Encoding Empire: How Legal Rhetoric Justifies Occupation and Masks Resistance

[Joyce Choo worked as a fellow with UNRWA during the 2025 Gaza war. She holds an LLM in international legal studies from NYU School of Law, where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar]

In recent years, the doctrine of self-defense has become a powerful tool for states to entrench territorial dominance. When Israel bombs Gaza, India militarizes Kashmir and Pakistan occupies Balochistan, they all invoke the same justification: self-defense. Legal language, such as “proportionality”, “necessity” and “defensive” has shifted from limiting violence to legitimizing it. These are not isolated cases. They reflect a broader pattern in which international law is used to rebrand imperial violence as lawful action. As the rest of this post explores, key features of international law have no longer restrained expansionist agendas – they are instruments of it.

Across these case-studies, legality is no longer a check on expansionist goals, it has become the language that enables it. In Palestine, Kashmir and Balochistan, official state rhetoric uses the grammar of law to repackage military dominance as national security threats. Legal terms like “defense” “proportional” and “terrorist” thus become tools to sanitize violence and delegitimize resistance struggles. Drawing on insights from Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), these examples show how international law’s foundations reproduce imperial hierarchies under an aesthetic of restraint. At its core, this post highlights not just how the law fails to stop occupation – but how it provides the vocabulary to sustain it on the global stage. 

Self-defense Under International Law

Article 51 of the UN Charter affirms that states may use force in response to an armed attack or threat thereof, as outlined in Article 2(4). But in its modern iteration, this doctrine has evolved beyond its original limits. Today, it accommodates for military action towards threats that are pre-emptive and anticipatory. This evolution has allowed for self-defence to become a legal cover for projects of territorial expansion – especially when resistance movements are framed as existential threats.

As David Kennedy has argued, international law is not merely distorted by powerful states, it is designed in ways to serve their interests within the guise of national security and protecting sovereignty. Applying this distortion, when Israel consistently frames its bombing in Gaza as a “pre-emptive” move of self-defense against terrorism, or when India describes its militarization in Kashmir as a matter of “internal security”, or when Pakistan justifies its occupation of Balochistan as necessary for national unity, the same legal pattern emerges: legal language becomes the scaffold for domination. These instances do not constitute solely abuses of the law, they are examples of how the law itself enables conquest by translating violence into a defensive necessity.

In Gaza, Israel’s consistent framing of anticipatory self-defence flips the burden of proof. Palestinian resistance is cast as an existential and never-ending threat, which allows Israel to repackage offensive expansionism into a continuous act of never-ending “prevention”. Through weaponising the ambiguity in Article 51, Israel presents what is de facto annexation as a defensive act. In Kashmir, India draws on similar legal reasoning. After abrogating Article 370 of its Constitution in 2019, India has intensified control over the region while continuing to present its actions as defensive measures. The discourse of legality, here too, obscures the unresolved status of Kashmir and the population’s right to self-determination under international law. Yet another example of this phenomenon (which has seen little mainstream attention from the International Community) is Pakistan’s military operation in Balochistan, consistently framed as measures necessary to maintain internal security, are strategically aimed at maintaining control over a resource-rich region.

Official denials of colonial dynamics by Israel, India, and Pakistan are not incidental, but strategic. As Kennedy notes, states reinforce imperial hierarchies and thinking not merely through force, but through the instance of their own presentations as objective and neutral states. This allows states with colonial ambitions to frame their imperial military actions as legitimate and lawful, with legal language providing them the platform to do so. This denial is central to this narrative. Israel’s systemic bombardment, ground invasion, and refusal to let in humanitarian aid are framed not as aggression, but as self-defense. The denial of the imperial nature of how these military actions feed into the ongoing Nakba since previous military offensives like Operation Case Lead (2008) and Operation Protective Edge (2014). Similarly, India’s constant denial of the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination under the pretext of national security then obscures the legitimate goals of the oppressed group, thus making their voices invisible in the international community.

This echoes a broader issue in TWAIL approaches, highlighting how legal systems entrench global power structures. As Makau Mutua has argued, the legal order is built on a “savage-victim-savior” narrative, where colonial powers position themselves as liberators while pathologizing resistance of colonized people. This framing still animates contemporary warfare today: Israel casting Palestinians as “terrorists”, India depicting Kashmiri protestors as “radical militants”, obscuring settler violence through the rubric of civilizational rescue. Noura Erakat and Darryl Li sharpen this critique, by showing that International Humanitarian Law has no longer constrained Israeli military power – it has normalized it. Legality then, through this view, is not the failure to restrain empire, but the mechanism that secures its permanence.

The Language of Domination: Imperialism and International Law

This piece draws on Stuart Hall’s cultural encoding theory to examine how powerful states weaponize legal language to legitimize and communicate violence. Hall argues that institutes “encode” messages within dominant ideological frameworks, anticipating how audiences will interpret and reproduce them. This post posits that international law operates much the same way: States encode acts of aggression – occupation, drone strikes, civilian targeting and starvation – through terms like “proportionate”, “terrorist”, and “defensive”. This pre-shapes the discourse around violence, constraining the interpretive space in which such violence can be understood and then contested.

Using a socio-legal lens, occupation, collective punishment and genocide are reframed, thus “encoded”, as legitimate uses of force. Even Human Rights challenges to state violence are forced to operate in this pre-inscribed language, reinforcing the very logic they seek to disrupt. Thus, legal terminology surrounding warfare does not merely describe violence; it disciplines how that violence can be seen, named, resisted or obscured. In this way, legal language sanitizes war crimes, suppresses indigenous resistance, and cloaks imperial domination in the language of neutrality. Hall’s theory helps us understand that legal legitimacy depends less on facts on the ground than on how that violence is made intelligible to the western legal imagination.

Matiangai Sirleaf extends this logic to the context of Palestine, arguing that Western nations like Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada were quick to name genocide in Myanmar, but have refused to do so in Gaza. Naming then, becomes a mechanism of state power. The ability of states to define and encode terms like “genocide”, “self-defense” and “terrorism” highlights how legality is not rooted fully in empirical truth, but political unity. Legal language becomes the ascetic infrastructure of empire by enforcing it.

Another layer of this analysis involves understanding how legal vocabulary became a tool of domination. According to Chimni, international law is built atop existing colonial power dynamics, so even its emancipatory tools such as sovereignty and self-defense, are co-opted to maintain colonial dominance. These concepts then move further away from being universally liberating, and are mobilized to entrench state power. In Palestine, Israel’s settlement expansionism and ongoing genocide are routinely ignored by the international community through a balancing of Israel’s security needs. Likewise, in Kashmir, India’s invocation of self-defence and military necessity is used to justify decades of military occupation, communication blackouts and the suppression of political expression against this. When states weigh their need for security against the rights of the occupied, they are then enabled to recast violent repression as a reasonable assertion of national unity. The security-versus-rights framework thus provides a legal loophole, which permits sweeping human rights violations while obscuring them in the language of legal legitimacy.

A similar logic plays out in Balochistan, where Pakistan reframes its military actions as internal security measures to counter “separatist” threats. By labeling Baloch resistance as “separatism”, the state obscures its exploitation of the region’s natural resources and its systemic marginalization of the Baloch people. Here too, the language of law – sovereignty, self-defense, territorial integrity – is weaponized to delegitimize indigenous political aspirations of freedom. Therefore, Chimni’s critique is vitally revealing: Such rhetoric enables imperialist agendas to be repackaged as legal necessities, thus insulating these nationalist states from international scrutiny by rendering domination permissible. The law is thus, not just distorted, but co-constructed with imperial ambition in mind, providing both the lexicology and the moral shield for continued occupation.

Repacking Occupation: The Colonial Grammar of Self-Defense Rhetoric

At the heart of these case studies lies a troubling pattern: self-defense has become a discursive instrument used to legitimize occupation and criminalize anti-colonial resistance. The transformative tool that jus ad bellum once was as a shield against aggression, now functions as a tool for empire, authorizing and rationalizing sustained military violence. This section looks at evidence of how legal language provides the matrix for complicity in the reproduction of imperial violence.

Legal Violence and the Aesthetics of Constraint

David Kennedy’s concept of the “aesthetic of legal restraint” is central to understanding how international law renders violence palatable to the western lens. By framing military operations in the sanitized language of necessity, proportionality and distinction, the law transforms aggression into nationalistic duty. Consider India’s 2025 Operation Sindoor, which was officially described as “measured, non-escalatory and proportionate”. Yet, reports indicate the operation involved strikes on mosques, hospitals, and civilian homes – killing children and displacing civilians. Here, violence is encoded through IHL, not as aggression, but as national duty and restraint. This same logic enables Israel to justify strikes on civilian infrastructure by rebranding it as “dual-use”, embedding military necessity into civilian space, and making accountability elusive. In both cases, legal language provides both the lexicon and the shield for modern-day imperialism.

Anthony Anghie’s “dynamic of differences” further clarifies this structure. International law, he argues, was constructed to manage and subordinate non-European peoples. These colonial dynamics endure today. In Kashmir and Balochistan, indigenous movements are cast as “security threats”, silencing political claims for self-determination by rendering liberation as insurgency. India’s co-optation of liberal feminist rhetoric, highlighting female military leadership, for instance, highlights what Chimni terms the “language of domination”: a mode in which emancipatory discourses like gender and rights are conscripted to legitimize state violence. Feminism here is no longer a tool of liberation but a discursive asset to imperial control.

Noura Erakat urges us not only to examine what international law justifies, but what it obscures. In Palestine and Kashmir, legal discourse systematically erases settler-colonial contexts and delegitimizes resistance. By branding militants as “terrorists,” Israeli and Indian officials shape legal narratives that depoliticize colonial struggle, framing all resistance as unlawful violence. Similarly, Pakistan’s characterization of the Baloch struggle as “foreign-sponsored insurgency” masks internal colonization and silences indigenous sovereignty. Makau Matua’s critique of international law being a “civilizing mission” rings true here: Third-world peoples are reduced either to victims or threats, but never as sovereign actors with legitimate political claims.

Taken together, these cases expose a broader pattern: international law doctrines are no longer simply interpreted, they are strategically deployed to entrench global hierarchies of power. Self-defense transforms into a malleable narrative used by imperial powers to justify domination. Legal language, then, is instrumentalized to manufacture legitimacy and shield state violence from true accountability.

Conclusion

What this reveals is telling: international law’s role in oppression is not misuse, but design. The crucial role of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) along with reformist efforts within international human rights law is essential towards combating these harmful narratives, by shifting the focus from abstract legality to lived reality of oppressed peoples. Only by critically interrogating the law’s complicity in empire building can we begin to decolonize legal norms and restore international law’s potential as a real barrier to imperialism.