The War Law Institute (WLI) is a platform dedicated to reimagining the world order from the perspective of the Global South. It seeks to cultivate intellectual renewal by placing war at the centre of inquiry; recognising it as foundational to history, state formation, and international law. War cannot be understood in isolation from sanctions, debt, aid, and political economy, nor from colonial conquest and anti-colonial resistance. WLI aims to provide a lively commons where lawyers, scholars, and thinkers can generate and refine ideas rooted in their own contexts, reclaiming agency over how law, politics, and the economy are debated and developed.
It is a space for independent, sovereign thinking grounded in the histories, struggles, and realities of the world’s darker, bombable geographies. It is not a space for ventriloquising Global North orthodoxies nor sanitising ideas for acceptance in Atlantic institutions. Our aim is not consensus, but rigorous debate, and to help shift the production of ideas away from the traditional centres of power and towards the rest of the world.