Dr. Usha Natarajan | Faculty of Law

Dr.
Usha
Natarajan

Job title:

Senior Lecturer

Education:

LL.B. (Monash) B.A. (Monash) M.A. (U.Peace) Ph.D. (A.N.U.)

Telephone:

876-927-1855

Email:

usha.natarajan@uwi.edu

Staff Profile Tabs

Overview

Usha Natarajan joined the UWI Mona Faculty of Law in 2026. She is Honorary Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies (SALISES). Dr. Natarajan was tenured at the American University in Cairo as Associate Professor of International Law and Associate Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies from 2010 to 2020. She was Visiting Professor at the Universities of British Columbia, Dalhousie, Melbourne, and the Geneva Graduate Institute; and she has held Fellowships at Columbia, McGill, Yale, and York Universities. Prior to academia, she worked with the United Nations and its agencies in Asia and the Pacific including with UNDP, UNESCO, and the World Bank. She received a B.A. (Art History) and LL.B. from Monash University, an M.A. in International Law and the Settlement of Disputes from the University for Peace, and a Ph.D. in International Law from the Australian National University.

Research Interests:

International Law

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)

International Environmental Law

Law & Development

International Migration & Refugee Law

Laws of the Use of Force

Courses :

International Law

International Environmental Law

International Organizations

Follow on:

Academia: https://mona-uwi.academia.edu/UshaNatarajan

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=iR1LT00AAAAJ

Profile

Dr. Natarajan has been an international law scholar and practitioner for more than 25 years. She has expertise in four areas of international law: environment, development, migration, and armed conflict; and in postcolonial and decolonial theories and methods. Drawing on her work experience across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, Dr. Natarajan utilizes critical and interdisciplinary intellectual traditions in the service of global justice and environmental sustainability. Dr. Natarajan is part of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement: a global network committed to creating a democratic, representative, and genuinely international law. Dr. Natarajan convened the first TWAIL conference in the global south in Cairo in 2015 and she is a founding editor of the TWAIL Review.

Dr. Natarajan has successfully led seven global collaborative research grants, including from the European Union on refugee rights in Egypt, the government of Canada on Third World Approaches to International Law, the London School of Economics & Political Science on combatting statelessness in North Africa, and Harvard Law School on the environment in international law. She has held nine global research fellowships, including the Edward W. Said Fellowship at Columbia University and the Law & Political Economy Faculty Fellowship at Yale Law School. Dr. Natarajan is the recipient of four global research awards and three scholarships, including the prestigious IUCN Environmental Law Research Award from the leading institution in her field. Over the last two decades, she has provided advice and training to several international organizations, governments, and non-governmental organizations including the ICRC, IOM, OHCHR, and UNHCR. With over 60 publications, Dr. Natarajan has served as editor at the African Yearbook of International Law, Asian Journal of International Law, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Journal of Environmental Law and Practice, and the TWAIL Review.

Research

Dr. Natarajan's research is interdisciplinary, utilizing postcolonial and decolonial approaches to provide an interrelated understanding of international laws on development, environment, migration, and conflict. As one of the spearheads of a global movement called Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), Dr. Natarajan is committed to knowledge production that is sensitive to postcoloniality and decoloniality; and to combatting discrimination in its gendered, racialized, classist, and other identity-based and intersectional forms. She approaches research as part of a holistic academic praxis cognizant of the role of the intellectual as a political actor through all aspects of scholarly life.

A central theme in Dr. Natarajan’s international law research is the inextricable link between the way people treat each other and the way they treat the environment. Her research reveals how five centuries of European colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and racial discrimination have inevitably produced climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and polluted air, water, and lands. Her collaborative research projects and extensive publications on environmental justice, sustainable development, climate loss and damage, mass displacement, and reparations are informed by her work experience across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, where there is consistent evidence that racism and extractivism produce one another. Among other things, she is particularly interested in the consequences of human migration due to environmental change and what an effective global governance regime would look like.

Publications

Books:

V Chapaux, F Mégret& U Natarajan (eds), Routledge Handbook on International Law & Anthropocentrism (Routledge 2023).

U Natarajan & J Dehm (eds), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge 2022).

U Natarajan, J Reynolds, A Bhatia & S Xavier (eds), TWAIL: On Praxis and the Intellectual (Routledge 2018).

Chapters in Books:

U Natarajan, ‘Why Do People Move? Governing the Time & Space of Climate Migration’ in P Amorosa et al (eds), Times of Global (In)Justice (Routledge 2026) 23.

U Natarajan, ‘Climate Reparations as Truth’ in C Heri & H Keller (eds), Reparation for Climate Change: The Successes and Limits of Litigation (Sui Generis 2026) 229.

U Natarajan, ‘Third World Approaches to Migration in International Law’ in A Anghie et al (eds), Research Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law (Elgar 2025) 451.

U Natarajan, ‘Climate Change & Right to Solidarity’ in C Baillet (ed), International Law & Solidarity (Elgar 2023) 241.

U Natarajan, ‘International Law and Sustainable Development’ in R Buchanan et al (eds), Oxford Handbook on International Law & Development (Oxford 2023) 565.

U Natarajan & J Dehm, ‘Where is the Environment?’ in U Natarajan & J Dehm (eds), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge 2022) 1.

U Natarajan & K Khoday, ‘Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law’ in U Natarajan & J Dehm (eds), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge 2022) 21.

U Natarajan, ‘Who Do We Think We Are? Human Rights in a Time of Ecological Change’ in U Natarajan & J Dehm (eds), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge 2022) 200.

U Natarajan & J Dehm, ‘Remaking International Law’ in U Natarajan & J Dehm (eds), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (Cambridge 2022) 375.

U Natarajan, ‘Measuring the Immeasurable: Loss and Damage from Climate Change in International Law’ in M Doelle & S Seck (eds), Research Handbook on Climate Change Law and Loss & Damage (Elgar 2021).

U Natarajan & K Khoday, ‘Environment’ in J D’Aspremont & J Haskell (eds), Tipping Points in International Law (Cambridge 2021).

U Natarajan, ‘Decolonization in Third and Fourth Worlds’ in S Xavier et al (eds), Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World & Settler Perspectives (Routledge 2021).

U Natarajan, ‘Climate Justice’ in M Valverde et al (eds), Routledge Handbook on Law and Society (Routledge 2021).

U Natarajan, ‘Mirrors, Mirages & the Development Myth’ in S Ballakrishnan & S Dezalay (eds), Invisible Institutionalisms: Collective Reflections on the Shadows of Legal Globalization (Hart 2020).

U Natarajan, ‘Environmental Justice and the Global South’ in S Atapattu et al (eds), Cambridge Handbook on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (Cambridge 2021).

K Mickelson & U Natarajan, ‘Reflections on Rhetoric and Rage: Bandung and Environmental Injustice’ in L Eslava et al (eds), Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge 2017).

U Natarajan, ‘TWAIL and the Environment’ in A Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos & V Brooks (eds), Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law (Elgar 2017).

U Natarajan, ‘Accounting for the Absence of Rule of Law: History, Culture and Causality’ in H Charlesworth & J Farrall (eds), Strengthening the Rule of Law through the UN Security Council (Routledge 2016).

U Natarajan, ‘International Environmental Law’ in Rom Bhandari (ed), International Law & Africa (Think Africa 2012) 8.

J Maswood & U Natarajan, ‘Democratization and Constitutional Reform in Egypt and Indonesia: The Role of the Military’ in B Korany & R El-Mahdi (eds), The Arab Spring: Egypt in Revolution and Beyond (AUC 2012).

Articles:

U Natarajan, ‘Who Do We Think We Are? Human Rights in a Time of Ecological Change’ (2026) 22 Loyola Chicago International Law Review 39.

U Natarajan, ‘Racializing Nature and Naturalizing Race’ (2025) 5(4) Journal of Law and Political Economy 718.

U Natarajan, ‘Colonialism, Jurisdiction and Sovereignty in Palestine’ (2025) 35(2) National Law School of India Review 76.

U Natarajan & K Khoday, ‘Situando la naturaleza: hacer y deshacer el derecho internacional’ (2024) 5 TWAIL Review 180.

N Erakat, J Reynolds, U Natarajan et al, ‘Roundtable: Locating Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law’ (2023) 52(4) Journal of Palestine Studies 100.

U Natarajan, ‘The Global Commons: Deep Sea, Outer Space & Beyond’ (2023) 37 Ocean Yearbook 3.

U Natarajan, ‘Law & Critique: Hubris during Environmental Change’ (2022) 21 Undercurrents 43.

U Natarajan, ‘Climate, Conflict and International Law in the Middle East and Beyond’ (2020) 114 ASIL Proceedings 160.

U Natarajan et al, ‘A Journal for a Community’ (2020) 1 TWAIL Review 7.

I Awad & U Natarajan, ‘Migration Myths and the Global South’ (2018) 30 Cairo Review of Global Affairs 46.

S Xavier, A Bhatia, U Natarajan & J Reynolds, ‘Conspiring in Cairo and Canada: Placing TWAIL Scholarship and Praxis’ (2017) 33 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice v.

U Natarajan, J Reynolds, A Bhatia & S Xavier, ‘Introduction – TWAIL: On Praxis and the Intellectual’ (2016) 31(11) Third World Quarterly 1946.

K Khoday, U Natarajan et al, ‘Introduction to the Locating Nature Symposium’ (2014) 27 Leiden Journal of International Law 573.

U Natarajan & K Khoday, ‘Locating Nature: Making & Unmaking International Law’ (2014) 27 Leiden Journal International Law 573.

L Eslava, U Natarajan & R Parfitt, ‘(Post)Revolutionary Interlinkages: Labour, Environment and Accumulation’ (2013) 4 Transnational Legal Theory 108.

U Natarajan, ‘TWAIL & the Environment: The State of Nature, The Nature of the State and the Arab Spring’ (2012) 14 Oregon Review of International Law 177.

K Khoday & U Natarajan, ‘Fairness and International Environmental Law from Below: Social Movements and Legal Transformation in India’ (2012) 25 Leiden Journal of International Law 415.

U Natarajan, ‘Creating and Recreating Iraq: Legacies of the Mandate System for Contemporary Understandings of Third World Sovereignty’ (2011) 24 Leiden Journal of International Law 799.

K Khoday & U Natarajan, ‘Sustainable Development as Freedom: On the Nature of International Law and Human Development’ (2011) 10(1) The Global Community: Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence 35.

U Natarajan, ‘A Third World Approach to Debating the Iraq War’ (2009) 9 International Community Law Review 405.

U Natarajan, ‘The Civilizing Mission and the “Gentle Civilizer of Nations”: Third World Approaches to the Iraq War and the Rule of Law’ [2007] International and Humanitarian Law Resources 7-14.

Reports:

U Natarajan, ‘Accepting the Unknown’ in ‘Symposium on Radical Imaginings of “Just & Green” Futures’, TWAILR: Extra, 13 May 2024.

J Dehm & U Natarajan, ‘A Planetary Green New Deal’, AfronomicsLAW, 11 December 2023.

U Natarajan, ‘Nature and the Conceit of Law’, Volkerrechtsblog, Symposium on Feminist Theory and International Law: Posthuman Feminisms, 23 May 2023.

U Natarajan, ‘Constituting the Economic’, Transformative Private Law Blog, Symposium: Towards a Sustainable Global Economic Law, 11 July 2022.

DS Olawuyi, U Natarajan et al, ‘Environmental Law Towards Sustainability Targets’ (2022) 5(6) One Earth 577.

U Natarajan & J Dehm, ‘Where is the Environment?’ (2019) 3 TWAILR: Reflections.

U Natarajan, ‘Human Rights: Help or Hindrance to Combating Climate Change’, Open Democracy, 2015.

U Natarajan, ‘Forced Displacement from Syria or How to Institutionalize Suffering’ (2013) 2(6) ESIL Reflections.

U Natarajan, ‘On Visibility and Changing the Deal’, Law’s Slow Violence, Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law School, 2013.

K Khoday & U Natarajan, ‘Climate Change in a Multipolar World’; ‘Sustainable Development as Freedom’; ‘Fairness in International Environmental Law or How Much Should a Person Consume?’; and ‘Dreaming of Sustainability: The Jiva, the Serpent, and Climate Change in Melanesia’, E-Discussion on Climate Change and Human Development, UNDP, Human Development Report, Asia-Pacific Regional Centre (2012) 64, 157, 254, 271.

K Khoday & U Natarajan, ‘Combating Social Exclusion and Ecological Change Through Legal Empowerment of the Poor’, CISDL Legal Working Paper (Center for International Sustainable Development Law, 2012).

K Khoday & U Natarajan, ‘The Return to Eden: Combating Ecological Change through Indigenous Rights’, CISDL Legal Working Paper (Center for International Sustainable Development Law, 2011).

In the Media

In the Media:

Podcasts: Colonialism, Jurisdiction and Sovereignty in Palestine, Borders and Beyond Podcast, National Law University Odisha, India, 17 Oct 2025.

Construire la frontière: légitimités et imaginaires, Jason’s Critique Podcast, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, 12 Aug 2025.

Power, Politics and the Planet, Mahauliyat Mukalmay Podcast, Research Society of International Law, Pakistan, 2 Aug 2023.

Locating Nature with Usha Natarajan & Julia Dehm, Carbon Critique Podcast, Episode 4, Research Institute for Sustainability, Germany, 15 June 2023.

Where is the Environment? Locating Nature in International Law, Speaker Series, QLaw Podcast, Queen’s University, Canada, 27 Feb 2023.

COP27: Will the loss and damage fund help the fight against climate change? An interview with Professor Usha Natarajan, Inter Gentes Podcast, McGill Journal of International Law and Legal Pluralism, Canada, 17 Feb 2023.

Interviews: U Natarajan & J Effoduh, ‘Structural Ambivalence and the Commodification of Critique’ (2026) 21 TWAILR: Dialogues.

BP Davis & U Natarajan, ‘“Nous réclamons le droit à l’opacité”: Glissant and the Ethics of Human Rights’ (2025) 20 TWAILR: Dialogues.

S Riley Case & U Natarajan, ‘Race, Ecology, and Nature in International Law: A Dialogue with Sarah Riley Case’ (2025) 19 TWAILR: Dialogues.

V Prashad, U Natarajan & J Reynolds, ‘Law, Social Transformation, and the Third World: A Conversation with Vijay Prashad’ (2025) 18 TWAILR: Dialogues.

J Dehm, C Gonzalez & U Natarajan, ‘Meltdown! International Law Praxis during Socio-Ecological Catastrophe’ (2021) 9 TWAILR: Dialogues.

Recordings: Decolonizing Caribbean Development Today, SALISES Webinar, UWI Mona, Jamaica, 11 Feb 2025.

No Coward Soul Is Mine: #MeToo in Academia, Feminist Voices in Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 1 Oct 2024.

Right to Solidarity Book Launch, American Society of International Law, United States, 3 May 2024.

The Legacies of Edward W Said: Academic Praxis and the Question of Palestine, TWAIL Review, 29 Nov 2023.

Introduction to TWAIL Scholarship & Praxis, TWAILR Academy, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, 17 July 2023.

Locating Nature Book Launch Panel, University of Amsterdam School of Law, The Netherlands, 25 Nov 2022.

Constructing the Economy, Nature & Value, Sustainable Global Economic Law Conference, University of Amsterdam School of Law, The Netherlands, 16 Dec 2021.

Environmental Justice and the Global South, Forum for Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies, Germany, 28 Oct 2021.

Anti-Racism, Decolonization, and Environmental Protection, Conference on the 1972 Stockholm Declaration at Fifty, Georgia University School of Law, United States, 8 Oct 2021.

The Future of Academia: What Next for Early Career Academics? Global Research Network, United Kingdom, 8 Dec 2020.

Transitional Justice in a Hostile Climate, American Society of International Law Annual Conference, United States, 25 June 2020.

Special Panel in Honor of Professor RP Anand, UN Audiovisual Library of International Law Lecture Series, P.R. China, 28 Aug 2011.

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The University of the West Indies, Mona

Faculty of Law

Dr.
Usha
Natarajan

Staff Profile Tabs

Online Systems

Student Services

Registration & Fees

Online Support

Faculty of Law

Dr.UshaNatarajan

Staff Profile Tabs

Dr.
Usha
Natarajan