International Territorial Administration Through the TWAIL Looking Glass: A Review

International organizations including the United Nations have long been involved in territorial administration. However, the most recent and arguably dramatic instances of the United Nations administration of Kosovo and its “kingdom” ¹ of East-Timor moved the topic of international territorial administration center stage and spurred considerable scholarly explorations.² Ralph Wilde’s study—a valuable contribution—is the first to analyze international territorial administration (ITA) (as defined below) through the TWAIL³ and post-colonial prisms.⁴ By probing the history, law, and politics of international “territorial administration,” defined as not just meaning governance and conducted both by international organizations⁵ (including the UN) and by “international appointees,” ⁶ Wilde’s book destroys the illusion that colonialism, trusteeship, and the civilizing mission have long faded from the international scene.

Wilde weaves his study around two central arguments. First, he establishes that ITA has evolved into a policy institution (established practice) and argues that our scholarly imagination and understanding of it will benefit from moving beyond the “post-conflict” reconstruction tableau.⁷ Indeed, the numerous instances of the use of territorial administration for various purposes by international organizations since the days of the League of Nations expose the falsity of the post-conflict labels on ITA projects.⁸ Furthermore, as Wilde reveals, the decision to make the UN administrator of East-Timor was made before violence had broken out following East-Timor’s vote to break away from Indonesia.⁹ Second, by comparing the purposes associated with ITA projects with those put forth by analogous policy institutions such as colonialism, administration by representative bodies, state-conducted administration under the Mandate and Trusteeship systems, and “occupation,” he identifies and examines the colonial continuities today and thus spotlights how “trusteeship and the civilizing mission never went away.”¹⁰

Wilde’s account of how his thinking on the relevance of the colonial analogy to ITA evolved is telling. Initially, his first reaction to the UNHCR administration of refugee camps (in Dadaab, Kenya)—where he had volunteered in 1997—was to demand higher standards of accountability given the enormous authority they exercised over the territorial units and their population.¹¹ Furthermore, he perceived his “humanitarian work” there of teaching Kenyan women leaders about international human rights law as “saving African women from the oppression of African men.”¹² However, his intellectual horizons were broadened once he learned about “trusteeship in international law and policy: the connection between the humanitarianism of ‘internationals’ today and the humanitarianism of colonial administrators a century ago.”¹³

Understandably, Wilde has trained the TWAIL and post-colonial lens on a particular phenomenon such as ITA that is deeply detrimental to disadvantaged peoples and states of the world. As is perhaps well known, TWAIL is not simply an “intellectual trend or an academic pursuit” but a “historically located intellectual and political movement” that assails the creation and perpetuation of international law as a “radicalized hierarchy” of international norms and institutions that subordinate the third world by the first world.¹⁴ The TWAIL movement’s clarion call has been to challenge the conventional wisdom that colonialism has ended. Indeed, the inspirational impact of TWAIL scholar Antony Anghie’s seminal work—which exposed the role of international law in the creation and continuation of colonialism—on Wilde’s thinking is evident.¹⁵ One of TWAIL’s principal claims is that the Western world maintains its hegemonic grip through political domination by painting the rest of the world as its inferior “other,” which also falls squarely within the scope of Wilde’s project.¹⁶

The activity of “territorial administration” in Wilde’s work refers not just to governance, the common meaning ascribed to the term “administration,” but to “a formally-constituted locallybased management structure operating with respect to a particular territorial unit, whether a state, a sub-state unit or a non-state territorial entity.”¹⁷ Although the sweep of the...