TAI Bookshelf Podcast - International Law and the Third Pole with Prabhakar Singh

Dr. Prabhakar Singh, Founding Dean of the DY Patil University School of Law, Navi Mumbai. Photo: Prabhakar Singh

It is 2022 and TAI Bookshelf Podcast is back with a fourth series! As always, co-hosts Liuba Timonina and Romain Chuffart chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. This year, the podcast team is joined by new and returning co-hosts Victoria Bergström and Saga Helgason. Mariel Kieval also gets onboard to help with producing the episodes behind the scenes. Tune in every month and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.

Three weeks ago, the Republic of India published its Arctic policy Building a Partnership for Sustainable Development. Having held an Arctic Council’s observer status since 2013, this policy was long in the making but it marks a turn in India’s Arctic engagement. Among the usual promoting Arctic cooperation and sustainability goals which have become the hallmarks of any non-Arctic State’s rhetoric toward the region, one of India’s Arctic “missions” is to harmonize polar research with the third pole – the Himalayas. Earlier this year, Romain and Liuba sat with Dr. Prabhakar Singh to talk about the Himalaya Region and its place in international law. Prabhakar explored the omnipresence of law and the idea of semi-colonialism at the third pole. The three of them discussed writing style and how to infuse international legal research with a more poetic and humanistic approach.

Prabhakar Singh is the Founding Dean of the DY Patil University School of Law, Navi Mumbai. He read his Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore, LL.M. at the University of Barcelona, and B.A.LL.B. (Hons) at the National Law Institute University, Bhopal. He is 2019 winner of the Asian Society of International Law’s “Young Scholar award” (2019-2021) for his work on semi-colonialism and international law. He is a member of the Asian Society of International Law’s Executive Council. Prabhakar, while specialising in the history and theory of international law, argues for the weaving of location-as-resource into the politics of legal knowledge production in and about the geographical South. He has presented papers at Toronto, Brown, Harvard, Nagoya, Tel-Aviv, Melbourne, New York, Yale, and São Paulo universities as well as at the FGV Law School, São Paulo and Bucerius Law School, Hamburg. He has taught short-courses at the Royal University of Law & Economics, Cambodia, Airlangga University, Indonesia, and at Sciences-Po, France. He has been a faculty member at the Transnational Law Summer Institute, King’s College, London. Prabhakar has published about 30 journal articles and book chapters in Oxford and Cambridge university presses. He was the guest editor of the Liverpool Law Review’s issue on jurisprudence. His opinions have appeared in The Telegraph (Kolkata) and Deccan Herald and his poems and short stories in the Economic & Political Weekly (Mumbai) and The Bombay Review. He is currently working on his first monograph on Semi-colonialism and international law.

References and further readings:

• KM Seethi, The Contours of India’s Arctic Policy, The Arctic Institute (3 August 2021) 
• Rashmi Ramesh, India’s Role in the Arctic: Reviving the Momentum Through a Policy, The Arctic Institute (18 May 2021)
• Singh, Prabhakar. “Of International law, semi-colonial Thailand, and imperial ghosts.” Asian Journal of International Law 9, no. 1 (2019): 46-74.
• Singh, Prabhakar. “Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations.” Journal of International Dispute Settlement 11, no. 3 (2020): 365-387.

This episode was recorded in January 2022.