In the wake of the Iraq war, a group of international lawyers published an open letter in the Guardian, framing their opposition to the invasion in legal terms. Months later, in a piece that has reached somewhat of a cult-status in the discipline, some of the signatories reflected on this act of resisting through writing, and specifically through writing as lawyers. In ‘We are Teachers of International Law’, Matthew Craven, Susan Marks, Gerry Simpson and Ralph Wilde consider the politics of invoking one’s expertise publicly, what it means to identify with a field and a discipline, the limits of resisting through the language of international law, and the inherent cost of collapsing ethical questions into legal ones. In a (relatively) recent talk, I called this piece ‘punk’: there is something subversive about the insistence on critique in times of (disciplinary) crises; something brave about the refusal to offer a solution or an answer at a time of uncertainty (the piece poses around seventy questions, and offers very few answers). It appears we may be at another moment of a disciplinary crisis. 

Ntina Tzouvala has recently argued that the war in Gaza has fractured a discipline in a way that is different than what we had witnessed before. Tzouvala argues that whereas the Global North (including its international law societies, journals and universities) has struggled with unequivocally condemning (or even acknowledging) the genocide, the Global South (and TWAIL) scholars’ responses had an air of moral clarity around them: what was happening was neither complicated nor complex, it was simply and obviously bad. International lawyers are then not merely disagreeing about the legality of the war; they are disagreeing about fundamental questions of ethics, values, and politics. Different groups of international lawyers now see the world fundamentally differently. 

I think Tzouvala is accurate in identifying the chasm that exists: which is not merely one of interpretation, but one of outlook; the common ground has shifted. And while I do think Palestine has made this chasm more obvious (both because of the visibility of the violence, and because of the volume and visibility of international legal ‘takes’ on this violence online, whether in blog posts like this one, or on Twitter (RIP) and Bluesky); I do not think the chasm is in any way new. I think the chasm is fundamentally, a crisis of politics in an ‘apolitical’ discipline. 

Let me elaborate. At the 1999 AJIL Unbound symposium on method, neither Marxism nor TWAIL were included. China Miéville’s ‘Between Equal Rights’ was published at the end of 2004, and Antony Anghie’s ‘Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law’ was published a few months later. ‘International Law on the Left’, a bible-of-sorts-for-budding-Marxists-to-this-day was published in 2008. And then a new generation of TWAIL and Marxist scholars emerged; edited volumes started including chapters on TWAIL and Marxism (always towards the end, but still, there), as did an occasional syllabus. In the twenty-five years since the AJIL Unbound symposium on method (some) critique went from deconstructive to structural; from broadly-left-but-unarticulated-politics; to increasingly explicit ownership of the politics of one’s work (and relatedly, of one’s own politics). One of the things that then changed in the discipline, throughout the 2000s, was that polite dinner conversation was disrupted by TWAILers and Marxists bringing politics to the table. 

And this growing political chasm is precisely why—despite somewhat of a cult-status of ‘We are Teachers of International Law’, despite critical scholars’ awareness of the limits of the law, despite our scepticism towards the healing powers of statements and letters—there has been a resurgence of statement and letter writing and publishing over the past eighteen months, even amongst the critical crowd. It is an attempt to find common ground; to agree; to gloss over deep ideological differences by relying on the thing we all share: international law. We may disagree about Zionism, but we can agree that genocide is bad; we may disagree about ‘land back’; but we can agree that ethnic cleansing is unacceptable; we may disagree about what counts as ‘legitimate violence’, but we can agree that civilians are protected by international law. Agreeing over the bare minimum is like a comfort blanket of disciplinary belonging; it is a way of signalling faith (and investment) in this thing we share. Except that, for some of us, the thing we share is increasingly not law, but politics. And that means that makes glossing over differences difficult, if not impossible.

I want to know how people feel about BDS and the academic boycott of Israel; whether they would attend a conference in Berlin even if they were allowed to speak about Palestine, knowing that comrades are being arrested for speaking Arabic outside, for wearing a Kufiyah. I want to know what people think when they say ‘Free Palestine’; how they imagine liberation; how they see their place in the struggle. I want to know what they would be willing to sacrifice for their beliefs: family, friends, work? I too have discovered the lines I am too scared to cross, and know the ones I have never looked back from. And I have found both comfort and growth in this process of unpacking, of (re)aligning. I have found camaraderie. 

In ‘Strategy and Tactics’ Robert Knox argues that as critical lawyers, our engagement with law needs to be tactical, in that our short-term use of law needs to be compatible with our long-term political strategy. The issue is, and Knox alludes to this, but does not say it explicitly, that critical lawyers do not have a unified politics, or a particularly articulated politics. Letters and statements give us a way of glossing over precisely this, which is why arguments that they are ‘tactical’ interventions are not particularly persuasive. Except, of course, unless one sees one’s commitment to the discipline as one’s politics. In which case the reproduction of the discipline is the political goal, and letters and statements insisting on the importance of both international law (what we do) and academic freedom (our right to do it) are in fact political tactics. 

How might we then understand the escalating crisis of the discipline? Perhaps as a clash between those who identify primarily as international lawyers (international-law-as-politics) and those who identify primarily as Marxists-, or postcolonial scholars-, critical race scholars-, feminists-who-do-international-law; whose political allegiance is not to the discipline, or its reproduction. A clash between a politics of belonging and a politics of un-belonging, as more and more international legal scholars realise that belonging ain’t all that, if the discipline you are hoping will accept you will only do so in exchange for your silence at the dinner table. The reason the discipline is then in crisis is because it is trying to build consensus by glossing over the politics, over the uncomfortable disagreements, over the details; but for many of us the politics are not optional; the disagreements are not abstract, but embodied and personal; the details are crucial. And the work that has been done by radical critical scholars over the past two decades, both in terms of producing deeply political scholarship and building spaces and communities around shared politics, means that an increasing number of us are feeling empowered to speak out, to be difficult, to be confrontational. The discipline is then in crisis because power we spent decades critiquing is finally being dispersed. And so, the crisis is probably a good thing.