Rethinking international legal education in Latin America: Exploring some obstacles of a hegemonic colonial academic model in Chile and Colombia

This chapter by REDIAL (Rethinking International Legal Education in Latin America) aims at opening spaces to reconsider the practices of teaching and researching in international law in Latin America beyond the mainstream view in the field. The chapter is a historical review of efforts done in the recent past to discuss legal education. The main argument is twofold: firstly, we provide data on graduate legal education on international law in Chile and Colombia at the LLM level, concluding that it is only by promoting and developing strategies towards a wider and diverse education in international law - one that acknowledges the peripheral stance we occupied yet at the same time recovers our historical particularities in the Latin American International Law Project - that we will achieve our goals. Secondly, we reflect on the publication system required in order to be part of the academic legal community and the burden we all face by the imposition of certain indexation system, like WOS or Scopus, because the only indexes accepted are those in which Latin American academia is openly marginal. The chapter pays special attention to the current contexts of Chile and Colombia and aims to collectively interrogate the ways in which we can think on alternative methods, tactics, and strategies to decolonize international legal education.