This course introduces students to the genealogies, concepts, and (geo)politics of international law and international human rights through decolonial and critical lenses. It examines how global legal regimes have been constituted through and in response to colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and racial hierarchy, and how these structures continue to shape the contemporary international order. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), postcolonial theory, international political economy, and decolonial thought, the course interrogates international law as both a site of domination and a potential terrain of struggle. Students will explore how international law has historically served to legitimize empire, colonialism, and economic dependency, while also providing a language and set of tools for anticolonial, anti-racist, feminist, and Indigenous resistance. Key themes include universalism and Eurocentrism, sovereignty and intervention, global inequality, structural and cultural violence, transitional justice, and genocide. Special attention will be given to the ways legal categories—such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and humanitarian intervention—have been defined, applied, and contested across different historical and geopolitical contexts. Through interdisciplinary readings and case studies from law, history, political economy, anthropology, and critical race theory, students will engage major debates surrounding the emergence and evolution of international human rights norms amid shifting global conjunctures: the transatlantic slave trade and abolition; the Nazi Holocaust and the post–World War II reconfiguration of international law; colonization, decolonization, and Third Worldism; the Cold War and neoliberal globalization; the “War on Terror”; and the present era of resurgent fascism, climate crisis, pandemics, genocide, and border violence. Ultimately, the course invites students to rethink international law and human rights beyond liberal universalisms—to consider alternative epistemologies and to imagine decolonial and pluriversal frameworks for justice, self-determination, and human dignity in the twenty-first century.