Beyond Containment – Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law: White Ignorance and Its Discontents – Plurality in Anti-Racist Praxis in International Law

[Mohsen al Attar is an Associate Dean (Education) and Reader in International Law at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University]

International law is often on the ropes. Each time a state invades another, a security agent tortures a suspect, or a wanted war criminal hobnobs with other state leaders, we are reminded that what international law could have been is always tempered by what it is. This ambivalence provides the contours for Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialized Boundaries (OUP, 2026), where the core argument is that international law has not fallen short of its aspirations; to the contrary, its aspirations were always organised around plural forms of domination. For the contributors to this collection, it is international law’s racialised epistemology that guides our enquiries, an epistemology that sought to liberate some through the subordination of many. International law’s purportedly universalist benevolence was always more histrionics than history, with its racial predations possessing a structural character that we have failed to escape.

This symposium showcases the collection (available open access). Over the coming week, a selection of contributors offer disparate — though not always divergent — answers to the preeminent question of our text: what does anti-racist praxis look like across the institutions, doctrines, and geographies of international law? The contributions range across a spectrum of possibility, from critique to reform to abolition, and the tension between those positions is not resolved within this volume. In fact, we regard it as one of the book’s greatest achievements; that it holds that tension open rather than foreclosing it.

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My contribution to this volume builds upon the work of Charles Mills. Because the problem this collection addresses is epistemic — not merely a record of unjust outcomes but a description of the practices that produce and naturalise those outcomes — Mills’ concept of “white ignorance” offers useful analytical vocabulary. To most, ignorance is understood as either the absence of knowledge or flawed knowledge; white ignorance could not be more different. It begins from the premise that there is nothing flawed about the exclusion of “racism” from human rights instruments or from the West’s immovable rejection of reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. To Mills, these are two examples of an active epistemic practice that seeks to scupper debates within the international order about racialised forms of domination. White ignorance differs from basic bias through its self-reinforcing character: the purpose of white ignorance is not only to pull the wool over our eyes but to create conditions where our eyes are trained to not even see the wool. It is a testament to the prevalence of white ignorance in international law that examples abound, as the contributors to this symposium articulate across a range of institutional sites, doctrinal domains, and geopolitical contexts.

At the level of human rights adjudication, white ignorance is most visible where neutrality is most loudly proclaimed.

Karla Schröter tackles a liberal favourite — the European Court of Human Rights — providing a potent account of the Court’s commitment to white ignorance, an argument in close dialogue with my own chapter. Where I juxtapose the Court’s celebration of Christianity via the crucifix with its demonisation of Islam through the veil — the crucifix rendered culturally neutral, the hijab culturally suspect — Schröter engages the Court’s veil ban cases through a framework of colonial fantasies. The Court is caught up in three fantasies: a philanthropic dream of saving Muslim women from Muslim men; a fantasy of conquest, where bodily access is the sought-after prize; and a frightened dream of safeguarding Europe against the agency of veiled women. Remarkably, these tropes are not only taken seriously by the Court but validated through a series of damning rulings. Schröter treats the Court’s white ignorance not as an epistemic failure but an ontological commitment, wherein the Court imagines itself a symbol and bulwark of civilisational superiority. It can — must — arrogate to itself the authority to decide which religious symbols count as culture and which count as danger, which women possess agency and which need to be saved (or sacrificed). As Schröter concludes, “the Court adopted the position of the White Man and linked itself to the chain of colonial violence.” Her chapter displaces the Court’s white ignorance, superseding it with the agency of Muslim women.

Paulina Jimenez Fregoso provides a germane argument, engaging with international human rights law via the Inter-American Court. Through the intersectional frame, she argues that race is not a self-sufficient analytical category. To the contrary, instances of racialisation or racial subjugation almost always happen to multiply-burdened individuals and groups — dominated not only because of their racial affiliation but also because of their gender, class, ability, and status, axes that are misrepresented within a legal framework that treats them separately, a strategy that makes them easier to dismiss. She examines the case of Cuscul Pivaral, where the Court proved ill-equipped to address the compounding effects of indigenous identity, illiteracy, poverty, and gender which combined to produce a state of vulnerability that made the claimants susceptible to HIV-contraction. This selective attention — acknowledging some intersections, overlooking inconvenient ones — is itself a form of white ignorance: the Court’s willingness to see race, but only partially, only where it does not disturb the broader hierarchy of recognition, performs the same epistemic function as the overt exclusions Schröter identifies. Even in post-colonies, well-intentioned adjudicatory bodies can reproduce the racialised hierarchies they purport to address.

At the doctrinal level, white ignorance is embedded in the foundational architecture of international legal instruments.

The refugee regime, the topic of Jinan Bastaki’s chapter, is emblematic of the best and worst of international law. The 1951 Convention did not even humour a universalist premise: from the outset, the instrument sought to resolve the challenge — not problem — of European refugees. It took several years and iterations before the coverage was extended to non-Europeans, but only after sufficient safeguards were in place at the domestic and international levels to prevent any effective settlement of refugees in Western states. Bastaki’s account of the treatment of Palestinians is especially elucidating. Here, European empire conspired with Arab states to exclude Palestinians from necessary protections, each satisfied with the herding of non-European peoples into refugee camps in perpetuity. The racialised treatment of Palestinians inspired many of the novel practices adopted today to prevent settlement — she uses the examples of Australia’s Christmas Island and the UK’s Rwanda policy. The Doctrine of White Australia may sound as though it belongs to a bygone era, but the white ignorance of the refugee system is as sturdy today as it was three generations ago.

The refugee system is always in conversation with the citizenship one, with a reciprocity visible in the global colour line both advance. To understand the colour of citizenship, Shahab Saqib argues that a racial order is perpetuated via sanitised citizenship law, where prohibited skin-based discrimination has evolved into acceptable passport-based discrimination, as he demonstrates via the Race Committee’s treatment of Diop v France. Here a Senegalese man was, ironically, excluded from the practice of law not because he was Senegalese but because he was not French — a material distinction according to France, and one the Committee accepted. The desire to discriminate persists; states seek creative ways of achieving legalised forms of racialised exclusion. Saqib deploys a ghost metaphor to expose the myriad ways racial discrimination continues to haunt international law: citizenship is one such example, nothing more than a formally race-neutral category whose purpose is to preserve a racially unequal order.

Moving from adjudication and doctrine to the politics of norm-making, the spectrum from critique to reform to abolition that structures this collection becomes most visible — and most contested.

Yang Han’s analysis of norm entrepreneurship complicates conventional accounts of how international norms are made and who makes them. Challenging the literature on norm diffusion, she questions the conventional account of a uni-directional procession of norms from the Global North to the Global South. Not only is this literature empirically incorrect, but it is ideologically suspect, obscuring the agency of Third World states and naturalising Western norm-setting authority as the source of universal values. As Han’s chapter demonstrates, the Global South — most notably via the Africa Group and China — has consistently advanced a global racial equality norm through the Durban process, Human Rights Council debates, and the General Assembly resolution on the transatlantic slave trade. Their attempts to codify this norm have been met by sustained resistance from the Global North, where states conveniently insist that racial equality is a domestic matter not subject to international scrutiny, while simultaneously supporting instruments like the Responsibility to Protect that impose precisely such scrutiny on others. Han’s most important contribution is to insist that this is not merely a record of bad faith: white ignorance is always accompanied by cognitive dissonance, a two-punch strategy designed to misrepresent the Global South as epistemically inert even as it is demonstrably shaping the normative agenda.

Nciko wa Nciko engages with one of the most pressing issues of our time — racial disparities in climate change — revealing white ignorance at its most architecturally concealed, via an examination of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. As he demonstrates, the entire frame was developed in a context where both the science of climate-induced displacement and the principle of differentiated First World responsibility were established — and then systematically ignored. Francis Deng and Roberta Cohen produced an international response to climate-provoked displacement that treats the crisis as a product of Third World governance failures: democratic deficits, civil wars, and crises of national identity, all of which have combined to create the predicament IDPs face. Industrialisation, globalisation, and accumulated emissions are nowhere to be found, a strategic omission intended to deny climate IDPs reparations and foreclose any accountability for the states most responsible. All IDPs can hope for via the Guiding Principles are charity and containment. Nciko is unapologetic in his account, naming two aspirations of white supremacy as the principal culprits: to safeguard the resources of life for First World peoples, which international mobility is believed to threaten, and to deny claims for reparations, either as financial support or access to environmentally sound technologies. White supremacist thinking is fuelled by white ignorance, with one reproducing the other through a dual racialised discourse. Perhaps Nciko’s strongest contribution is his use of the Kampala Convention as a poignant way forward: like Han and Schröter, he takes seriously the agency of the Third World as a site of norm entrepreneurship.

The final two contributions complicate the very terms of the debate — one by mapping white ignorance across unlikely terrain, the other by placing the entire framework under genuine pressure.

Suraj Girijashanker’s chapter on India demonstrates that white ignorance is not exclusive to white people or white states. Rather, as Mills himself recognised, it describes an epistemic orientation that can be adopted by actors across the global racial hierarchy — and strategically deployed against their own subordinated populations. Girijashanker traces India’s complicated relationship with anti-racism, from Nehru’s (rhetorically) strong support for anti-racist internationalism to Modi’s weaponisation of ethno-chauvinism against Dalits and Muslims under the racial logic of Hindutva. Drawing on Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence and transposing it to the international plane, he explains India’s tacit support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza through the ideological affinities between zionist settler-colonial logic and Hindutva’s anti-Muslim project: “the international policy of Hindudom… must always aim to break up the power of the Moslem blocs from Africa to the Malayan peninsula… the creation of a strong independent Jewish state must serve to checkmate the aggressive tendencies of Moslem fanaticism in general.” India’s willingness to mobilise anti-racist frameworks while simultaneously deepening racial logics at home and reinforcing them internationally speaks to a core insight of this collection: the formal vocabulary of anti-racism is no guarantee of the epistemic transformation needed. Anti-racist praxis requires not the strategic use of race but its structural undoing — a distinction that interest convergence, by definition, forecloses.

Dylan Asafo raises the imminent climate catastrophe from an Oceanian perspective. He developes a notion of “slow and benevolent” violence to capture the nature of the injuries inflicted by the COP process. Not only do these annual gatherings fail to deliver climate justice, but they create false hope while exhausting the energies, efforts, and capacities of Oceanians and other racialised peoples. As Asafo asserts, the cycling from hope to disappointment and back is not accidental. Rather, this cycle is strategically deployed to foreclose genuine efforts toward climate justice and, barring those, to forestall imagination of a world beyond international law. While ascribing responsibility to the machinations of Western states, Asafo’s opprobrium is also directed toward comprador elites within the Pacific who appear eager to ensuring their communities do not break from an order that would sooner have them underwater than questioning the logic of a system that dismisses their fears. White ignorance rears its dubious logic once again, establishing pseudo-structures for international climate justice while perpetuating the conditions that make that justice unattainable.

Raghavi Viswanath and Claire Smith close our symposium — and pose the question the volume does not resolve. Presaging an argument they are developing in another collection, Viswanath and Smith question international law’s value in the pursuit of racial justice, unable as it is to break with its fetishisation of the status quo. They open with the UNGA’s declaration on chattel slavery, celebrating the centring of historic yet ongoing violence and the need for redress. Yet even this initiative is stricken with the same limitations and disenfranchisements, seeming to reproduce more of the same. As they argue, international lawyers continue to focus on the conundrum of international law’s endless ambivalence even while scores of people die, raising an essential question for critical scholars: what if resistance within the system is necessary not for the defeat of domination, but for its survival? And if critical scholars, too, have become complacent toward a framework that perpetuates what we claim to resist, have we fallen prey to our own version of the epistemic ignorance?

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I conclude where I began — with Mills. Asafo, Smith, and Viswanath land on abolition, a conclusion that cannot simply be acknowledged and moved past. If white ignorance is structurally self-reinforcing, then the danger of critique being absorbed by what it critiques is not hypothetical; it is, as several chapters in this volume confirm, a historical pattern. Since the Black Lives Matter movement sprung to life, Black scholars were welcomed onto editorial boards of journals that possess only a passing interest in race and footnotes to anti-racism were injected into textbooks that remain ideologically Eurocentric. Both reforms suggest that the field has found ways to perform inclusion without undertaking transformation.

This is what separates counter-narrative from epistemic resistance. José Medina’s concept of “epistemic friction” — the destabilisation generated when subsumed knowledge is brought into contact with a dominant one — does not describe the addition of new voices to existing frameworks. It describes the unsettling of the conditions under which certain knowledge counts as knowledge at all. The contributors to this collection model that friction in different registers and with different degrees of commitment to the existing legal order: Nciko and Han working within its reformist tendencies; Asafo, Smith, and Viswanath pursuing its abolition. To me, Vincent Lloyd’s observations remain the most cogent: recognition cannot be achieved by embracing the grammar and logic of a system premised on the domination of non-European peoples. The terms of moral and legal engagement must themselves change.

Ultimately, the racialisation of international law is not a problem at the margins of the discipline; it is structural, epistemological, self-reinforcing, and of material consequence. If we wish for an anti-racist praxis capable of disrupting these dynamics, we must ask what international law says — and fails to say — about race, just as we must reflect on what race — and racism — does to international law. For our contributors, across their differences about how much of the existing order is salvageable, both questions are primal. We hold these together across the collection not to resolve the tension between critique, reform, and abolition. Rather, we do so because we refuse to let any one of those positions assume a monopoly over anti-racist practices in international law.

We thus offer you this collection and symposium with the utmost anti-racist commitment and humility.

Please join us for a virtual launch of our collection on 28 April 2026 between 0900-1030 EST, hosted by the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School. Registration details available here.