"New Subjects in International Law and Order"

This article contends that the League’s mandate system was more than a political institution or a bureaucratic procedure: it was a culture of argumentation that engendered particular ways of reading and writing — not least for those in colonial territories conquered during the First World War who now fell under its jurisdiction. The petitions they sent to the League document how a new politics of textual interpretation and application arose in response to the League’s theoretical limitation on colonial sovereignty. As an index to mandate sovereignty compiled by its subjects, these petitions offer the resources for a history of international order from below.

UCLA Law Review, 2021

International law was invented in 1789 when Jeremy Bentham introduced the term to replace the outmoded “Law of Nations.” Since then, international lawyers have spent a lot of time thinking about whether international law is in fact law, and little or no time considering how international law is international, or what international actually means. In this Article, I want to suggest that, with the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, the term international came to incorporate elements of both the terms world and global: as an imaginary, a world international lawyers lived inside (and produced), and a global perspective they took of (and used to take from) its Others. In particular, I aim to show that this “international” was a racial imaginary—a White International (or “White World” in W.E.B. Du Bois’s terms)—that emerged from and reinforced Global White Supremacy. This White World was consecrated as the de jure international order with the founding of the League of Nations after World War I, and the sociopolitical system of Global White Supremacy (or “Racial Contract” in Charles W. Mills’s terms) underpinning this international survived its formal demise with decolonization. The whiteness of this international—both historically and in the present—has been rendered invisible to most international lawyers, however, in part because of the current conceptualization of race by both mainstream and critical accounts of the discipline. In order to begin to unwhiten it, Part I of this Article rereads existing historical and theoretical accounts of the discipline, arguing that aside from the racial aphasia that characterizes the mainstream, critical scholarship is prone to either overparticularize, or underhistoricize, the role that race has and continues to play. Part II of this Article then reconsiders the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, arguing that it was only thinkable and possible because of the racial imaginary—the “White World” or the “international”—that its founders (that is, the Men of 1873) assumed and reproduced, one that was based on a particular biological conceptualization of race. It aims to show how, paraphrasing W.E.B. Du Bois, the Men of 1873 discovered that they were white and international, and, by that token, wonderful, at the same time. In Part III, this Article turns to the Black Internationalist fiction of W.E.B. Du Bois and George Schuyler to show how, in Dark Princess and The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World, respectively, these scholars not only recognized this “white international” as a sociopolitical system of Global White Supremacy, but they also set out to map its conditions of making and unmaking. This Article will end by considering how Black Internationalist fiction more generally might be read for what Charles W. Mills calls “alternate clocks and maps of global racial resistance” and as tools for unwhitening both the "International" and the world.

Harvard International Law Journal , 2010

Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d’histoire du droit international, 2021

Review of the Book

The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century, 2019

The history of modern international law is often told as a fable of Jewish moral cosmopolitanism. Many recent accounts of the lawyer, law professor, and judge Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960) confirm this narrative by positing that his pioneering ideas of international human rights, crimes against humanity, and the laws of armed conflict derive from his personal experience of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and refugeedom. Implicitly or explicitly, this meta-narrative frequently situates politics in opposition to law, and frames Zionism as the particularistic pole opposite the putative universalism of twentieth-century Jewish legal cosmopolitanism. This chapter challenges this view through a novel reconstruction of Lauterpacht’s biography based on newly discovered archival sources in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. Against the trend towards apolitical or antipolitical narratives, this chapter argues that Lauterpacht’s political investment in the Zionist movement shaped his legal imagination of modern international law.

Race, Palestine, and International Law , 2023

In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine for the Jewish people-in denial of the national self-determination of the Indigenous Arab population-in public international law. 1 The Palestine Mandate juridically erased the national status of the Palestinian people by: (1) framing the Arabs as incapable of self-rule; (2) heightening the significance of establishing a Jewish national home; and (3) distinguishing Palestine from the other Class A mandates for possessing religious significance that exceeded the interests of any single national group. A century later, the still-unresolved "question" of Palestine remains central to struggles for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in international law. This essay revisits two flashpoints in the tangled history of Palestine and international law, where questions of race and racism have been central: first, ongoing debates over the regime and crime of apartheid; and second, the now-repudiated UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, recognizing Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Both stories demonstrate the importance of understanding race and colonialism as conjoined concepts, neither of which can be properly understood in isolation from the other.

Review of James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)

European History Quarterly, 2020

revived Jacobin-Marxist school of interpretation of the Revolution, originally formulated by Albert Mathiez, George [sic] Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul, and the interpretation that views "universal and equal rights" and democratic republicanism as the core revolutionary values' (473). Israel's distinction between friend and foe is too stark and is likely to invite scrutiny; his theory of Radical Enlightenment is political only in a Schmittian sense. When vituperatively referring to the 'negative critiques', Israel boasts as if every criticism were refuted clearly. But it is even doubtful whether he really understood the points of criticism. Sad but true, it is easier to see why The Enlightenment that Failed has failed than to see why the Enlightenment failed.

International Journal of Law in Context, 2024

In this article, I reconceptualise the League of Nations as an Imperial Assemblage that embeds and is embedded by coloniality. Relying on the return to the League's historisisation by Third World Approaches to International Law, I argue that we can understand the League as a governance body that works across scales of international, transnational and local actors, processes and structures to reiterate coloniality within the mandated territories. I utilise Deleuzian notions of assemblage alongside the concept of 'coloniality' within the literature of decolonial theory within International Relations and Sociology to show how the work of the League's various actors, processes and structures across different scales made, actualised and evolved the laws on Forced Labour and Slavery from 1925 to 1932 in the inter-war era with a particular focus on Mandate Territories B and C.