In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...
[Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is a Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies] Avraham Russell Shalev, a lawyer and researcher with the Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli think tank, has written a reply to my post on why Israel has no legal claim to the West Bank. Shalev argues my post is part of a “troubling trend...
[Dr. Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg is a Lecturer in International Relations at King’s College London. I would like to thank Kevin Jon Heller, Vidya Kumar, Heidi Matthews, Mohsen al-Attar, and Sarah Zarmsky for their comments on previous versions] Last week, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers released a legal opinion by Daniel Reisner, Roy Schondorf, Josh Kern, and Dov Jacobs (hereinafter the Opinion) in the context of the...
What can I do? Many of us have repeatedly asked this question in the past months. We predicted the revolution would not be televised; we did not anticipate the genocide would. Scholars of anti-colonialism were well versed in Europe’s history of horrors. We knew of the German annihilation of the Herero and the Nama; we wrote about the Indigenous peoples the...
Introduction Of all the questions I've been asked concerning the latest round of violence in the Israel/Palestine situation, the most common is whether Israel's actions in Gaza amount to the war crime of collective punishment. Because of my role as a Special Advisor to the ICC Prosecutor, it would be inappropriate for me to address that question; there is, of course,...
If you're not careful, [international lawyers] will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.Malcolm X The Power of Mythmaking Origin stories are always more fiction than fact, more myth than reality. At times, origin stories serve to redeem a dubious past, while at others they enable us to justify an unwelcoming...
In recent days, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva has generated much controversy by declaring that, should Russian President, Vladimir Putin, visit the G20 Meeting in Brazil in 2024, he would not be arrested, in defiance of the existing International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against him. Eventually, Lula backtracked, stating the arrest was not up to him, but Brazil’s judiciary. In so doing,...
[Kurt Mundorff is author of A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Tennessee Knoxville Department of Political Science.] As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moved westward, so too did Russian officials who began removing Ukrainian children and transferring them to Russia, often parading the children on television as proof of their...
Growing up in Lima, I heard the mythologized story of Columbus “discovering” America (the continent, sorry US) a million times: In a leap of faith, Queen Isabel of Spain sold her Crown jewels to finance a daring explorer’s expedition to unknown lands. Nobody believed in him, but Columbus persevered, proving everyone wrong and discovering a land no one else knew about, on three little caravels,...
[John D. Haskell is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester Law School and Junior Faculty at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy.] “I [find] myself in a spiral of uneasiness … [S]omething in the authors’ tone of voice, in their self-positioning [is] disturbing… I am troubled by the initial pairing of the notions of democratic...
[Tania Atilano holds a Juris Doctor from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is conducting research on the laws of war in nineteenth-century Mexico and on counter-guerrilla warfare in the state of Guerrero (Mexico) during the '70s.] Since I published the article about the criminalization of the Laws of War in the 1871 Mexican Criminal Code (MCC), I have received various...
1- White Supremacy and the International Legal Order Writing in 1997, Charles Mills threw a grenade into political theory. With a touch of hyperbole, we might even say he collapsed the contours of the social sciences. Standard undergraduate philosophy courses, he tells us, cover two thousand years of political thought. Mainstream philosophers introduce students to liberalism and libertarianism, capitalism and communitarianism, socialism...