Rethinking Iran and International Law: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case Revisited

Pahuja, Sundhya; Storr, Cait

doi:10.1163/9789004314375_006

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The most notable example is perhaps the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company by the democratically elected prime-minister Mohamed Mossadeq in Iran in 1951. 36 As decolonisation proceeded, the quakes became more frequent, as both the substance of the asserted 'rules' protecting foreign owned private property, and the preferred modes of 'enforcement', were subject to radical challenge. From the perspective of the West, this was perceived as a crisis of 'legitimacy'.…”

Section: Allendementioning

confidence: 99%

Corporations, Universalism, and the Domestication of Race in International Law

Pahuja¹

2019

Empire, Race and Global Justice

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In this chapter, I will contrast two normative approaches to the question of justice between peoples which emerged during the period of decolonization in the Twentieth Century, and which circulate in international law and institutions. These approaches have struggled through the period of the 'Cold War' to the present day. The first, underpinned by an historically decontextualized, moral universalism, sees 'poverty' as a threat to world peace, prosperity and security and its 'alleviation' as a gesture of enlightened self-interest. The second is inflected by an historical and political-economic understanding of global inequality as resulting from an active impoverishment of the Third World by the First World during the period of imperialism, and potentially remediable through the acquisition of statehood and the development and deployment of international law. The concept of race figures in each of these approaches in different ways, but has merged over time to divorce racialized disparities from analyses of global economic inequality. In order to illustrate this struggle, and the changed analytical valency of race, I will trace the attempt made in the 1970's, by the 'Group of 77' states, to assert international legal control over trans or multinational corporations, and the contemporaneous response by the West, which prefigured the transformation of the initiative after the end of the Cold War. This example is a site in which the rival accounts of 'global justice' did battle. Re-reading this struggle with race in mind, both suggests what might be at stake in their competing political and jurisprudential visions and reveals the racialized underpinnings of the way that authority and responsibility are distributed in international law and institutions today. International law does not recognize any distinctions…based on religious, geographical or cultural differences.

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Section: Allendementioning

confidence: 99%