by Alain Alameddine
A common response is that so-called “international institutions” and “international law” are imperfect or corrupted. A number of scholars, however, challenge this view. Ralph Wilde is an academic and expert in public international law. He posits that far from being a tool of liberation, international law is actually “the Master’s tool”. Emilio Dabed, a lawyer specialising in constitutional matters, explains that far from being imperfect, the international order is actually working “exactly as intended”, not to end wars, but to make sure that they serve imperial and colonial interests. Indeed, an examination of the origin, design and laws of these institutions reveals their colonial purpose and shows the way forward.
The origin of international institutions reveal their purpose. The concept of international tribunals originated after the First World War and was implemented after the Second World War. Both wars, of course, were European in origin, and affected the rest of the world because of the involvement of the colonial, imperialist powers. Eurocentrism and colonialism is very relevant to this discussion. It is pertinent that international tribunals were never proposed while Europeans colonised and enslaved land and peoples around the world over hundreds of years. They were only proposed when colonial powers attacked other colonial powers.
Their real purpose is to protect the colonisers from each other, rather than protect the world from the colonisers.
The design of so-called international institutions reveals the same purpose. For example, the United Nations — the name itself is based on the European nation-state model — grants the “right” of veto to its five “permanent members” (the US, the UK, Russia, China and France) which means that nothing can work if any of them object. This structure protects the colonial powers from each other and the rest of the world, rather than protecting the rest of the world from them. The UN was actually established as a confrontation and negotiation arena for the five states which were determined would “continue to play” an important role after World War Two, to the detriment of all other countries. It’s no coincidence that the five were the first nuclear-armed powers. Zionism is a colonial endeavour, and colonialism is akin to a crime against humanity (but see below). However, because the five world powers recognised the Zionist state of Israel as a legitimate state, it will never be held liable for this crime. Colonial institutions like the UN Security Council legitimise colonialism.
International tribunals were designed in the same way. Although all member states of the UN are party to the International Court of Justice and subject to its decisions, the colonial powers that set it up decided that it cannot enforce its decisions, and that only the UN Security Council can do that, subject, of course, to the veto of the five “permanent” members. A recent example of this was the 2022 ruling “binding” Russia to immediately suspend its military operations in Ukraine, which was simply not enforced because of the veto.
Furthermore, the US, Russia and China are not parties to the International Criminal Court, which means that it has no jurisdiction over its individual citizens. By design, this means that any country joining the ICC would be liable to implement its rulings against individuals but would not be protected by it if war crimes are committed by any of these three world powers. The result is that almost all of the 57 people that the ICC has indicted are from the Global South, and war criminals such as George W Bush and Tony Blair who killed one million Iraqi civilians aren’t among the few people from the West/Global North on the list.
Such tribunals give an impression of stability and security, selling the illusion that we don’t live according to the law of the jungle.
The reality is that their rulings do not depend on superior moral values but on the outcome of confrontations and negotiations between colonial powers. They do not affect change by imposing anything on colonial powers, but rather reflect the existing current balance of power between them.
International laws also reveal colonial intent. For example, Article 51 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians prohibits “indiscriminate attacks”, which includes employing “a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective”. This is, of course, perfectly legitimate. Yet, freedom fighters can rarely obtain accurate weapons such as those owned by colonial powers, and the Convention does not attempt to present national liberation movements with a way out of this; it actually doesn’t even take note of this asymmetry. The result is that a rudimentary Palestinian rocket launched in the general direction of an Israeli colonial settlement is more liable to be classed as a crime than a US-made 2000-pound bomb dropped by Israel on an alleged Palestinian freedom fighter and killing dozens of civilians as “collateral damage”, since the rudimentary rocket is technically much more “indiscriminate” than the latter “precision” bomb.
Another striking indicator is the answer to the question of whether or not settler-colonialism is a crime against humanity. The Rome Statute of the ICC, widely considered to be the reference with regard to crimes against humanity, lists a number of such crimes. Settler-colonialism is not one of them, although some elements of settler-colonialism such as deportation or extermination of civilians are listed as crimes against humanity. Other key components of settler colonialism, however, aren’t, such as encouraging the migration of a foreign civilian population to supplant the indigenous population; armed occupation; land and house appropriation; and attacking and eliminating a country’s defence forces for the purpose of colonising its land. Amazingly, none of these are listed specifically as crimes against humanity.
Furthermore, the Rome Statute makes absolutely no distinction between civilians residing in their own homes and civilians taking part in settler colonisation, protecting both colonised and colonisers equally. This means that a houseowner is more entitled to use force against a burglar attempting to steal a TV than against settler mobs that have occupied the whole house. Even more mindboggling is that this means that settlers deliberately moving into the homes of indigenous people who have fled due to violence or the threat thereof are not criminals, but that houseowners attempting to take back their homes from the settlers are.
Understanding the colonial reality of this world order helps us not to lose hope when it fails to deliver justice, since we were not expecting it to in the first place.
This doesn’t mean that we cannot use the “international” institutions while they exist, in order to expose Israel’s nature as a settler-colonial entity, for example. Understanding that such institutions are confrontation arenas between states also helps us to pick our battles wisely. Instead of doing nothing but wait or hope for favourable decisions, we should work to affect the balance of power within these states to alter the course of negotiations and help impose favourable decisions. This includes organising to affect the power balance, particularly organising within political movements to rise to power in these states — “playing politics instead of making demands”, as Ilan Pappe puts it — and actually be there at the negotiation table. It also reveals the importance of the confrontation arenas chosen by freedom fighters, rather than the world powers. In the case of Palestine, for example, this would include “armed struggle” (which is legitimate under international law) when resisting occupation, direct action, boycotts, debunking Zionist propaganda and fighting to reclaim the dominant narrative.
Our discourse is also something we should pay particular attention to. The fact that these tools are part of an oppressive world order should be reflected in our narrative. For example, the oft-mentioned UN General Assembly Resolution 194 with regard to the Palestinian right of return can easily be used to deny the right of return: it states “refugees wishing to return home and live at peace with their neighbours” have the right to return or to compensation. By these standards, Israel could argue (and has argued) that most Palestinians have no right to return because they support the armed resistance which is in contradiction to “living in peace with their neighbours”. Actually, the mere mention of the right of return “as per a UN resolution” legitimises the same institution that suggested partitioning Palestine in the first place. Instead, let us legitimise indigenous sovereignty and universal values of morality by focusing on the indigenous people’s right to go back home and exercise sovereignty in their land, and on the world’s moral duty to support that right.
The longer-term objective must not be to learn how to deal with the colonial world order, but to work to dismantle it. This includes considering the alternatives. Many propose the democratisation of the United Nations, and abolishing the veto, which could solve the bias toward colonial powers. This would require understanding how exactly the power differential works in their favour, determining what kind of policies and arrangements are needed to do away with this differential, and working to reach power in our home countries in order to be able to impose this democratic alternative.
On the other hand, such democratisation, even if successful, would still not be a panacea. The concept of a worldwide body with jurisdiction over its members fundamentally implies a limitation on state sovereignty, giving free rein to neoliberal and identity influences within societies. This is what has happened in, for example, Syria, Iraq and Sudan. Dismantling the state led to societal fragmentation on sectarian grounds, which suppressed society’s immunity to foreign interference, leading to violence and even civil war. The actual solution would have been transitions of power from these dictatorial regimes to truly democratic administrations while preserving state structure and legitimacy, thereby protecting society from both foreign interference and sectarian breakup. This is a feat that cannot be undertaken by other powers but only by local democratic political movements.
The establishment of such democratic forces to break up colonial relations of power in our home countries, both in the Global North and the Global South, thus seems to be the first step in freeing humankind from colonial institutions. This means that individuals longing for freedom around the world must join, or form, such democratic movements that are aware of the danger and pervasiveness of colonialism. They would also need to recognise the intrinsic role that capitalism and the politicisation of identity plays in colonialism. Rather than copying and pasting rigid leftist doctrines, they would need to be able to master conceptual tools taught and developed by the revolutionary and decolonial Left over the past two centuries while developing the capacity for a critical analysis of reality and of change. And instead of limiting their interests to their own societies, they would need to build relations with other similar movements, if only in their regions. Colonialism is a global phenomenon, and so the fight against it must be as well.
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