Symposium | Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law at 20
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law at 20
by Ntina Tzouvala and Wanshu Cong
Published on 12 November 2025
We live in dangerous, disorientating times characterised by the global resurgence of authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism and xenophobia. As we are finalising this note, a precarious and unjust, but nevertheless necessary, ceasefire has been brokered in Gaza—one that offers Palestinians limited respite from a genocidal war, while also further excluding them from meaningfully determining their political future. In the US, the comprehensive remaking of the state, embarked upon by the second Trump presidency, is, amongst other things, manifested in a series of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in which the US government openly and crudely dismissed domestic or international law as systems that may constrain state violence. More broadly, the liberal international order that the US spearheaded after 1945 and, in particular, after 1990s seems to be collapsing rapidly, as its former guarantor is turning increasingly hostile toward its core tenets by for example replacing rules with ‘deals’.
In this context, our decision to reflect upon and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Professor Anghie’s pathbreaking Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (ISMIL hereafter) may seem out of place. After all, the political, legal and economic conjuncture that according to Anghie himself formed the background for this work, namely neo/liberal, Western triumphalism in the 1990s and early 2000s, is drastically different from today’s circumstances. Indeed, the current disintegration of the neo/liberal international legal order can trigger feelings of nostalgia for the post-Cold War settlement and make ISMIL appear unduly harsh in its scepticism. Echoing Anghie’s own concluding post to this symposium, we caution against such nostalgia. His work shows how the pathologies of the neo/liberal international legal order gave rise to some of the most destructive, violent and authoritarian tendencies that we witness today. For example, it is hard to ignore how the legal, administrative and discursive edifice of counter-terrorism and expansive interpretations of ‘self-defence’ are mobilised in Gaza, in Kashmir or in the Caribbean in precisely the ways that Anghie diagnosed and warned against in the early 2000s when he spoke of ‘imperialism as self-defence’.
At the same time, resisting neo/liberal nostalgia cannot be equated with an insistence that everything is essentially the same. Rather, the emerging international dis/order is in many ways markedly different from its predecessor. Take, for example, the ‘crown jewels’ of neo/liberal legalism. The World Trade Organisation is now rendered largely irrelevant thanks to Trump’s tariff crusades and bilateral deals, while the International Criminal Court faces punitive sanctions for daring to issue arrest warrants for US allies. More broadly, we contend that while international law remains an important tool for those opposing imperial violence, notably in the case of Palestine, and combatting planetary crises such as climate change, it has lost much of its popularity as a justificatory discourse for states and capital alike. It is true that the recourse to international law by states (especially powerful ones) and capital has always been selective, but the current moment is distinctive due to the radical disruption of mainstream neo/liberal consensus about the international order. Returning, then, to ISMIL is not an effort to affirm that nothing has changed in the structuring and unfolding of an imperialist global system, but rather an act of genuine intellectual engagement. Our hope is that this symposium will assist us and our readers in evaluating the arguments as well as political and ethical commitments of ISMIL. We will do so not to mindlessly repeat ISMIL’s core arguments treating them like uncritical mantras of critique, but to build on this invaluable inheritance to understand our own historical moment, which as all historical moments is a unique blend of continuity and rupture in regards to previous moments such as the one Anghie confronted in 2005.
The first two contributions of this symposium by Dr Zeina Jallad and Dr Sahiba Maqbool are timelier than we would prefer. Dr Jallad’s contribution is aptly titled ‘The Law Was Never Meant to Protect Us’. Drawing from ISMIL’S emphasis on the ‘colonial encounter’ as central to the formation of modern international law, Jallad offers a convincing critique of the economic dimensions of the Oslo Accords as encapsulated by the Paris Protocol of 1994. Jallad shows that, in the name of economic cooperation, the Protocol intentionally and systematically constructed a relationship of dependency between Palestinians and Israel, effectively making Palestinians subsidise their own occupation, and paving the way for the starvation of Gaza’s Palestinian population. Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza, therefore, should not obfuscate the fact that international law has for a long time embedded structural constrains into any effort for Palestinian self-determination.
In turn, Dr Sahiba Maqbool’s builds upon ISMIL’s ambitious legacy by critiquing the fundamentals of international law. Drawing from ISMIL’s focus on the colonial construction of postcolonial sovereignty, Maqbool meticulously shows how India was able to mobilise (and still does so) core international legal rules and concepts, such as the doctrine of state succession and the distinction between internal and external self-determination, in order to consolidate its rule over Jammu and Kashmir against the wishes of its inhabitants. The contributions of Jallad and Maqbool remind us that Anghie’s critique was not one simplistically directed against ‘the West’ nor one showing the postcolonial state as some ‘innocent victim’ of international law and colonialism. Rather, ISMIL offers indispensable tools for understanding the trajectory of many postcolonial states and their engagements with international law in ways that reproduce and reinvent, instead of challenging, the ‘dynamics of difference’.
It is a testament of ISMIL’s status as a true classic of public international law that it has inspired a broad range of readings and reactions across the world. In his own contribution, Dr Zhaoran Lin offers an illuminating account of the book’s reception in China. Lin documents the rising interest in Anghie’s work and, more broadly, in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) amongst academic and practicing international lawyers in China. His contribution documents the eclectic reception of Anghie’s core arguments in China: Chinese international lawyers show considerable interest in and engagement with ISMIL’s critique of Western imperialism and the role of international law in China’s historic subjugation, while paying no attention to the book’s reliance on postcolonial theory and its scepticism towards the state-form and sovereignty as such. This view from China raises an urgent question about the implications of ISMIL, and more broadly TWAIL, making inroads into international legal practice and reform. In our view, Mordizadeh’s recent critique of the purported the unwillingness and/or inability of TWAIL to articulate programmatic actions for political change misses the point here. Rather, we sense that with ISMIL at 20, other questions may be more apt: what disciplinary and even world-making projects have emerged that seek legitimacy through an invocation of the book’s arguments? What aspects of ISMIL are ignored or highlighted in this process, and what are the ideological and even material implications of our engagement with Anghie’s work and legacy?
Dr Phil Saengkrai’s contribution takes up these questions by insisting that Anghie’s work not only leaves space for but actually calls forth a hopeful mode of engagement with international law. Drawing from ISMIL’s insistence on the importance of history, Saengkrai recovers the role of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee (currently knowns as the Asian African Legal Consultative Organisation) in the process of the drafting of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Even though Saengkrai concedes that the outcomes of their efforts were mixed, he draws attention to the progressive afterlives of their work, including Thailand’s invocation of the problem of unequal treaties in its submission at the International Court of Justice for the Chagos Advisory Opinion and its argument that treaty interpretation should favour the weaker party in cases of ambiguity.
The next contribution, authored by Professor Sundhya Pahuja, also builds on ISMIL’s historicising impulses, but for very different purposes. Her contribution offers a diagnosis of the present and, in particular, the USA’s adoption of openly annexationist language against its neighbours and allies and the outright capture of domestic US politics by corporate interests. Her piece offers a powerful restatement of the ‘imperial boomerang’ thesis for the purposes of international legal analysis. Pahuja documents how the arguments and practices of imperial rule are now making their way back to the imperial centre. In particular, she contextualises the unfolding blending between sovereign power and corporate rule in the USA by reminding us that the corporation has always played a central role in imperial conquest and order-making. For Pahuja, the true scandal of the current moment is that such practices of authoritarian, self-enriching rule only became the object of international (legal) condemnation when deployed within and against the imperial core.
In his own concluding post, Professor Anghie offers a characteristically generous and detailed engagement with the work of the five contributors, while offerings his own important insights into the current political moment and its implications for international law. Two aspects of his contribution stand out for us, which grapple with the current historical moment as a combination of continuity and rupture—the theme that animates this symposium. First, Professor Anghie aptly demonstrates the centrality of the destruction of Palestine for TWAIL as an intellectual movement, for the vast majority of individual TWAILers, and for international law as a whole. Indeed, for him, the systematic destruction of Gaza ‘has now utterly changed everything, in ineffable ways’. TWAIL scholars, such as Adil Hasan Khan, have picked up the mantle of thinking through the profound disciplinary and political implications of the genocide and, unsurprisingly, they have done so in close conversation with Anghie’s intellectual contributions:
This Third Worldist revelatory critique is not about seeing and then looking away but seeing and bearing witness to a truth about imperial power that is always already in the process of being covered—so that we, and those who come after, might not mis-remember. Revealing that which has already been seen by all, but lied about by those in power, is an activity through which a critic takes up the responsibilities of a witness.
This insistence on bearing witness to a truth about imperial power takes us to the second notable aspect of Anghie’s contribution: his diagnosis of the current moment as the rise of nationalist, annexationist imperialism, as a departure from and also as a product of neoliberal empire. One need not consider one mode of imperialism ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the other to observe that territorial expansionism has regained popularity amongst political leaders of nuclear powers, including Russia, the US and Israel. Professor Anghie urges us to resist nostalgia for the neoliberal empire by insisting that it was precisely this mode of power and its legal infrastructure that created explosive inequalities and injustices that fuel nationalist empire, while also making sure to acknowledge that there are meaningful differences between these two models of global ordering. This insistence on thinking through the specificity of the current moment while also acknowledging its deep historical roots is perhaps one of the greatest contributions of ISMIL—a contribution that goes far beyond the specific arguments and materials of the book and offers both intellectual and ethical guidance to scholars past, present and future.