual property. Despite recent efforts to diversify and pluralise the scholarship and practice of IEL, the discipline remains constrained by an epistemological orthodoxy that privileges Eurocentric production of knowledge about law’s place within the global economy. Conventional IEL scholarship suffers from a ‘methodological othering’, a technique that excludes, marginalises and discounts as inferior approaches to the discipline that do not fit within its dominant framework of analysis, leading to the exclusion and marginalisation of experiences and conditions of constituencies in the third world and their erasure as a subject of the global legal order.

These epistemological gaps and erasures have far-reaching consequences on the scholarship and practice of IEL. But more importantly, they leave deep and lasting impacts on the epistemologically silenced IEL scholar and practitioner whose engagement with the field is mediated through these asymmetrical encounters. In this lecture, I reflect on these epistemological challenges in the field of IEL and explore how we can build an alternative praxis on which to critique the dominant and homogenising cannons of IEL to reclaim the production of knowledge about how states and communities in the global south engage in and with the architecture of the global economy.

More information about the Gillian White Lecture Series: https://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/milc/events/gillian-white-lecture-series/

Host or Publisher Manchester International Law Centre