International criminal law -- and humanity in general -- lost one of its greatest champions when Ben Ferencz passed away a couple of years ago at age 103. Those of us who were fortunate enough to know Ben deeply miss him and his critical yet optimistic voice. So I am absolutely delighted that my dear friend Greg Gordon, who is...
With contributions from Mohsen al Attar, Brendan Ciarán Browne, Shahd Hammouri, Nawal Hend, Ata Hindi, and Ali Osman Karaoğlu The Gaza Riviera: Colonial Fantasy Masquerading as Peace Both the American president, Donald Trump, and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, caught the headlines this week, with much of mainstream media publicising the offering of a “peace plan” to the Palestinians. The European...
[The following are remarks to be delivered by the author at the Sorbonne on 25 September 2025.] For many. it will seem absurd that we should be gathering today to discuss the recognition of the State of Palestine by the French Republic at this particular moment in time. For, as I speak, the putative sovereign of that State – the...
From Liberation in Algiers to Pacification in Brussels More than most disciplines, international law has found it difficult to escape the stability of its canon, a series of venerated doctrines and texts that circumscribe legal imagination within the confines of Western thought. Indeed, international law has long stood as an essential feature of the structuring logic of imperial domination—including the doctrine...
Yesterday, Brian Cox, a frequent critic of this blog, posted a long comment on Twitter (now X), in the context of a discussion he had with Opinio Juris’ own Kevin Jon Heller. The post was part of a longer personal exchange, the subject of which I will not address here. What is scholarly interesting about Cox’s post is that he...
[Ilias Bantekas is Professor of Law at Hamad bin Khalifa University (Qatar Foundation) and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University, Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service Andrew Dahdal is an Associate Professor at the College of Law and Legal Advisor in the Office of General Counsel at the College of Law, Qatar University] Modern international law is an outgrowth of the...
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...