Critical legal scholarship has created and sustained important alternative narratives of international law to challenge its mainstream accounts. In the aftermath of decolonisation, developing states in the global south, often united by a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), participated in arenas of contestation such as territory, sovereignty, human rights and collective negotiation. They pushed for the recognition of new norms in these arenas in international law by their interactions with each other and with the developed world. This chapter maps the patterns in these interactions and their effects. It proposes that a typology may exist between interactions that advance international law by creating new norms for a more inclusive grammar of international law and interactions that, on the converse, reify an existing structural bias in the grammar of international law, retarding the forward march of norm making in international law. The paper assigns names to the typology of interactions – the former as the avant garde (or the “vanguard”) of new international law and the latter as the ‘laggard’.