ABSTRACT
Much of the work of the Third World engagement with international law and New International Economic Order (NIEO) scholarship involved an attempt to delegitimise existing legal norms; in particular, challenging their supposed objectivity. Central to the project of the Third World and later scholarship writing in its name was the complicity between international law and imperialism, and in particular the mechanisms by which colonialism was justified and maintained. The divide between the developed and the newly ‘developing’ nations was a defining aspect of Third World legal struggle, and formed the entire basis for the formulation of the NIEO. In most narratives however, the rise of the Third World is overshadowed by the nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. The context of the so called Cold War provides the other backdrop to the Third World relationship to international law.
