Remembering the Russell Tribunal

Fifty years have passed since the International War Crimes Tribunal for Vietnam was convened by the philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell. Its goal was to investigate US crimes in Vietnam - not to punish individual perpetrators but to inform public opinion and arouse opposition to the war in ‘the smug streets of Europe and the complacent cities of North America’

Spectral expertise

‘Terribly unjust, subject to crisis, environmentally unwise, everywhere politically and economically captured by the few, and yet somehow impossible for anyone to alter or escape’: this is the world David Kennedy presents us with in his new book, A World of Struggle. [1] To understand its stability, Kennedy argues, we must turn away from traditional accounts that focus on the interstate system or the global economy, and look behind these apparent structures to the work of experts. Global political and economic life is increasingly formed not in the visible centres of political decision-making, but in the shadowy world of technical management. This is not a world of calm analysis and sage counsel, but of ruthless internal struggle and unceasing conflict. It is also one that remains largely invisible, impervious to contestation. A World of Struggle seeks to pull back the veil on the workings of expertise, offering a rich description of the expert knowledge practices that shape our world

50 years after Russell : an interview with Tariq Ali

You arrived in Britain from Pakistan in 1963 to study at Oxford and quickly became a central figure in the British anti-war movement. It was a letter to the Observer, though, in 1965, taking the paper to task for its support of US policy in Vietnam, which I believe first drew the attention of Bertrand Russell. He wrote to you congratulating you on your missive

The prioritisation of rule of law support from a peacebuilding perspective

Armed conflicts are increasingly interpreted as products of the breakdown of the rule of law. In turn, weak rule of law institutions are understood as a major challenge to early post-conflict reconstruction and long-term conflict prevention. Considered essential for the maintenance of peaceful social relations, rule of law reform has thus become a priority in peacebuilding activities in the periphery. Yet enforcing a liberal legal framework in war-torn countries has had mixed success at best, with reforms encountering severe diffculties in gaining the necessary legitimacy within disrupted communities to function authoritatively. This report explores the process of the prioritisation of the rule of law, presenting the assumptions that favour its application and the typical reforms implemented in the context of peacebuilding initiatives. In addition to discussing the current challenges to the modus operandi of external interventions, it makes concrete proposals for potential improvements

The ideological origins of piracy in international legal thought

This thesis explores the origins of the pirate in international legal thought. It takes as its starting point the recent wave of piracy off the coast of Somalia, mapping the image of the pirate constructed by contemporary legal commentators. The figure of the pirate that takes shape is the archetype of illegitimacy and epitome of enmity in international law: hostis humani generis. Where and when did this figure first emerge in international legal thought? My argument is twofold. First, against dominant transhistorical accounts which project the pirate backwards in an unbroken arc from the present to antiquity, I show that its juridical identity has been marked by fundamental discontinuities and transformations. Second, I locate the construction of a distinctly modern figure of the pirate in the emergence of a capitalist world economy in the long 16th century. The pirate’s universal enmity, I suggest, was initially religious in nature, an ideology rooted in inter-imperial rivalries confronting Habsburg Spain with Ottoman, in the Mediterranean, and Protestant, in the Atlantic, threats to a universalising Christendom. With the development of an early capitalist economy and the growing coincidence of imperial interests with trade, the image of the pirate began to change. In the work of Grotius, I argue, its enmity was transformed, the pirate rendered not as religious foe, but as enemy of a universal right to commerce. It is this new secular figure of enmity, the thesis concludes, that is produced and reproduced in modern legal thought

From Vietnam to Palestine : peoples’ tribunals and the juridification of resistance

In this chapter, I show how in the case of both the Vietnam and Palestine peoples' tribunals the tension between law and politics resolved itself into the question of these bodies’ relationship with international law. In both cases, international law and legality were foregrounded as the privileged frame of analysis and condemnation. Yet the two tribunals also differed in important respects, reflecting a shift over time in how the constitutive tension between law and politics was balanced. The embrace of international law by the Vietnam tribunal in the 1960s, at the height of the Third World movement and anti-colonial internationalism, can, I suggest, be understood as an instance of ‘principled opportunism’—legalism mobilised in aid of the tribunal’s broader practice of resistance against imperialism. By the time a peoples’ tribunal for Palestine was constituted in 2009, however, both Third World and workers’ movements had collapsed, the language of international law and human rights displacing other emancipatory frameworks in the political imagination of internationalism. This can be seen, I argue, in the even greater prominence awarded legalism by the Palestine tribunal, international law now not merely invoked tactically, but celebrated as the tribunal’s very raison d’être. In this way, peoples’ tribunals both reflect, and contribute to, the juridification of resistance

Dispensing global justice

The international criminal court is the newest would-be global institution to have been established by the big powers since 1945. [*] Its Statute, agreed at a conference in Rome in 1998, was ratified by the minimum necessary sixty states in 2002; the Court opened its doors in The Hague the following summer. The ICC raises both political questions—its relation to the major powers, above all the United States, and its function in world conflicts—and juridical ones. The history of international criminal law tends to be told as a teleological story of irreversible progress, in which the violence of cold state calculi gives way to a supra-political justice. Milestones along the way include the pre-1914 attempts to sanitize war between the European powers, when Swiss lawyers floated the idea of an international tribunal to back up the first Geneva and Hague Conventions, and the Versailles Treaty’s arraignment of the Kaiser for offences against ‘international morality and the sanctity of treaties’, never followed through. More salient have been the 1945–46 Nuremberg and Tokyo trials of selected German and Japanese officials; the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, set up in 1993 by the UN Security Council to try individual Serbian leaders, and a much smaller number of Croatians and Bosniaks, for ‘crimes against humanity’; and the less celebrated International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up by the UNSC in 1995. At the end of this narrative stands the ICC, ‘the most dramatic marker yet in the long human struggle for accountability’. [1