Additionally, the anniversary theme most certainly falls flat in Haiti, given the U.N.’s shameful history there. In 2010, peacekeepers charged with protecting Haitians were responsible for a deadly cholera epidemic which resulted in 800,000 cases and killed an estimated 10,000 Haitians. Despite Haiti having no history of cholera outbreaks, the U.N. took years to admit its role and did not provide effective remedy. Peacekeepers in Haiti also committed widespread rape, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation of women and children without redress. One survivor surmised, “As far as the U.N. goes, they came here to protect us, but all they’ve brought is destruction.”

In too many instances, the U.N. has largely functioned to preserve unjust global power dynamics. At the time of its founding in 1945, racial apartheid remained a brutal reality and approximately 750 million people were subject to colonial domination and rule. The U.N. continues to institutionalize this hierarchy; as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently commented:  “Five permanent members effectively make decisions on behalf of more than 85% of the world’s population living in countries of the Global South.”

Recalling the 1960 coup in the Republic of the Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo), and a subsequent protest at the U.N. offers a window to see the U.N.’s malignant neglect more clearly.

Coup in the Congo

Amidst the wave of decolonization in Africa following World War II, the Belgian government planned to formally grant independence to Congo, while neo-colonially governing key areas. Belgium desired to maintain control of Congo’s vast mineral riches. Today, for example, Congo holds half the world’s reserve of cobalt, used in batteries for cell phones, cars, computers, and other electronics. During the handover ceremony in June 1960, newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba forcefully asserted independence, declaring, “We who suffered in our bodies and hearts from colonialist oppression, we say to you out loud: from now on, all that is over.” But following almost a century of colonization, the road ahead was not easy.

On July 5, 1960, Congolese rank-and-file soldiers mutinied in response to Belgian military officials proclaiming, “Before independence = after independence.” The soldiers were disgruntled by lack of leadership changes and wanted higher wages. Sensing an opportunity, Belgium immediately reasserted power. With Belgian support, the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded, with Moïse Tshombe as nominal leader. Both feared the central government’s encroachment on lucrative mining profits, which provided 60 percent of the country’s income.

To respond to the secession, Lumumba traveled to the United States to request assistance from it and the U.N. While in New York, Lumumba met with the activist and writer Rosa Guy, founding member of the Harlem Writers Guild. The United States rebuffed Lumumba, and while the U.N. assembled a large peacekeeping force, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld refused to allow U.N. forces to intervene in Katanga. Making matters worse, when he later visited the country, Hammarskjöld declined to meet with Lumumba, heading instead to see Tshombe and seemingly granting him legitimacy. Guy lobbied informally to member States of the U.N. that they should continue to recognize Lumumba as Congo’s legitimately elected prime minister.

Simultaneously, Lumumba faced prospects of a secession from the mineral-heavy province of South Kassai. Consequently, he approved army chief Joseph Desiré Mobutu’s plan to lead an attack on the province. Congolese troops subsequently rampaged, resulting in massive killings and alienating many from Lumumba’s government.

With few options left, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for military aid. The Soviets agreed, incensing the United States, given their Cold War rivalry. In August 1960, the U.S. government authorized a clandestine scheme to “replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means.” The U.S. ambassador advised President Joseph Kasavubu to buy votes in parliament prior to a no-confidence vote against Lumumba. Though Kasavubu did not follow the advice and lost the vote, on Sept. 5, 1960, he nevertheless announced Lumumba’s dismissal on the radio.

Over cables, Hammarskjöld indicated that the U.N. had no issues with Lumumba’s illegal removal from power. U.N. officials in Congo even attempted to stop Lumumba from challenging his purported dismissal, though he eventually did so on the radio.

By Sept. 14, 1960, the CIA’s principal agent and Lumumba’s erstwhile confidante Mobutu, spearheaded a military coup. Conor Cruise O’Brien, a U.N. official in charge of operations in Congo, remarked that the U.N. displayed a concern for legalism “when it was a question of rescuing Lumumba which was quite absent from their very uninhibited phase of activity when it was a question of bringing about Lumumba’s political destruction.”

On Jan. 17, 1961, the day of Lumumba’s assassination, Mobutu delivered Lumumba to Tshombe, Belgian officials, and mercenaries who beat him bloody. Stuart Reid, a history and foreign policy writer, gruesomely details how Katanga’s Belgian police commissioner and the police commissioner’s brother used sulfuric acid, turning Lumumba “into a mass of mucus.” When the acid finished, only Lumumba’s bones and teeth remained. Reid recounts how the Belgians twisted teeth out of Lumumba’s skull with pliers. They then set the remaining parts of Lumumba aflame. The CIA has since acknowledged its involvement in Lumumba’s demise and claims that the U.N. and Belgium played “equally important roles.”

A Demonstration at the U.N.

Lumumba’s execution was met with grief and despair within Congo and beyond. Across the Atlantic, as part of the Black freedom movement, activists and writers Maya Angelou and Rosa Guy, along with jazz great Abbey Lincoln had previously created the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH), an organization of artists dedicated to supporting the movement. Following Lumumba’s murder, Congolese diplomats informed Guy, who shared the devastating news with Angelou. Angelou wrote of her profound experience in her autobiography, “The Heart of a Woman”: “I knew no words which would match the emptiness of the moment. . . the loss of one hero was a setback of such proportion it could dishearten us and weaken the struggle.”

Guy’s connections with Congolese diplomats tipped them off that Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., was about to announce Lumumba’s murder at the U.N. Following a CAWAH meeting in Harlem, Guy and Angelou stumbled upon Malcom X delivering a speech, which inspired them greatly. Angelou wrote that Guy told her they had “‘to let the Congolese and all the other Africans know that we are with them.’” They convinced some members of CAWAH and the Harlem Writers Guild to join the demonstration. One of Guy’s relatives discouraged her from organizing the protest, declaring, “The United Nations is all the poor countries of this world have…Don’t do anything that might endanger its existence.”

Nevertheless, they persisted. At a bookstore and frequent gathering place in Harlem, Angelou, Guy, and Lincoln informed those in attendance of Lumumba’s execution and the audience responded with disbelief and wailing. Lincoln implicated the Belgians and the Americans.  She shared news about their planned demonstration, which included women clipping black mourning veils to their hair, and men wearing black armbands. Lincoln declared, “‘We’re going to stand up and remain standing until they put us out.’” Many in the crowd shouted agreement, “‘See you at the U.N.!’”

They scheduled the demonstration for Feb. 15, 1961. Members of several Black nationalist groups participated. However, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were not involved due to the Nation’s policy of non-engagement, which prevented members from participating in politics and protests. Malcolm X was increasingly frustrated with the Nation being seen as talking tough, but never doing anything.

Angelou writes of her disbelief at the large crowd in front of the Manhattan headquarters of the U.N., with placards proclaiming “‘Freedom Now.’”  Many activists were unable to enter the U.N., but sympathetic States provided access to about 75 Black demonstrators.

Inside, the U.N. Security Council was meeting to discuss Lumumba’s murder, and Hammarskjöld was busy protecting his tenure from the Soviet Union’s calls for his resignation.  In a searing 1,500-word statement, the Soviets labeled him an accomplice to murder and an imperialist. U.S. Ambassador Stevenson flew to Hammarskjöld’s defense, “Shall the United Nations survive? Shall the attempt to bring about peace by the concerted power of international understanding be discarded?”

During Stevenson’s speech, Angelou writes, a piercing “scream shattered his words.” Other voices joined the bloody shriek:

“Murderers.”

“Lumumba. Lumumba.”

“Killers.”

Angelou did not anticipate a riot at the U.N. She expected “to stand, veiled and mournful.” Yet, she heard her own voice joining the chorus shouting, “Assassins.”

Suddenly, the U.N. was in chaos. Angelou recounts diplomats vanishing as guards quickly escorted activists outside. Demonstrators outside were energized. Angelou recalls someone exclaiming, “‘This ain’t no United Nations. This is just united white folks. Let’s go back in.’” With police preventing re-entry, protestors headed for the Belgian Consulate instead, singing, “‘And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.’”

In the aftermath, since Guy and Angelou were originally stirred to action by Malcolm X’s oration, they sought out his belated guidance about what they should do. As one of the most radical leaders in the country, they figured he had to support their action. Instead, Malcolm X told them they were wrong, that “‘going to the United Nations’” would “‘not win freedom for anyone.’” He subsequently issued a statement asserting his and the Nation of Islam’s non-involvement, but pointedly observed that the demonstration at the U.N. was symbolic of Black rage in the United States.

Other commentary quickly followed. The New York Times described the activists as “invading” the Security Council chamber and absurdly declared it “the most violent demonstration inside United Nations headquarters in the world organization’s history.” Ralph Bunche, who became the first Black Nobel Peace laureate in 1950, and was serving as undersecretary of the U.N. at the time of the protest, apologized before the General Assembly, telling delegates that the activists were “misled,” and unrepresentative of the “thinking and conduct” of Black Americans. Some in the Black elite were aligned with Bunche’s distancing remarks. Others, like James Hicks, editor of the New York Amsterdam News, challenged Bunche’s apology for Black grief. This sentiment was echoed in several letters to the editor from Black Americans. Hicks described Lumumba’s assassination as the “international lynching of a black man on the altar of white supremacy” that “was staged before the world under the auspices of the United Nations.”

Conclusion

Notably, the country inspiring the 1960s riot never recovered from the complicity of international actors. Mobutu brutally ruled Congo for 32 years. He enriched himself, acquiring sums estimated at $4 to $5 billion, while the 100 million inhabitants of Congo lived in extreme poverty. Protracted extractivist warfare followed Mobutu’s demise, resulting in the deadliest conflict in the 21^st century. Since the 1990s, more than six million people have died, seven million people are internally displaced, while 25 million face starvation in Congo. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls have also been subject to rampant sexual violence. Warring parties as well as U.N. peacekeeping forces are implicated in these wanton abuses. In 2022, more than 60 years after Belgium brutally murdered Lumumba, it finally returned for burial a gold tooth that one of his assailants took as a macabre souvenir.

In Sept. 2025, U.N. General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock, a former German foreign minister, mused, “Our world is in pain…But imagine how much more pain there would be without the United Nations.” The story of the Congo is the story of the U.N. The Congo could not possibly experience more pain than it has amid a constant U.N. presence for the past 65 years, including three different peacekeeping missions, with the last being the most expensive in history. In 2022, profound frustration with the U.N.’s failure to protect civilians led some Congolese to protest calling for the organization’s departure.  Perceptions persist that the U.N. does not defend the Congolese and is aligned with foreign actors, reminiscent of earlier concerns expressed in the aftermath of Congo’s independence. If the U.N. is the “life insurance for every country,” as Baerbock asserted, then it’s past time for a radical change in policy.

The historian Brenda Gayle Plummer described the 1960s U.N. protest as a “massive …international outcry against imperialism,” the likes of which had not occurred in the United States since protests against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s. Although relegated to the annals of history, the 1960s demonstration at the U.N. is a powerful reminder of the importance of connecting international freedom struggles with those at home in the United States. Following Malcolm X’s break from the Nation of Islam in 1964, he revised his position on political activism. In a speech in New York on Feb. 16, 1965, he observed that “‘human rights’ is part of the charter of the United Nations.” For Malcolm X, framing issues as human rights violations meant, “you can take your troubles to the World Court. You can take them before the world. And anybody anywhere on this earth can become your ally.” Internationalization could “make the world see that our problem was no longer a Negro problem or an American problem but a human problem. A problem for humanity. And a problem which should be attacked by all elements of humanity.”

We saw echoes of the legacy of the 1960s demonstration last month, as thousands protested outside U.N. headquarters in opposition to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly inside, hundreds of diplomats in the chamber walked out before his speech. Their walk-out is in marked contrast to the reception he received when the U.S. Congress invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress in July 2024, with most legislators standing and rapturously applauding.

The animating issue shaping the U.N.’s work is whether it furthers the continuation of colonialism, exploitation, and subordination, or supports the radical transformation of the international order that governs our lived realities. In the parable of the elephant and the mouse retold by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when an “elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Certainly, when “you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” This is the U.N.’s essential quagmire.

On Oct. 15, 2025, prior to U.N. Secretary-General’s Antonio Guterres’ address, Baerbock spoke of the need “to build a more coherent and responsive United Nations system that is fit for the 21^st century.” Lamentably, these UN80 proposals do not envision transformative structural change. Shall the United Nations survive? On Oct. 17, Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, speaking before the General Assembly, declared that the “U.N. died in Gaza.” Indeed, the institution’s very survival depends on how it ultimately positions itself between the elephant and the mouse, in South America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and beyond.

The post The United Nations and a World in Pain appeared first on Just Security.

Introduction

In the beginning of 2025, I visited the Muir Woods National Monument in northern California. I went to see the redwoods with my child, cousin, a close friend, and her child. We stood before the massive tree trunk eager to show the kids how you can tell the age of a tree by moving from its inner circular rings and going outwards. Our enthusiasm quickly faded into horror as we began to utter the contents:

“900 A.D. a tree is born;”

the next concentric circle, “1100 building of cliff dwellings begin Mesa Verde;”

the subsequent circle, “1325 the Aztecs begin construction of Tenochtitlan in Mexico;”

the following circle, “1492 Columbus sails to America;”

the next circle, “1776 Declaration of Independence,”

the last one, “1930 a tree falls.”

Our conditioning occurs imperceptibly.

I have never seen a literal depiction of the concept of terra nullius before. This term is a legal fiction in public international law that allegedly created territories without masters. Through legal devices, Indigenous populations in existence for millennia are forcibly forgotten. The references to Indigenous peoples within the tree’s timeline are all astonishingly decontextualized. Unnamed are the exact nations and peoples that were there long before the tree’s birth; unidentified are the ones that came afterwards.

Also erased from “the frame” are the peoples forcibly kidnapped and sold from Africa who were enslaved on these lands now known as the United States. No mention of their arrival, their labor, their lives, the legal abolishment of slavery, nor the quick instantiation of de facto racial apartheid and segregation of Jim Crow laws that followed. The tree is embodied, and Black peoples are relegated to nowhere.

The tree’s timeline metaphorically represents historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson’s work on slavery and “social death.” Patterson explains how the process of enslavement was marked by natal alienation from kin groups and homelands, general dishonoring, and complete and gratuitous violence and vulnerability. Enslaved peoples were relegated as social nonpersons – cast outside of what it means to be human. The general dishonoring is so total that there are no contributions from the social non-persons of enslaved Africans on the tree’s timeline.

This piece reconsiders foundational mythologies about the United States, the role of the law, the rule-based-international order, and Pax Americana’s upholding of the international rule of law. It concludes that the international order worth fighting for is a radically different world altogether.

Foundational Mythologies about the United States

Recently, several pronouncements about the purported need to expand American territory have emanated from the head of the United States: “Look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country.” President Donald Trump declared, “[W]e need Greenland for national security purposes.” On illegally annexing Canada and making it the 51st state, he ruminated, “Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.” Speaking on his colonial fantasies to illegally assert ownership of the occupied Palestinian territories, he proclaimed, “I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable,” and it could be “the riviera of the Middle East.” Although he has attempted to walk back some of these comments, the current occupant of the White House makes no pretense of hiding America’s empire.

Trump’s remarks have been incorrectly opined as an attempt to “make colonialism great again.” However, the variant of colonialism Trump is serving never receded.

Leave “Neo” Out of It.

This is a classic application of the concept of terra nullius. The difference is that the purported territories without masters that he names include several places within the Global North – Denmark and Canada, whose (disputed) territorial claims to sovereignty are recognized internationally and crucially would have been recognized before. While Trump has not called parties to a meeting to discuss how their collective commercial and imperial interests should be divided, his recent remarks are reminiscent of the Berlin Conference in 1885, when Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and King Leopold II of Belgium negotiated their competing imperial claims to different African territories.

Confronting Pax Americana from within the imperial core is a surprisingly challenging task. In Daniel Immerwahar’s book How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, he tells the story of U.S. empire by engaging with “the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited.” The “pathbreaking” nature of this book in the United States can only be understood against the persistence of American exceptionalism and the thoroughness of the populace’s indoctrination.

The United States is a settler-colonial project. Its imperial history and present are impossible to hide. Settler colonialism is a “structure not an event,” which historian Patrice Wolfe helps us to identify. Colonialism 101 covers the replication of the technology of subordination of Black, Indigenous, and other peoples’ whose systems, ways of being and lives were disregarded across the globe through direct and indirect forms of oppression. As the legal scholar Natsu Taylor Saito explains, “the freedom and prosperity equated with national security in the dominant narrative was dependent on territorial expansion, the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and the exploitation and control of Black labor.” Wolfe’s work enables us to recognize that “race is colonialism speaking.”

The devastating effects of colonialism, chattel slavery, and other forms of unfreedoms are strategically staged in the background. This is illustrated in the removal from our knowledge database that there was even a thing called the American Colonization Society. Or that it was responsible for “solving” the problem of a free Black population by exporting settler-colonialism. Consequently, White supremacists within the American Colonization Society, working with some formerly enslaved peoples established a settler-colonial state called Liberia in West Africa. James Baldwin, reflecting on this history, observed that when White “Americans responsible for sending” formerly enslaved Black peoples to Liberia, they did so, not because of emancipatory valuation of freedom, but because they “despised them, and they wanted to get rid of them.”

Many commentators point to the Second World War as a demarcation point between the colonial past and the decolonial present. But the reality of the American project blurs these lines. The undermining of the sovereignty of peoples colonized internally and externally by the United States is ongoing. The United States still claims several non-self-governing territories. Moreover, the connections between Pax Americana’s military interventions around the globe and its settler-colonial foundations are clear. This enduring aspect of United States imperial rule is unhidden unless you choose to forcibly forget.

Within Pax Americana we exist under imperial rule. To believe you can cut off the measures deployed in territories and occupied lands before they reach the metropole is to fundamentally misapprehend Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang effect, your position within empire, and to misunderstand the co-constitutive nature between the periphery and the center. In other words, if the measures are employed there, the threat or actual use of them are already here. Legal experts can unknow this reality or confront it.

The Role of Law

The law does not exist outside of society, material conditions, and hierarchical relationships of power, and it never has.

Commentators can choose to foreground the existence of human agency in law by excavating how all forms of human law, “reflects various characteristics of human decision-making that are also observable in other contexts, such as the influence of emotion and cognitive biases.” Or they can elect to background the fact that only human actors can give meaning to rules. By definition, issues of legality are fundamentally indeterminate and unresolvable. As legal scholar Anthony Farley accurately surmises, rules “do not determine the circumstances of their own application,” and the rules “regarding the application of rules do not determine the circumstances of their own application.” The entire premise of the legal profession is based on this. To pretend now, as if the law exists somewhere, and is ascertainable in a vacuum, is to fundamentally miseducate the populace, not only about the nature of, but also the role of the law.

Yet, the preeminent and consistent role given to legal formalists in explaining this moment of crisis to us is shocking to witness as the guardrails we have been told are rock solid to protect us, seemingly fall by the wayside one by one. For example, legal institutionalists responded to the recent removal of inspector generals (IGs) with code and verse about how a particular set of steps needed to be followed while the IGs were escorted and barred from their offices. The legal intelligentsia continued to insist in an increasingly fervent pitch, that a dog cannot play basketball while watching several dogs dunking over their heads from the three-point line.

We are in a clarifying moment about the law. This includes noticing the emergence of what legal scholars like Chaz Arnett call the “datafied state,” where the State expands social control and power and widens surveillance of peoples through datafication processes. We can also more easily perceive the influence of billionaires with the role that Elon Musk is asserting as Oligarch in Chief, as well as the more visible role of private sector actors in United States governance. Yet, the owning class is regularly protected in law – almost imperceptibly. Farley asserts that this occurs so subtly, it seems as if, “such protection were the protection of all people and not merely the protection of a master class residing within and above the dispossessed, a master class that dares not speak its name.” Greater honesty about this proclivity of the law, not just in moments of crisis with techno-state fusion, but even in the structural violence of normal times, would make us more inclined to demand a radical transformation of the status quo.

Rules-Based International Order

The currently lionized rules-based international order facilitated the transcontinental, transoceanic trade in enslaved African persons. It was created without regard for the perspectives of subaltern peoples over the partitioning of their homelands, polities, and practices of governance. The rules-based international order perpetuates and obfuscates acts of political, social, economic, legal, ecological, and racial violence, which have never been fully repaired. The complete capitulation of the project at the normative level is represented aptly in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibiting slavery, the trade in enslaved persons, and servitude, and in the same breath, creating carve outs for forced or compulsory labor imposed as a punishment for a crime.

As many theorists have argued, law is the monopoly of violence. According to Farley, the rule of law represents the “sigh and submission of the oppressed,” and reflects “the brutish grabbing and grasping and gobbling of as much as possible.” The current romanticization of the international order against this grounding, makes his dry observation even more necessary: “hell itself has its legalities.”

Given the exclusive and oppressive process of international law-making historically, what does not get included as law is as important as what is incorporated into law. The Non-Aligned Movement of States founded in 1961 brought together countries from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East to advance their interests and priorities through a legally non-binding Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in May 1974. The NIEO sought to establish an international order based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest, and cooperation amongst all states. The NIEO aimed to close the widening gap between the Global Souths and Global North, and to accelerate economic and social development.

If implemented, the NIEO would have necessitated far-ranging policy reforms, including reparative and distributive justice efforts that challenge entrenched commercial interests and powerful States. Tellingly, the Declaration was never enacted; the international rule of law was not reshaped to give effect to any of the principles it identified. The world that the NIEO sought to remedy in 1974 has gotten materially worse under the rules-based international order.

In April 2023, the United Nations Secretary General released a dire report on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at providing a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” The seventeen goals include objectives like no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being amongst others. The U.N. Secretary General warned the 191 U.N. member States who agreed to the SDGs in 2015, that “halfway to the deadline for the 2030 Agenda, we are leaving more than half the world behind. We have stalled or gone into reverse on more than 30 percent of the SDGs,” he urged, “Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda will become an epitaph for a world that might have been.”

Yet, the problem is not one of scarcity. Indeed, the current maldistribution of resources has resulted in just 26 people having the same wealth as half of the world’s population and record levels of inequality. This profoundly unjust status quo is an indictment of the rules-based international order. It reveals how zones of sacrifice persist – the bodies, lives, health, wellbeing of the vulnerable, of those on the periphery, those marginalized in society, who are treated as waste, discarded as if they are disposable in the Global North and Global Souths.

Pax Americana & the International Rule of Law

The myths that hide Pax Americana and the vagaries of the international legal order are in a delicate dance. American leadership has varyingly participated in the rule-making exercise internationally, seeking primarily to limit the application of any rules to its project, but making sure to weigh in on the terms for others. There are numerous examples of Pax Americana’s strategic engagement with the rule-based-international order including the U.S.’ disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan during Bush II’s presidency.

An oft cited example of the development of the “rule of law among nations,” is when Americans, British, and Soviet Union leaders decided to pursue criminal court proceedings for the punishment of defeated Nazi leaders instead of by “executive decree.” One legacy of the rules-based order emerging from the Nuremberg trials would presumably be the restriction of extra-judicial killings. Yet, this has not proven to be the case. Under the Obama administration, the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya had U.N. Security Council authorization to take all necessary measures, “excluding an occupation force” to protect civilians. Instead, they embarked on a regime change operation to depose the Libyan President. Buoyed by the intervention, rebel forces killed a head of state ultra vires while an international arrest warrant was pending execution. Remarkably, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) November 2011 decision mundanely states, “the purpose of criminal proceedings is to determine individual criminal responsibility” and cryptically notes, “that jurisdiction cannot be exercised over a deceased person.” Notably, the lessons learned from the commentariat concern leaders hanging onto power, or the future applicability of humanitarian interventions.

The dispensing of an international trial is a nonevent.

Our conditioning occurs imperceptibly.

More recently, in November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Head of Hamas, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (Dief), Commander-in-Chief of Hamas, and Ismail Haniyeh, Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the Minister of Defense of Israel, alleging that they bear criminal responsibility for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israeli forces reportedly killed Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh. Israeli forces also reportedly killed Mohammed Deif. Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, described the discarding of all legal process as “justice served.” Pax Americana’s claims to upholding a rules-based international order echoed through the legacy of Nuremberg’s lead American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson is bookended fittingly here.

The rule-based international order is the rule of men after all.

Pax Americana Exiting the Rules Based Order?

The dance between the rules-based order and Pax Americana has recently gotten hectically off track. When leaders eschew openly embracing the U.S. imperial project, benign and benevolent views of the United States as a force for good in the world are able to flourish and persist. However, being confronted with the imperial logics of Pax Americana can prompt a bewildering crisis of cohesion and challenging of priors.

Palestine is a portal to see both the field of international law and Pax Americana more clearly for what they are. The purported frustrations by the Biden administration and public admonitions to Israel to “limit civilian casualties,” all the while continuing a policy of funding and arming the slaughter of Palestinians, underscores the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the Biden administration agreed with Israel’s determination that Palestinians be cast outside of “civilians and civilian objects.” Further, the Biden’s administration insistence that Israel has a right to defend itself, as justification for its ongoing and escalating military and financial support for Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, proceeds as if international law does not have distinct bodies of law that govern the use of force which pertains to the purported justice of war (jus ad bellum), and a different one governing the laws of armed conflict, which covers what is just and fair conduct in war (jus in bello). Ordinarily, the reason an actor is using force, and its validity, is legally irrelevant in terms of international humanitarian law, which determines what one can do after resorting to force. The claimed justness of the cause of war does not give carte blanche to use any means and methods of force in conflict. Yet, Pax Americana proceeds as if the rules-based order and its dictates simply do not exist.

The United States lodged several unsuccessful arguments for treating like cases dissimilarly with respect to Palestine. Pax Americana’s actions has seriously undermined multiple institutions of the rules-based order including disregarding: the U.N. Security Council (with vetoes to several cease fire resolutions), the International Court of Justice (in cases concerning Israel’s occupation and allegations of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories), the U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (findings of war crimes and crimes against humanity); and defunding the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees.

Trump’s presidency thus far has also aimed its sights on other aspects of the rules-based international order, accelerating the destruction of institutions put in motion decades prior to his inauguration. The Trump administration issued executive orders to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Human Rights Council. It is also defunding several international organizations including the U.N. Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization and the World Food Programme. The Trump administration asserts that these bodies are acting “contrary to the interests of the United States.”

The Call to Urgency

Recently, legal experts have issued several calls to arms to defend the rule of law and international institutions.

The “wretched of the earth” live a different material reality.

The rule of law has already abandoned itself.

The rules-based international order is revealing its own irrelevance by unremembering its own death.

Diane Desierto refers to Pax Americana’s disentangling from the rules-based-international-order as effectively undoing the grand bargain of the San Francisco Conference where delegates of 50 States gathered to create the United Nations in April 1945. At that time, 750 million people, about a third of the world’s population, were subject to colonial domination and rule. The implicit terms of the grand compromise for newly independent states are reflected in Ghana’s first president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s statement, “seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added onto you.”

Literary scholar and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of the “double-bind of freedom” is exceptionally generative to deploy. Hartman clarifies how Black peoples have “burdened individuality,” following emancipation. Hartman describes how formerly enslaved peoples are “free from slavery and free of resources, emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject.” Extrapolating burdened individuality globally has significant resonance. The social contract negotiated by many Black, Indigenous, and other peoples’ struggle for freedom internationally resulted in the acceptance of a pyrrhic victory of independence that can mask the fundamentally inequitable, exploitative, and hierarchical nature of the international order, which gets recast as a mutual exchange between States.

Some like Haiti, had to literally pay for its freedom. Following the heady days of the Haitian Revolution from 1791-1804, the defeat of France, and the independence celebrations of the first country to be created by formerly enslaved persons, France required Haiti to pay reparations in exchange for it recognizing its nascent sovereignty. France saddled Haiti with large, odious debt for many years as a condition for its freedom and recognition of its independence. This precarious economic position rendered Haiti exceptionally vulnerable. The United States also subjected Haiti to occupation and numerous foreign interventions and interference over the years. The burdened sovereignty of the Haitian political project reflects the limitations and hinderances that defined(s) many of the political projects of States in the Global South.

Despite the long history of extraction, instead of receiving compensation for reparative claims post-independence, newly decolonized States got nothing. After World War II, as Desierto details, outside of Germany, no other “reparations agreements would be reached for most of the rest of the world,” including Japan, which waived the reparations claims of its nationals subjected to the U.S. atomic bombing of them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

To counter this material reality, newly independent countries aspired to reshape the world in equitable ways in the NIEO proclaiming, “the right of all States, territories and peoples under foreign occupation, colonial domination or apartheid to restitution and full compensation for the exploitation and depletion of, and damages to, the natural resources and all other resources of those States, territories and peoples.” Instead, countries received trivial amounts of foreign aid, which did not fairly or adequately compensate them for centuries of exploitation, extraction, and unjust enrichment.

Incredibly, the 2022 World Inequality Report estimates that contemporary global inequality is close to the early 20th century peak of Western imperialism. Significantly, this report was released years before Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

The calls to urgency now are both perplexing and vexing to observe.

Where have you been?

What world are you living in?

Calls to uphold the status quo do not even acknowledge the obscene ask to defend subjugation, ratification of conquest, and aggression, nor the fundamentally inequitable bargain that subaltern peoples are being called to implicitly make.

Once again,

                       without

                                        paying

                                                         what

                                                                        is

                                                                                  owed.

Conclusion

This moment presents us with renewed ability to envision the world without Pax Americana playing global cop of the rules-based international order. Mariame Kaba organizer and educator, informs us that when people consider a world without police they are fearful. Similarly, when people imagine an international society as violent as this one, merely without Pax Americana they recoil. However, abolition is a transformative goal. It represents the horizon. Experts have illuminated the process of abolition as gradually “replacing and supplanting the dominant methods of enforcements” internationally with “radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms.”

Recognition is past due that the operating principles of Pax Americana and the rules-based order are inherently bankrupt. Both regulatory frameworks are fundamentally harmful and morally unsustainable. They need to be abolished.

Not defended.

This is not an argument about the outliers or excesses of each systems’ operations. Nor is this a functionalist claim that these systems of regulation as practiced are ineffectual and exacerbate the problems that they seek to solve. Even if those contentions are correct, the problem with that line of reasoning is it fosters tinkering around the margins reforms. Yet, the systems that would need to replace Pax Americana and the rules-based international order are so qualitatively different that we must transform substantially away from both regulatory forms of governance.

Abolition is a framework that can offer some guidance. Abolitionists’ scholars conceptualize justice as “an integrated endeavor to prevent harm, intervene in harm, obtain reparations, and transform the conditions in which we live.” In Race & National Security (2023), contributors offer visions for reforming and transforming national security. Aziz Rana:

encourages us to adopt the same anticolonial imagination that circulated during the global era of decolonization and to direct it at the American security project itself. Radical imagination, according to Rana, necessitates rejecting the presumptive legitimacy of the state’s international police power. For Rana, radical imagination includes ending the colonial status of all the existing territorial dependencies— in line with the genuine political desires of local and self- determining communities. Rana also suggests that such radical imagination encompasses everything from sharing sovereignty with Native peoples and land return to reparations, decriminalizing the border, transformative and structural reforms to intelligence and policing apparatuses, and providing judicial avenues for the remedy of past colonial crimes as well as contemporary national security ones.

Returning to these radical imaginings of anti-subordination, reparative, and distributive justice, and decolonization represented in the Black Radical tradition, the NIEO, abolitionists’ insights, and elsewhere, and building on these with transformative actions towards freedom, is essential to face the demands of the moment.

The world worth fighting for is a radically transformed one.

IMAGE: Age rings are shown on a cut section of a Coastal Redwood tree at Muir Woods National Monument on August 20, 2013 in Mill Valley, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The post Pax Americana: How Not to Hide an Empire appeared first on Just Security.

The conflict has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries, with estimates of 15,000 killed and more than 20,000 injured. The humanitarian crisis is dire, with millions facing severe food shortages. Around 25 million people are in need of assistance, 8.1 million are internally displaced, and 2.9 million people have crossed the border since April 2023. Recent discussions at the United Nations General Assembly highlighted the urgent need for international intervention and support.

Meanwhile, the most recent clashes in Khartoum suggest a possible shift in the balance of power, as both sides continue to vie for control amid an increasingly fragmented landscape.

Co-hosting this episode is Just Security Executive Editor Matiangai Sirleaf. Matiangai is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Joining the show to discuss the conflict’s origins and its impact, and the international community’s response are Laura Beny, Nisrin Elamin, and Hamid Khalafallah.

Laura is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, Nisrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and Hamid is a Researcher at the University of Manchester.

Listen to the episode, with a transcript available soon, by clicking below.

The post The Just Security Podcast: Assessing the Origins, Dynamics, and Future of Conflict in Sudan appeared first on Just Security.

Just how have those bodies ruled? What have they chosen to condemn as violations of community norms and what conduct has been silenced or omitted? And what does all of this mean in practice, both as a matter of international law, for third-party States, and for the people on the ground?

Joining the show to unpack how international courts and institutions have addressed the situation in Palestine are Shahd Hammouri, Ardi Imseis, and Victor Kattan.

Shahd is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Kent Law School, Ardi is an Associate Professor and the Academic Director of the International Law Programs at Queen’s University Law School, and Victor is an Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law.

Co-hosting this episode is Just Security Executive Editor Matiangai Sirleaf. Matiangai is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

Listen to the episode by clicking below.

The post The Just Security Podcast: Assessing the Recent Response of International Law and Institutions in Palestine and Israel appeared first on Just Security.

Palestine is a litmus test and, as I wrote in a recent article in the International Journal of Transnational Justice, is unearthing “who has historically been entitled to levy the charge of genocide, which genocides have been cognizable, and which have been unremembered.” A technical and legal discourse abounds about whether particular standards are met for international crimes. The hyper-focus on labeling can conceal the incredibly unjust status quo, divert attention from its oppressive character, and potentially limit organizing for alternative ways of being.

The rhetorical power to name and, crucially, fail to name has historically been wielded against subordinated groups. Concomitantly, many individuals, groups, civil society organizations, and States engage in advocacy, and explicitly rely on the symbolic power of naming and acknowledging harms. As legal scholar Natalie Hodgson observes, this can provide “civil society with a way to sociologically criminalize the state from below and challenge the hegemonic beliefs that enable state crime.” Naming allows for identification and acknowledgement, clarification, confirmation, affirmation, and perhaps validation. I argue that “the very act of naming has an expressive condemnation function,” which “operates to stigmatize an offender for a violation and to alert the public about an offense.” I contend that “proceedings and their outcomes can serve as forms of moral communication used to express condemnation, revalidate a victim’s worth and strengthen social solidarity.”

This piece analyzes some of the most recent pronouncements of international bodies on Palestine, to surface what they have chosen to condemn as violations of community norms. The expressive power in naming a given situation of mass atrocity a genocide or not, a crime against humanity or not, and so forth, has social meaning and effects that are independent from legal connotations. Yet, power has often resolved the question of who is entitled to define and invoke these charges legally, socially, and practically. In this context, appeals for more international law, or to the rule of law, and universal principles, must be sensitive to how law is made, how it operates in practice, and how it is often selectively applied and enforced against racialized others.

The Commission of Inquiry

On June 19, 2024, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel presented its report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. The report presents the Commission’s legal findings.

The Commission concluded that “both the 7 October attack in Israel and Israel’s subsequent military operation in Gaza should not be seen in isolation.” To stop the recurring cycles of violence, the Commission called for strict adherence to international law, including “ending the unlawful Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, discrimination, oppression and the denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and guaranteeing peace and security” for Israelis and Palestinians. The Commission found that on Oct. 7, 2023, members of Hamas’ military wing and the military wings of other Palestinian armed groups, and Palestinian civilians, committed the following war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against civilians, murder or wilful killing, cruel treatment, inhumane treatment and torture, taking hostages, and acts of sexual violence, amongst others. The Commission also found that “Israeli authorities failed to protect civilians in southern Israel on almost every front,” and that in several locations Israeli forces “applied the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’” and killed Israeli civilians.

Additionally, the Commission determined that “Israeli authorities are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the military operations and attacks in Gaza since 7 October 2023.” The Commission asserted that Israel committed the “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare; murder or willful killing; intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects; forcible transfer; sexual violence; outrages upon personal dignity; and” sexual and gender-based violence, “amounting to torture or inhuman and cruel treatment.” The Commission found that “Israel inflicted collective punishment on the Palestinian population in Gaza, in direct violation of” international humanitarian law. Further, it remarked that Israeli forces directed attacks against civilian and civilian objects in violation of “principles of adequate precautions, distinction, proportionality, and special protections for children and women,” under international humanitarian law.

The Commission also noted that Israel committed crimes against humanity including: “extermination; murder; gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys; forcible transfer; and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.” Additionally, it determined that Israel violated several international human rights obligations including: “the rights to family life, adequate food, housing, education, health, social security, and water and sanitation, particularly impacting children and persons in vulnerable situations.” Also, the Commission observed that Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank have exceeded “any other period since 2005,” due to “a surge in violent settler attacks on Palestinian communities, often assisted or condoned” by Israeli forces.

Legal scholar, Shahd Hammouri spells out several ways that the “commission fell short of meeting its obligation of truth-telling.” Notably, the Commission did not make legal findings pertaining to genocide, nor engage in analysis on the prevention of genocide. It declared Israeli officials’ statements constituted “incitement and may constitute other serious international crimes.” The report also highlights statements “aimed at systematically dehumanizing Palestinians.” The Commission’s investigations cover the period from Oct. 7, 2023, to Dec. 31, 2023. Its investigations are ongoing. Yet, by November 2023, several U.N. experts were already “calling on the international community to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people.” Further, in October 2023, scholars were warning about the “potential for genocide.” Yet, the report only recommends that the Israeli government comply “fully and immediately” with the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) orders in the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) case. Notwithstanding the Commission’s seeming reluctance to consider whether Israel is currently committing genocide, a report by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe this threshold is met.

A U.N. snapshot of the reported impact on Palestinians in Gaza, as of July 10, is 38,295 fatalities, 88,241 injuries, 1.9 million internally displaced persons (90 percent of Gaza), and 96 percent of the population projected to face crisis or worse levels of food insecurity (745,000 facing emergency levels, and 495,000 facing catastrophic levels). Moreover, U.N. experts recently declared that “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.” The slaughter in Gaza has meant that approximately 21,000 children are missing, “many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Israel has decimated an estimated 70 percent of all civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including schools, industrial facilities, health facilities, religious institutions, press offices, and water systems, which is rendering Palestine uninhabitable. A U.N. Development Program report in May 2024 estimates that Gaza will need 80 years to “restore all the fully destroyed housing units.” Further, a U.N. official remarked that the massive level of destruction in Gaza in such a short time, has not been seen since World War II and that “[a]ll investments in human development . . . for the last 40 years in Gaza have been wiped out.” This has laid the groundwork for a “lethal combination of hunger and disease,” and an entirely preventable public health emergency that will have long-lasting ramifications. A study published in the Lancet, a premiere medical journal, on the “indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence,” estimated conservatively (based on 4:1 indirect deaths per direct deaths, and using an approximate death total from June 19, 2024 of 37,396) that “up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” The U.N. snapshot of the impact of October 7th in Israel estimates over 1,200 fatalities, 5,400 injuries, over 200 hostages taken and approximately 120 remaining in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court

While the Commission can only investigate individual criminal and command responsibility, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is empowered by the Rome Statute to investigate and to try individuals charged with “the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.” Palestinian representatives have repeatedly sought to get the ICC to invoke its jurisdiction over crimes taking place in its territory dating back to 2009 and 2015. Palestine was formally recognized and allowed to become a State Party to the Rome Statute in 2018. It then submitted a referral to the prosecutor “to investigate, in accordance with the temporal jurisdiction of the Court, past, ongoing, and future crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction, committed in all parts of the territory of the State of Palestine.” The ICC finally opened an investigation in 2021 to cover alleged crimes committed “in the occupied Palestinian territory. . . since 13 June 2014.” In 2021, legal scholars Noura Erakat and John Reynolds observed that the delay by the Court reflects a lack of a sense of urgency and political will to proceed with the situation in Palestine in earnest.

Several States and organizations have filed complaints and referrals to the ICC following Oct. 7, 2023. On May 20, 2024, the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC applied for arrest warrants. The Prosecutor’s office states it has reasonable grounds to believe that Yahya Sinwar (Head of Hamas), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, (Commander-in-Chief of the military wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades), and Ismail Haniyeh (Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau) bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes against humanity: extermination, murder, and other inhumane acts. Additionally, they are alleged to bear criminal responsibility for rape and other acts of sexual violence as well as torture as both crimes against humanity and war crimes. Moreover, the application names them as potentially bearing criminal responsibility for the following war crimes: taking hostages, cruel treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity.

Further, the application asserts that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, the Minister of Defense of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for both crimes against humanity and war crimes. The application alleges crimes against humanity including: extermination, murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, as well as allegations of war crimes, including: starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to body or health, or cruel treatment; willful killing or murder; and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.

Strikingly, there is a discrepancy between who the ICC named and who the Commission deemed the most responsible for the international crimes it investigated. This includes, for example, “senior members of the political and military leadership of the Israeli State, including members of the War Management Cabinet and the Ministerial Committee on National Security, other Ministers of the Government and leaders of the” Israeli military. Some Palestinians have also expressed concerns about false equivalence given the magnitude of how many Palestinians have been killed and harmed. The perception of double standards and selective accountability has also played out in the ICC’s investigation with the relative under-resourcing and under-staffing of this situation. Similarly problematic is the length it comparatively took for harms to be named, from 2021 to 2024. Additionally, the prosecutor’s authority to investigate extends back to 2014, but thus far, arrest warrants temporally focus on October 2023 and afterwards.

Moreover, there are significant omissions from the substance of what has been named and recognized by the ICC as a potential violation of community norms. Consider Palestinian human rights organizations Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ request that the Prosecutor weigh “the inclusion of crimes against humanity, notably apartheid, and the crime of genocide, in the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine.” Conspicuously, the Prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants does not include charges of genocide, nor apartheid. Yet, groups like Law for Palestine have documented over 500 instances of incitement to genocide by Israeli officials. Additionally, Human Rights Watch determined in 2021, and Amnesty International concluded in 2022, that Israel is committing apartheid against Palestinians. As socio-legal scholar Kamari Clarke argues, the act of “naming and ordering, without naming or prioritizing other global acts that are part of the world’s context for violence, perpetuates structural inequalities” and racial subordination. It is also why legal commentators like Rabea Eghbariah forcefully maintain that the “law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition.” The creation of new law and legal concepts is an urgent and necessary priority. Especially when we consider how extant laws silo and disaggregate harms in ways that render invisible the whole from the sum of its parts, such that we are less able to perceive and name the structural and embedded nature of harms.

The International Court of Justice

The International Court of Justice has been called on to adjudicate both structural and direct violence in Palestine. Unlike the ICC, the ICJ is a reactive body and does not initiate investigations. The ICJ is the principal court that can hear general disputes between States and give advisory opinions on international legal issues. It is an organ of the U.N. and focuses on determining State responsibility, as opposed to individual criminal responsibility. The Court issued an advisory opinion in the 2004 case on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The ICJ also held a six-day hearing beginning on Feb. 19, 2024 in the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory case, where an unprecedented 52 States and three international organizations presented arguments about Israel’s prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Currently, the ICJ is hearing a case initiated by South Africa in December 2023 against Israel. Most States around the world have ratified the Genocide Convention of 1948. South Africa followed the precedent set by the Gambia, when it brought Myanmar to the ICJ and secured provisional measures against it for alleged genocidal actions against the Rohingya ethnic minority. South Africa relied on the Court’s holding that the Genocide Convention creates obligations between its signatories, allowing them to hold each other accountable for breaches.

South Africa submits that “Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” It requested a provisional order “as a matter of extreme urgency” to protect Palestinians from “further, severe and irreparable harm.” The Court granted six of the nine provisional measures sought by South Africa in January 2024. This indicates the legal plausibility of South Africa’s case moving forward. Legal scholar Nimer Sultany aptly remarked that South Africa “seeks to protect lives that western countries seem not to care about – and for that reason, it [intervention] is both justifiable and honourable.”

South Africa repeatedly returned to the ICJ to seek additional emergency orders. For instance, the Court’s January 2024 order required Israel to “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to the people of Gaza. Several groups have criticized Israel for not complying with the Court. On Mar. 6, 2024, South Africa asked the Cout for additional provisional measures concerning widespread starvation in Gaza. The ICJ found “that famine is setting in,” and on Mar. 28, 2024, issued an emergency order, indicating that Israel, “ensure, without delay . . . the unhindered provision at scale . . . of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” Further, on May 24, 2024, the ICJ ordered additional provisional measures. The Court directed Israel to “halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The ICJ will not deliver a final judgment on the merits of this case for several years.

The fraying seams of the racially unjust world order are increasingly visible as Israel’s carnage of Palestine continues unabated. The ICJ depends on the U.N. Security Council for enforcement. However, the United States uses its permanent seat and veto on the Council to provide political cover for Israel and has repeatedly vetoed resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. The Security Council could only pass a temporary cease-fire resolution for the month of Ramadan, because the United States abstained. There is a prominent American seal on Israel’s decimation of Palestine. At the time of writing, a permanent cease-fire agreement remains elusive as Israel has indicated that it is not willing to stop “until all of objectives of the war have been achieved.”

What Is Remembered

In many ways, law helps to shape collective memory. I have noted with concern how the Genocide Convention’s provisions “apply prospectively and do not extend to any of the earlier genocides conducted on Black, Indigenous, and other subordinated groups, nor did it apply to the victims of the Holocaust.” The legality principle has functioned, as Kamari Clarke observes, “in one fell swoop” to remove “the numerous atrocities attendant to colonization and empire-building by Western powers from the gaze of this body of law.”

The forced forgetting of earlier genocides is on vivid display. For example, when Germany indicated its plans to intervene in support of Israel at the merits stage of the case, the Namibian president took umbrage. He declared that on:

Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20^th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of Namibians died in the [most] inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil. . . in light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, [Namibia] expresses deep concern with the shocking decision.

Germany has not provided redress, nor paid reparations for its actions in Namibia. Germany’s apparent “racial aphasia,” and Namibia highlighting the racialized politics of the historical recognition of genocide, is striking. The first lady of Namibia also took Germany to task on the 120th anniversary of the Herero-Nama genocide in January 2024. Germany only recently acknowledged that its actions in Namibia constituted a genocide at the time they engaged in it.

Germany’s politics of genocide remembrance and its contradictions are also evident when examining how Germany’s historical culpability, shame, and guilt for the Holocaust are surfacing in its policies of unconditional loyalty, support, and refusal to criticize Israel for its actions against Palestinians. Germany faces allegations of complicity in genocide. Nicaragua sought an emergency order from the Court requesting that Germany, “immediately suspend its aid to Israel, in particular its military assistance including military equipment.” Nicaragua claims that Germany’s support violates its obligations under the Genocide Convention as well as other international law norms. Although the Court has declined to indicate provisional measures so far, it is incredibly rare to see actors called to account for their purportedly genocidal actions internationally.

Moreover, the hypocritical positions of parties in analogous legal cases makes plain the extent of the mask-off moment we are experiencing in the racialized politics of recognition and remembering of genocides. A good illustration of this is how Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands intervened in the Myanmar case before the ICJ to advance a broad definition and lower threshold for determining genocide. They contended that since declarations of intent to commit genocide are rare, the Court should not solely focus on explicit statements or numbers killed, but reasonable inferences drawn from a pattern of conduct and factual evidence. Additionally, they maintained that genocidal actions can also include forced displacement from homes, deprivation of medical services, and the imposition of subsistence diets, if systematic. Yet, thus far, they have not sought to extend this reasoning to apply to Israel’s conduct in Palestine, and to intervene to support South Africa’s case at the ICJ.

I insist we recognize “international law does not operate in an ahistorical vacuum. The memory of racial and colonial violence is ever present and current manifestations of racial and colonial violence trigger earlier ones.” Acknowledging the erasure of a multiplicity of genocides from Namibia, to King Leopold’s Congo, wherein approximately ten million were killed through omission and commission, to the genocides of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, which decreased the population by approximately 90-95 percent, and other genocides, is incredibly urgent and meaningful. Discounting of this past renders more invisible and less discernable ongoing genocides, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and atrocities from the Sudan, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Ethiopia, Palestine, and beyond.

Redux

On May 29, 2024, South Africa delivered a public dossier of evidence on Israel’s intent and incitement to commit genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza to the President of the U.N. Security Council. It recalls to mind when the Civil Rights Congress in 1951 sought to petition “the General Assembly of the United Nations on behalf of the Negro people in the interest of peace and democracy, charging the Government of the United States of America with violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The We Charge Genocide petition condemns the U.S. government: “[o]ut of the inhuman [B]lack ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease.”

As I wrote recently, the “We Charge Genocide petition concerned not just the direct and spectacular physical violence of lynchings, but also the structural and systemic nature of violence against Black people.” The petitioners were relying on a structural account of genocide, which is provided for in the text of the Convention. It defines genocide to include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The petition illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and other subordinated peoples on the receiving end of genocides understood conceptually what genocides entail due to their lived experience.

Holocaust survivor and lawyer Raphael Lemkin is credited with originating the term “genocide” during the Second World War and subsequently giving it meaning in international law. Genocide scholar Alexander Hinton discusses how Lemkin feared that the We Charge Genocide petition would undermine his bid to get the United States government to ratify the Genocide Convention. Lemkin sought to stigmatize the petitioners as “communist sympathizers.” Lemkin also “downplayed the long history of violence committed against Black Americans,” and insisted that “[g]enocide means annihilation and destruction,” and “not merely discrimination.”

Yet, the petition clarifies that it is “incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people.” Instead, the petitioners stress that the Genocide Convention, “defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in” its “specific words, as ‘killing members of the group.’  Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or religious group is genocide.” The high threshold to meet this intent requirement was only inserted in the Convention to placate powerful States. Similarly, political groups were excluded from the definition to assuage influential States’ concerns about being implicated in genocide. Reflecting on this history is revelatory because from its legal inception, the concept of genocide has been wielded and interpreted in ways that appease dominant actors.

Unsurprisingly then, the We Charge Genocide petition was never publicly heard. Unremembering these political dynamics and insisting on scrupulously enforcing genocide as neutral, exceptional, and singular, not just legally, but also socially, reinscribes the functioning of imperial power and reifies the subaltern positions of those who lack(ed) international law-making power. Yet, historically subordinated peoples, as legal scholar Darryl Li discusses, “ have long narrated their own experiences of mass violence with reference to genocide.”

There are several parallels and important disjunctions to be drawn from considering these initiatives together. In the past and now, the mainstream media has largely ignored the charge of genocide. Similarly, the United States government engaged then, and is engaging today, in a campaign to discredit the charge of genocide. In my judgment, the “Civil Rights Congress’ We Charge Genocide petition in 1951 and now with South Africa taking up the case of genocide against Israel decades later, both function as shaming sanctions from the subaltern. In some sense it matters less what the outcome of the final proceedings are, than that the case was formally made.”

Conclusion

Palestine is a litmus test for morality as June Jordan warned, because of what it is unearthing about us – both our actions and inactions in this moment. What we remember, and what we forcibly forget, what we name, as well as who we silence. As I wrote in the International Journal of Transnational Justice, my positionality compels my writing:

Images from Palestine have taken me back to one of the most triggering and traumatizing experiences of my life, seeing war through the eyes of a child. The Liberian civil war resulted from power struggles after a coup d’état disrupted settler hegemonic rule. I remember as a kid trying to make sense of what was happening. I recall distinctly going from thinking this was a big sleepover with friends and family, to understanding quickly as we hid from the sounds of war that we were seeking shelter, security and solace in each other. That I had been in a position of privilege to say I did not want to eat this or that, but we were now rationing food and I was instead begging for leftovers.

I also remember asking my mother what ethnicity I should say I was, if asked by a militant. My mother is the descendent of formerly enslaved peoples who are termed Americo-Liberians, and my father is from a large ethnic group in West Africa: Mandingo. I knew enough about the history of Liberia to understand that membership in both groups was not ideal. One because of a history of settler colonialism, the other because Mandingos are viewed as outsiders having immigrated into Liberia from Guinea over the past 200 to 300 years.

When we fled Liberia, I remember seeing death and destruction on the path to the United States embassy. Decomposing bodies and dogs eating carcasses. I understood even at that early age that my ability to leave family and friends behind was conditioned on things that I had no control over. Status, hierarchy, and privilege were determinative. Things like where I was born, my ethnicity, my race, my class, all these things had a material impact on my chances in life. I learned early on that constructions like my nationality, and having citizenship in the imperial core, and my immediate family members having papers and green cards to the United States, meant that we could leave when others could not and had to stay on the periphery. My rights, my freedoms, my security and my chances were contingent, and based on arbitrary things not within my control.

And, so today, as American tax dollars are underwriting the evisceration of Palestine, supplying weapons, providing political cover, and ensuring that children’s earliest memories will be filled with atrocities, it is impossible to be silent.

What we can name and render cognizable and what we must un-remember and forcefully forget is deeply connected to the numerous atrocities embedded in the international order. The capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not, as well as who deserves empathy and recognition, and who does not, is linked to racial and colonial logics and projects, both past and present. Thus, we must continually question who has the power and moral authority to name and shape collective memory through law and beyond.

IMAGE: People raise flags and placards as they gather around a statue of late South African president Nelson Mandela to celebrate a landmark genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on January 10, 2024. (Photo by MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images)

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Vaccine apartheid as a concept calls attention to the effects of inequitable vaccine distribution policies on historically subordinated peoples. Vaccine apartheid has meant that people living in many countries in the Global South are being denied significant doses of vaccines. Some reports indicate that “for every 100 people in high-income countries, 133 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered, while in low-income countries, only 4 doses per 100 people have been administered.” Using vaccine apartheid to characterize this state of affairs is important because it troubles, and renders suspect, the use of terms like vaccine nationalism to describe countries hoarding enough supplies to vaccinate their populations several times over.

The euphemism of vaccine nationalism conveniently papers over the racialized distributional consequences of vaccine inequities. In “Disposable Lives: COVID-19, Vaccines and the Uprising,” I analyze how racialized notions regarding which lives are expendable are reflected in inequitable vaccine access and how COVID-19 has heightened the visibility of the disposability with which society views the lives of people of color. This presumed disposability is reflected in the paltry number of vaccinations, with only about 7% of vaccination completed for the entire African continent. That this meager percentage represents just over half of the entire supply of vaccines to African countries to date is abysmal.

Fatima Hassan, founder and director of the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa poignantly remarked:

I grew up in apartheid. I know what it means to be a second-class citizen or even a third-class citizen. And this is what we saw in this current pandemic. Black and brown people in Latin America, in Asia and Africa were told to wait. We were told that the knowledge wouldn’t be shared with us. We should participate in clinical trials. We should contribute to scientific knowledge, but we should wait, basically last in line, like we did during apartheid, for access to any kind of service, whether it was education or health, before we could get our vaccine.

Some have sought to locate the reason for these delays in the lack of production facilities and other impediments, such as the need for vaccine storage at subzero temperatures requiring the development of a cold distribution chain for vaccine administration. Notwithstanding these issues, the root causes of vaccine disparities lay in legal and policy barriers to access.

The Lack of Global Solidarity

Instead of a recognition that global solutions are needed to address the COVID crisis, many countries have prioritized and competed for bilateral deals, which have driven up prices. Additionally, rich countries have not sufficiently supported and funded global health initiatives such as COVAX, which is the principle vehicle that the World Health Organization (WHO) is utilizing to deliver COVID-19 vaccinations to people in low- and middle-income countries.

The WHO developed a recent strategic plan to address critical disparities in access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, vaccines and personal protective equipment in low- and middle-income countries. An estimated $23.4 billion (USD) funding is needed until September 2022 to implement a plan which would only deliver sufficient doses and support “vaccination campaigns to achieve 43% coverage” in the targeted countries. While this is ultimately aimed at contributing to the global target of 70% coverage in all countries by mid-2022, the arrival and spread of the Delta variant has already indicated what the dangers of haphazard and lackadaisical vaccination programs are. Low global rates of vaccination allow space for the virus to mutate and propagate into potentially more dangerous forms. Moreover, even if COVAX were fully funded, relying on the munificence of others to donate money or share vaccine surpluses is fundamentally flawed as a public health strategy given the need to vaccinate entire populations.

Philanthropy Cannot Buy Equality

In October 2020, India and South Africa made the case that an intellectual property “waiver should continue in effect until widespread vaccination is in place globally, and the majority of the world’s population has developed immunity.” The proposal seeks to reshape the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime in significant ways by enabling substantial technology transfer for effective COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostic tests. The joint submission covers not only patents, but also copyright, industrial designs, and undisclosed information including know-how and trade secrets.

South Africa and India modified this proposal in May 2021 to instead request a three-year waiver. They also revised the proposal because of “the concern of continuous mutations and the emergence of new variants and consequently the many unknowns with respect to SARS-COV-2 and its variants and the global need for access as well as the importance of diversifying production and supply.” The waiver proposal is co-sponsored and supported by the African group of states as well as several other countries in the Global South. Notably, China, France, and the United States have all expressed support for the waiver proposal. However, the United States has limited its support of the wavier proposal to vaccines.

The pharmaceutical industry opposes the waiver proposal along with several others primarily based in the Global North, like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The European Union has even gone so far as authorizing countries to limit exports of vaccines. Those that oppose the waiver proposal contend that intellectual property rights are necessary to incentivize research and development. On their view, equitable access to vaccines can be achieved through voluntary licensing and technology transfer arrangements. But, as South Africa forcefully argued at a WTO General Council Meeting, “[T]he problem with philanthropy is that it cannot buy equality . . . the model of donation and philanthropic expediency cannot solve the fundamental disconnect between the monopolistic model it underwrites and the very real desire of developing and least developed countries to produce for themselves.” The waiver proposal has been stalled between these competing positions as the TRIPS Council operates on a consensus model for decisions. This impasse will likely not be resolved soon as the next World Trade Organization ministerial conference has been postponed indefinitely in light of Omicron.

Meanwhile, vaccine apartheid persists. Pharmaceutical companies have exercised their monopoly power to artificially limit supply and to prevent others from accessing the publicly funded technologies needed to create the vaccines. Some companies like Moderna, one of the most efficacious vaccine manufacturers, have promised not to enforce their patent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, it also does not own all the patents in its vaccine and cannot make credible commitments that bind other patent holders.

More importantly, the non-enforcement promise is a red herring since one would also need more than a patent to bring a vaccine to market, which is why the waiver proposal also covers copyright, industrial designs, and undisclosed information including manufacturing know-how and trade secrets. The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, said the quiet part out loud when he commented that “If someone wants to start from scratch, they would have to figure out how to make mRNA, which is not in our patents.” That process could take years to reverse engineer and Moderna has made clear that it is only willing “to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others for the post pandemic period.” In other words, the company will not share its vaccine recipe when the world needs it most. The multibillion dollar company also has demonstrated unwillingness in the past to distribute its vaccine to countries on the African continent during the pandemic. The WHO had to hire Afrigen Biologics to work on reverse-engineering the Moderna vaccine.

Moderna is by no means the only vaccine manufacturer that has refused to share its knowledge with the world. For example, in 2020, the WHO created a technology access pool to encourage pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge with manufacturers in other countries that need to develop vaccines, but no company has done so to date. Even the somewhat encouraging news about a licensing deal involving Aspen Pharmacare in South Africa is limited to the packaging and selling of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in Africa. The deal does not entail a technology transfer that would allow Aspen to manufacture its own drug substance and raise capacity.

Our Current Trajectory

If the current course is not corrected, vaccine apartheid will only deepen, and the resulting mal-distribution will render historically subordinated groups even more disposable. This apparent dispensability was made abundantly clear with the swift decisions by countries in the Global North to cut off southern African countries following South Africa’s genomic sequencing of the variant. Instead of being rewarded for tracing and alerting the world to a variant that was already circulating in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union and others were hasty to make decisions informed by “Afrophobia” as the President of Malawi aptly termed it.

As I argue elsewhere, responses to the coronavirus continue to be informed by “outdated but persistent settler-colonial conventions that have mapped illness and disease on to racialized peoples and certain geographic regions.” The response to Omicron reflects the racialization of diseases and embodies the tendency to attach racial meaning to ailments based on the racial groups that tend to be socially associated with a given illness. We witnessed this with the Ebola epidemic, which similarly “resuscitated historical images of Black African bodies as uncontainable and disease-ridden and sparked racialized fears.” This fear of other and their diseases reminds us quite powerfully how the history of diseases and responses to diseases is linked to politics of racial exclusion and racial subordination.

Disease carrying microorganisms are certainly not differentiating amongst people based on race, nationality, ethnicity, or other categories, but SARS-CoV-2 is discerning between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. At the time of writing, the Omicron variant is present in at least twenty-four countries and may be circulating elsewhere undetected. Yet, unfair travel restrictions targeting Africans has lamentably prevented the ministerial meeting to discuss redressing vaccine inequities. The sheer magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic in deaths and illness concomitant with the scale of vaccine redlining make evident that a significant level of legal reform and restructuring is required to meet the challenges of the current moment. If the ongoing pandemic and the emergence of Omicron and other variants is going to teach us anything, the lesson must be that until we are all safe, none of us are safe.

Photo credit: People wait on a bench waiting to be vaccinated at Parirenyatwa group of hospitals on Dec. 1, 2021 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is among the southern African countries facing travel bans after the Omicron Covid-19 variant was first reported in neighboring South Africa. (Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images)

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How does race manifest in national security?

National security as traditionally conceived refers to protecting a nation from attack and encompasses areas like economic, monetary, energy, environmental, military, and political security, as well as natural resources. Yet, do the field and concept of national security as practice and theory stretch to include issues of racial justice? How does white supremacy inform and shape the parameters of what “counts” as national security? How do ideas about race perpetuate and reinforce existing hierarchies in national security? Does national security law and its implementation subtly or directly facilitate racial subordination nationally and globally? What benefits or limitations does race have as an analytical tool for practitioners, policymakers and scholars of national security? What would it mean to race national security?

The increasing attention to issues of racial justice both domestically and internationally and the ongoing uprising challenging the racial status quo warrant an explicit engagement with these questions and motivate this series. The primary purpose of the “Racing National Security” series is to render race visible in national security. Failing to see race and engage with race render the role of racism and white supremacy invisible in national security and limit effective problem solving.

The failure to engage explicitly with race and racial justice is evidenced in some of the previous contributions in Just Security. This is not an issue unique to these contributions, but instead mirrors the longstanding backgrounding given to issues implicating race in this and other fora. This series intentionally seeks to uplift voices and topics that tend to be decentered in national security discussions.

The secondary aim of the series is to highlight the importance of a racial justice framework over and above one focused on racial discrimination. Racial justice as an alternative framework shifts attention to macro-structural processes that facilitate racial subordination and stratification as opposed to individual acts of discrimination. Makau Matua’s work draws attention to how international law, like national law, is captive to the racial biases and hierarchies that hide injustice under the pretext of legal neutrality and universality. Foregrounding race and racial justice, then, is a task that is necessary not only for the field and practice of national security, but the discipline of domestic and international law more generally.

Standing on Shoulders

“Racing National Security,” draws inspiration from a rich body of scholarship that positions racial justice as fundamental to understanding national security as praxis and theory. Many academics have long sought to bring issues of race from the periphery to the center in national security discussions. In 1998 Natsu Taylor Saito wrote in “Crossing the Border: The Interdependence of Foreign Policy and Racial Justice in the United States” that the ill-treatment of racial and ethnic minorities within the borders of the United States makes it easier to disregard the rights and humanity of those outside the border. Ruth Gordon’s “Racing U.S. Foreign Policy” questioned how race affects lawmaking and decision making in foreign policy and international law. Experts like Henry J. Richardson III have also examined the role of race in U.S. foreign interventions in “U.S. Hegemony, Race, and Oil in Deciding United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 on Iraq.” Aziz Rana’s research situated the United States alongside other settler societies marked by longstanding histories in which colonists and their descendants divided legal, political, and economic rights between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be they expropriated indigenous groups or racial minorities. Similarly, Tayyab Mahmud’s scholarship unearthed how constructions of race shaped the colonial encounter and influenced the development of nationalism and a security apparatus aimed at upholding racial hierarchy.

Researchers like Gil Gott have explained that the demonization of “enemy groups” is racialized in national security law and policy. This demonization is evidenced in the intersection between immigration law and policy and national security claims to safeguard White majoritarian interests from the racialized other. The work of scholars such as Wadie E. Said demonstrates how the construction of the terrorist, the criminal, and the illegal immigrant as “foreign” facilitates the migration of “War on Terror” practices from the global arena to the domestic, while in other instances police practices are brought to bear in the context of external wars. Similarly, professors like Sahar Aziz and Khaled E. Beydoun have made explicit connections between the targeting of Black and Brown populations as “terrorists” for dissident activity, in “Fear of a Black and Brown Internet: Policing Online Activism.”  While others like Darryl Li have scrutinized the consequences of policing transnational Muslim populations and the concomitant placement of some people outside the law and others above it. Nana Osei-Opare argues that this has resulted in mainstream discussions that obfuscate “White terrorism” from national security such that seemingly only non-Western bodies are capable of terrorism. Some intellectuals like Tina Patel even question whether the security framing simply masks racism inherent in counter-terrorism strategies.

From Racial Discrimination to Racial Justice

Recently, Just Security has featured several articles under the theme of racial discrimination. Shifting the framework to racial justice is necessary because a thematic focus on racial discrimination can unwittingly center individual pathologies, ideologies, and attitudes. This is because of the strong associations that tend to view racism as psychological. Indeed, Frantz Fanon pointed out the problematic predisposition to consider racial discrimination as the product of a mental quirk in “Black Skin, White Masks.” This series aims to move Just Security’s thematic focus away from a framing that can inadvertently elevate discussions of whether individual actors are “racists,” to a thematic focus that explicitly prioritizes addressing institutional racism and anti-subordination efforts aimed at fostering racial justice.

Moreover, some of the contributions filed under Just Security’s “racial discrimination” theme are better understood as ones that concentrate on issues of racial justice. For instance, “The United States’ Racial Justice Problem is Also an International Human Rights Law Problem” by E. Tendayi Achiume and “How Inter-State Procedures in Human Rights Treaties Can Support the Black Lives Matter Movement” by Nawi Ukabiala both turn to international human rights law for redress and to facilitate more racially just and equitable outcomes. Additionally, “Black Lives Matter Might Just Rescue American Democracy” by Oona Hathaway and Daniel Markovits and “Researchers on Atrocity Prevention Warn: US on Path to Widespread Political Violence” by Jeffrey Smith and Richard Ashby Wilson position the issue of racial justice as central to maintaining peace and democracy. Notably, Zinaida Miller problematizes the assumption that stability in the United States is less dangerous, violent, or threatening than instability since that very stability can be radically violent for communities of color that live under perpetual threat “whether of police brutality, economic dispossession, food insecurity, criminal violence, or immigration raids.” Moreover, Shirin Sinnar in “Invoking ‘Terrorism’ Against Police Protestors” laments the othering of often racialized groups as “terrorists.” While other contributors, like Danielle Schulkin in “White Supremacist Infiltration of US Police Forces: Fact-Checking National Security Advisor O’Brien: It’s More Than ‘a few bad apples,’” critique attempts at absolution through the characterization of police violence in the United States as episodic. This series expands on these discussions with the goal of continuing to turn the emphasis from instances of prejudice or racial discrimination to one that is oriented toward subverting white hegemonic power and dominance.

The Contributors

By delving into the fundamental role of race, contributors to this series assist in more completely capturing the field and practice of national security. I hope these contributions spark and revitalize debates beyond the confines of this series. I am acutely aware of the historical moment that is unfolding in the United States and elsewhere. The contributors similarly recognize not only the gravity of this moment but the opening and potential that it presents. The series is set to run until the end of July 2020 with contributions generally published every other day.

Contributors to the series will race national security from several different vantage points:

• Yuvraj Joshi on the potential and limitations of transitional justice as applied to addressing historical racial injustice in the United States (here).
• Monica Bell on the complexities surrounding policing and the challenges conceptualizing and realizing security for Black people in the United States (here).
• Aziza Ahmed on de-carceral efforts and the de-securitization of healthcare (here).
• Michele Goodwin on the intersection of race, gender, class, health and national security (here).
• Adelle Blackett on the implications of the uprising in the United States and racial justice at the United Nations and the International Labor Organization (here).
• Kamari Clarke on international criminal law’s blind spots and limitations regarding addressing ongoing and historic racial injustice (here).
• Jaya Ramji-Nogales on the relationships between race, migration, and national security (here).
• Aslı Bâli on the deployment of the language, rhetoric, tools and framework of the “War on Terror” and in national security more generally to the uprising in the United States (here).
• James Gathii on the national security apparatus’ historic suppression of anticolonial movements and the comparable attempt to suppress the uprising in the United States (here).
• Catherine Powell on linkages between the struggles between U.S. civil rights and international human rights and the convergence and divergence between the two as anti-colonial movements that fundamentally question the meaning of security (here).
• Noura Erakat on transnational solidarity in antiracism movements, linking military shoot-to-kill policies abroad to domestic policing in the United States and providing closing thoughts to the series (here).

By rendering race visible, the contributors in this series elucidate how race and the associated racial valuations attached to groups influence assessments of when it is in the interest of institutions, laws, and society to act on issues of national security. I hope these phenomenal offerings provoke and enrich readers. I know that the authors took the utmost care and thoughtfulness in managing these contributions. My hope is that this series helps to regenerate a concerted effort in transformative change and policymaking that is rooted in anti-subordination efforts.

Photo credit: Demonstrators protest Saturday, June 6, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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