Legal education on International Law: Rethinking the Latin American experience

International Law has a direct impact not only on international relations between traditional subjects of International Law, but also has a direct domestic impact. In this regard, scholars such as Martti Koskeniemi, David Kenedy and Sundhya Pahuja among others, have highlighted out the importance of taking a critical approach towards the teaching and the practice of International whilst remembering it´s origins, challenging its universality and underlining that it is relevant to local realities and requirements. Despite the great tradition of Latin America scholars present in International Law, featuring well-known names such as Andrés Bello, Carlos Calvo or Alejandro Álvarez , the international legal education in Latin America has been characterized for being a dogmatic form of teaching, based on a reproduction of a Western approach towards International Law. In this regard, it has been adopted in an uncritical way, almost as something natural or given, following an Euroscentric and formalistic approach. According to the foregoing, the aim of this project is to create a WAP for scholars from the Latin-American region who are working on subjects related to International Law, from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, the aim is to create a space to share personal teaching experiences, identify common problems and challenges when studying and teaching International Law and, at the same time, to rethink the traditional approach (or approaches) of teaching and research within Latin-American Law Schools.
This project is the direct result of our participation in the IGLP Workshop 2014 in Doha. During the workshop a group of people from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru, had the opportunity to share our teaching and research experiences with others from the region. This allowed us to identify common problems and challenges that while studying and teaching International Law.

After several discussions, we identified the common interest of promoting an academic trend for the renewal of the education that until now has characterized for its formal and dogmatic nature. We are also looking at promoting legal research of International Law in the region and at the need for a long-term project that will allow the diffusion of a new approach in the region.

In this regard we believe that the creation of the WAP will help us analyze the challenges that we face and to propose possible solutions to them. The WAP will be a space in which we can share our different experiences of teaching and research, identify common problems, and begin to build the foundations for regional movement and the rethinking for both the theory and practice of International Law.

The construction of the WAP will allow us to consolidate a regional academic network with other colleagues interested in challenging traditional assumptions of teaching and researching International Law. We believe the WAP will serve to uncover blind spots, to question certain aspects assumed in traditional methodologies of teaching and researching International Law and to support new approaches which are more relevant to the reality of the region.