Introduction: Naive Perception and the Necessity of a Critical Alternative
In Türkiye, legal education is not so much about the information learned but rather the process by which law becomes an everlasting set of guidelines embedded in the personality of the lawyer. This requires familiarity with certain theoretical and methodological perceptions across the vast territories of the legal discipline that can cumulatively allow a potential lawyer to develop ideas about the functioning of daily lives in legal terms. Setting aside the question of whether this ultimate goal for lawyers is achieved in the Turkish legal education in its entirety, it seems at least that the legal education partially fails in providing an adequate variety of the lenses needed to understand the operational world of international law in the real world. As Aral rightly indicates, approaches to this issue are based on a positivist account that mostly prioritizes the Western narrative in understanding international law,1 despite society’s awareness of the unequal encounter with the West.
The differences between my experience while pursuing a Ph.D. at a largely critical law school and that of an acquaintance of mine in Türkiye also provide an ironic personal example of the continuation of this prioritization at the graduate level. To cut a long story short, as I explored the theoretical possibilities the third world approaches to international law (hereinafter TWAIL) could provide for my research, my acquaintance had been asked to read Malcolm Shaw’s textbook on international law for preparation. Although the processes are notably different in style, the advice to read an awfully long positivist account of international law, which has also been recently made available in Turkish as well,2 is a clear sign of this continued insistence on the Western narrative.
