By Sabrina McLennon

Edited by David Barsemian, Ghayas Osseiran, and Alexander Bagdade

Beyond the cypress and olive trees of Mount Zion, the setting sun hides behind silver clouds and above warring factions, bathing Jerusalem anew in crimson-red, in a vain attempt to evade the panorama of bloodshed that has come to define the Arab-Israeli conflict. The genesis of the modern-day inter-communal antagonism plaguing historic Palaestina and Medinat Yisraʾel is traced to these antecedent events: the Balfour Declaration of 1917,  the British conquest of Palestine, and the subsequent termination of the British Mandate of Palestine. Accordingly, the 1948 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan contributed to a collapse of law and order in the region, as the withdrawal of British authority, shaped by its legal doctrines and positivist framework, was characterized by the breakdown of centralized control in ‘Mandatory Palestine’. Under the false pretext of the lack of a governing body in Palestine, as well as the February 1948 Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d’état, and the risk posed by a ‘power vacuum’ in the Middle East, the United States secured its national interests by framing the region as part of a broader policy of Soviet containment, prioritizing continued access to oil, and recognizing the State of Israel in 1948, effectively succeeding Britain as the dominant power in the region. For our purposes, a study of the interplay between media power and the Arab-Israeli conflict, in the paradigms of the Cold War, will interrogate media as a locus of power, the space wherein power is decided, and public opinion is forged. Through a Cold War prism, American foreign policy interests influenced meta-narratives on the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in the first Arab-Israeli war, and facilitated the construction of a democratic process in the Israeli press, as exemplified by the Israeli Communist Party's daily newspaper Kol Ha’am. Albeit the existence of over thirty Palestinian newspapers and periodicals between 1908 and 1914, print culture was heavily censored and constrained under the British Mandate for Palestine, limiting its political reach. By the détente period, however, the transnational influence of Third World revolutionary movements, particularly through the use of media, inspired by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to publish multilingual guerrilla publications and internationalize the history and legacy of al-Nakba and Palestinian self-determination efforts and independence movement.

Within the complex tapestry of the early Cold War, the bias in American news coverage forged international views on the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre from the Israeli War of Independence. Albeit the Haganah and Irgun functioned as the primary military appendages of the pre-state Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, they represented a deep internal schism over the 1947 UN Partition Plan, with the latter group and Revisionist leaders rejecting the proposal in favour of a “Greater Israel” vision first articulated by David Ben-Gurion at the 1942 Biltmore Conference. Such ideological rigidity led to the wartime calamity of the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, wherein at least 100 villagers were killed at the hands of this paramilitary group that sought a Jewish state encompassing the totality of Mandate Palestine. On the eve of Israeli statehood, May 15, 1948, the Irgun granted American correspondents information on the operation at Deir Yassin, a privilege otherwise denied to British counterparts; such strategic selectivity followed the 1946 King David Hotel bombing by the Irgun, which killed 91 people and fractured the Zionist relationship with Britain, explaining why the Jewish Agency, previously reliant on the 1922 mandate, shifted its diplomatic focus towards the U.S. for support.

Subsequently, the U.S. correspondent Dana Adams Schmidt's headline featured the 10 April 1938 issue of the New York Times:  ‘200 Arabs killed, Stronghold Taken; Irgun and Stern Groups Unite to Win Deir Yasin’. A reading of the end of the article, under the subhead ‘Victors Describe Battle' reads: “The Irgunists and Sternists escorted a party of United States correspondents to a house in Givat Shaul, near Deir Yasin [sic], tonight and offered them tea and cookies and amplified details of the operation.” Although on the full terms of the Irgun, the decision of the Jewish paramilitary to entrust the story to American correspondents foreshadows the eventual alliance shared between Washington and Israel. Moreover, Schmidt’s matter-of-fact narrative throughout the report is framed amidst President Truman’s remarks, in response to Secretary of State George Marshall, and large coalitions of American policymakers, “I am sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” Truman’s remarks at the American Society of Newspaper Editors stated that it was the patriotic duty of the press to support the President’s initiatives and ensure ‘the American people’ were behind U.S. foreign policy to hence safeguard ‘the welfare of the world’. As such, Schmidt’s account exemplifies the nexus of power and American media bias in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Effectively, by restricting access to solely U.S. correspondents, the Irgun report on Deir Yassin was used to center the narrative of its perpetrators. Inversely, Schmidt’s bold headline ’200 Arabs Killed’ introduced the Arab-Israeli conflict to the American public yet maintained political indifference to the bloodshed of Arabs, thus in line with U.S. foreign policy.

Furthermore, the media pluralism of the Israeli press, in concurrence with Israeli law, embodied the bastion of free thought, speech, and ‘pro-democratic’ values of Judeo-Christian civilization, hence aligning with U.S. interests in the Cold War. After the horrors of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, some 600,000 to 760,000 Palestinians retreated from areas of the homeland under Jewish authority. Thereafter, the establishment of a modern Jewish State in biblical Eretz-Israel was declared on 14 May 1948 by the de facto leader of Palestine’s Jews, David Ben-Gurion. Pre-dating the birth of Eretz-Israel by more than half a century, Hebrew newspapers existed as the mouthpiece for an assortment of political parties and constituted an integral part of Jewish revival in the land. In the pre-independence period, party newspapers were expected to help advance national goals, as defined by the politician-military elite. In the increasingly bipolar landscape of the 1950s, the Mapai – Israel’s left-leaning government – maintained a policy of neutrality with respect to the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite beginning to seek American support, they were not yet willing to openly declare allegiance to American leadership as to ensure the young nation-state’s independence, emphasizing national interest and “non-identification”. Thus, the January 1953 editorial of the Israeli Communist Party's daily Kol Ha’am (The Voice of the People) and its Arabic-language sister Al-Ittihad sent shock waves throughout the region by alleging that Israel had offered to send 200,000 troops to support the American war effort in North Korea, therefore ending neutrality. Kol Ha’am offered additional criticism: “[A]ll forms of surrender by the Ben Gurion Government, and all her demonstrations of faithfulness, will not avail her with her American masters.” In actuality, apart from its vitriolic language and exaggerated rhetoric, the article accurately described the shift in Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s stance from neutrality in foreign affairs to military support for the United States in the event of war in the Middle East.

In response, the General Minister of the Interior suspended the communist newspaper; an order thereafter reversed by Kol Ha’am’s petition to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1953, and their ensuing decision. Located in the Zionist democratic principles of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the importation of an American judicial structure, the seminal case of Kol Ha’am v. The Minister of Interior, under the counsel of Israeli-American Justice Simon Agranat, established freedom of expression via judicial legislation, and thus set a precedent for civil rights decisions in Israel. As such, the divorce of the region’s legal system from British colonial authoritarianism to projection of democratic liberalism constituted the genesis of Israel’s democratic process. To note, at this period, the fallacy of McCarthyism ensnared the United States in a spiral of state-sanctioned persecution of left-wing individuals. In addition, a year prior, President Truman formalized the federal employee loyalty program to safeguard the government against suspected federal employees. Notwithstanding the ‘special relationship’ to yet be concretized, the political agency of the nascent state of Israel is underscored by the Israeli government’s allowance of the communist party press to continue following Moscow’s line, and the Communist Party press broadcast its unbound criticism of ‘Zionism’ as an illegitimate liberation movement. In the framework of a bipolar hegemony, the role of national ethos, as an adjunct to state politics, is seen through the region’s bilateral legal landscape and periodical press.

An antecedent to the First Arab-Israeli War, the flight and expulsion of the predominant Arab populace by the nascent state of Israel, since known as al-Nakba, in juxtaposition with the number of Palestinian refugees sent to Arab states, stirred Arab nationalist sentiment and hostilities towards Israel. In effect, during the 1940s to 1950s, the secular Arab Nationalist Movement, under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab rhetoric, weaponized the Palestinian calamity and the expansion of Jewish settlements as a perennial reminder of the humiliation and dispossession of 1948. Under the thumb of the Egyptian government, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) comprised a melée of fragmented nationalist groups: the Fatah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). With the defeat of Egyptian forces during the Third Arab-Israeli War, in February 1969, guerrilla control of the organization was established with Yassir Arafat’s ascension to Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Under his leadership, the PLO employed guerrilla warfare tactics to reclaim the whole of Mandate-era Palestine until December 1988. Hence, the PLO drew inspiration from the revolutionary strategies and ideologies of other Third World movements, in an attempt to distance itself from Arab nationalism and bring international prominence to the Palestinian cause.

Notably, in August 1967, the PLO began publishing articles under the series Revolutionary Studies and Experiences that outlined the core policy of the Fedayeen resistance movement, with the materials appearing in Arabic, English, and French alike. In effect, the series featured the communist regimes in North Korea and China, with three pamphlets devoted to the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.  More broadly, fedayeen newspapers covered revolutionary struggles abroad and followed international reactions to Palestinian resistance. For instance, in 1968, Filastine al-Thawra ran a regular section, “Reports of the Revolution in the Last Half Month,” to share news of armed struggles in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Likewise, the 1969 Al-Fatah pamphlet The Palestinian Freedom Fighters and the World Press re-emphasizes the critical importance of international media, by citing British and American news sources such as the Guardian, Life magazine, the Daily Star, and the International Herald Tribune, and their parallels between the Palestinian Liberation Movement, the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and the European resistance movements of World War II. Thus, by 1969, the PLO guerrilla pamphlets had succeeded in presenting the Palestinian people, carrying out armed resistance, as no different from the ordinary subjugated people of Vietnam, Angola, South Africa, Bolivia or elsewhere, also interested in the eventual liberation of their homeland and the self-determination to which all peoples are entitled. In the volatile political landscape of the Cold War, guerrilla newspapers comprised a strategy of revolution premised upon forging ties with the international community, despite Washington’s refusal to arrange a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1969–1988. In effect, through multilingual guerrilla pamphlets, the PLO successfully divorced the Palestinian plight from Arab nationalism and established its revolutionary image by tapping into the Third-World transnational revolutionary network.

In conclusion, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, as a proxy theatre of the superpower rivalry, exemplified the nexus between mass media and political power in a volatile political landscape. Within the paradigms of the Cold War, the significance of meta-narratives and American news print media’s narration of the First Arab-Israeli War is observed through the conflict’s legacy. In addition, the development of a legal democratic process in Israel, resulting from the seminal case of Kol Ha’am v. The Minister of Interior and the importation of American legislation, exemplified the interplay between national ethos and state politics in determining government policy on civilian rights and freedom of expression. In the same milieu, the transnational influence of Third World revolutionary movements facilitated global news discourse on the Palestinian Liberation Movement through the publication of guerrilla booklets by the PLO. In a bipolar system context, the unstitching of the collective memory woven by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War is accomplished through a macrocosmic consideration of the afflicted region’s colonial and imperial legacy. Thus, in the global sphere of revolutionary action and U.S.-Soviet rivalry, paired with the colonial history of the Middle East, a deeper consideration of the role of media and nation-states in shaping public perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict is required to unearth the sequentiality of acts responsible for the unremitting bloodshed in the ancient lands of Canaan.

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By Pascale Moko Foko

Edited by Borna Atrchian & Charlotte Pieper, Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright

On the 21st of October 1952, The Times announced a State of Emergency had been declared in Kenya the previous day, reporting Governor Evelyn Baring’s decision to formalize colonial intervention against the insurgents. The newspaper identified the target of this intervention as members of the “Mau Mau,” a rebel movement whose acts of violence, it claimed, were motivated by anti-European sentiment. Commenting on the government’s final decision, The Times declared: “This step has been taken with great reluctance, but there was no alternative in the face of mounting lawlessness, violence, and disorder in a part of the colony.” The imperative of restoring the colonial order by intervening against the Mau Mau uprising was not affirmed only in The Times. Both conservative and liberal outlets concurred in depicting the rebel organization as an evil that urgently needed to be eradicated.

​Earlier historiographies have examined the nature of this consensus, particularly because the British journalistic landscape at the time reflected the distinct political orientations of each newspaper. Anne Wetherilt, for example, argues that the press converged in portraying Mau Mau as evidence of African “savagery” and “backwardness.” Historian Erik Linstrum further contends that the press’s jingoistic uniformity produced a paradox: in order to justify intervention during the Emergency, newspapers had to publicize the very violence whose visibility ultimately undermined the Empire’s existence. Such studies highlight how the Mau Mau uprising not only challenged Britons on the ground; it also unsettled the moral, political, and socioeconomic frameworks through which metropolitan readers understood African identities and agencies, as well as the legitimacy of imperial rule. Therefore, beyond simply reporting on the conflict’s developments, the British press helped shape the knowledge that sustained the Empire amid forces seeking to subvert it. Considering the diversity of political perspectives within the press, this paper asks: What journalistic practices did British newspapers use to construct knowledge about the Empire in Kenya and the Kenyan Emergency?

To respond to this, I apply the concept of intermediality, developed in literary and media studies, to the British press’ representation of the Mau Mau rebellion. In “Intermédialité, ou comment repenser les transmissions,” Éric Méchoulan argues that media are never autonomous but emerge through their relations with other media. Whereas “multimedia” refers to the juxtaposition of established forms of communication, intermediality highlights the processes through which media take shape when in contact with one another. Méchoulan also explains that tracing these intermedial relations reveals how knowledge is produced. Following this approach, this text examines how the press incorporated or contested literary texts’ perspectives on the situation in Kenya and the governance of the empire, thus mediating metropolitan understandings of the imperial Emergency.

More specifically, I argue that press coverage of Mau Mau relied on intermedial relations with literature to sustain or transform established imperial orders, portraying both the Empire and its decline as outcomes that ultimately served British interests. The analysis unfolds in three sections. First, I examine the Times coverage of the early years of the rebellion, which promoted King of the Wa-Kikuyu and Facing Mount Kenya to reinforce the imaginary of the “White Man’s Country.” Second, I consider the reaction of The Manchester Guardian and other liberal newspapers to the scandal at Kamiti detention camp. This section highlights the press’ role in reshaping moral conventions in the imperial context, shifting them from a transnational Christian framework, as imagined in The Pilgrim’s Progress, toward a secular understanding of justice and accountability. Finally, I analyze the role of Elspeth Huxley’s writings and the press’ engagement with them in portraying Britain as a benevolent presence in Kenya, shaping both the memory of the Empire and the perceptions of its postcolonial legacy. This paper is based primarily on digital archives of newspapers from the period, supplemented by relevant historiographies, in order to offer new interpretations of media coverage of the Mau Mau. Rather than aiming for exhaustiveness, it emphasizes specificity by focusing on three moments of the State of Emergency, situated at the beginning, middle, and end of the conflict, that reveal how the media worked to construct colonial imaginaries that were palatable to metropolitan audiences. It is essential to recover these intermedial narratives, as they help to complete the history of representations of the Empire at critical moments marked by extreme violence.

Disorder in the White Man’s Country

Every story begins with a disruptive element unsettling the established order. For the conservative Times, this order was the “White Man’s Country” formed in Kenya since the colonial conquest, and the disruptive element was the subversive behaviour of the Kikuyu people, the principal ethnic group involved in Mau Mau. Since the Scramble for Africa, Britainhad encouraged its subjects to settle in its new African territories to fulfill what it described as a moral obligation to “civilize” African peoples, guiding the inhabitants of the so-called Dark Continent toward modernity and progress. This call led White colonists of all socioeconomic backgrounds to seize large tracts of land, situated mainly in the temperate highlands of central Kenya. As historian Caroline Elkins notes, European settlement and land expropriation had their most significant impact on the Kikuyu. These agriculturalists lost more than sixty thousand acres and endured profound social consequences, as their social mobility and status depended on the accumulation of land. Many were confined to reserves outside their homeland, while others became squatters, that is, Africans living and working on European farms in the renamed region of the “White Highlands.” Thus, Kikuyu people were drawn into a colonial system that relied on their labour and political subordination to transform Kenya into the heartland of the White Man’s Country.

​ At the outbreak of the Mau Mau rebellion, The Times anxiously defended the colonial paradigm, notably by drawing on pre-Emergency literature about the Kikuyu. The “quality” newspaper primarily attracted a political and economic elite involved in domestic politics as well as colonial affairs. Its coverage of imperial anxieties regarding White governance in the Empire was already prominent before the rebellion erupted. Works of fiction and non-fiction were mobilized to counteract rebellious entities that exacerbated these anxieties.

Deeming the Kikuyu as such an entity, the Times invoked John Boyes’ autobiography King of the Wa-Kikuyu (1911), which recounts the author’s travels and alleged rise to paramount chief among the Kikuyu during the Matabele War (1893). Boyes describes his position as leader among the Kikuyu as follows:

My mission through the country had served to produce a spirit of friendship between the different clans and tribes which effectually put an end to the petty quarrelling and constant fighting which had hitherto gone on ; and from this time I was looked upon as practically the king of the country, all matters in dispute being referred to my judgment, and I was constantly being called upon to give counsel and advice upon every conceivable subject which affected the welfare of the people. The three most powerful chiefs in the country — Karuri, Karkerrie, and Wagombi — acknowledged me as their leader, and chiefs and people were now entirely under my control. As proof of the altered condition of the country, I could now send messengers to any one of the chiefs or headmen without any fear of their being attacked or molested on the way.

The Times amplified voices that used King of the Wa-Kikuyu as evidence that the Kikuyu had always welcomed Europeans because they supposedly recognized the benefits of the colonists’ mediating presence. In a letter to the editor, a former settler claimed that the Kikuyu had long been targets of neighbouring peoples, such as the Mari and the Masai, and that White settlement had “rescued” them from this hostile environment.

The Mari were the chief offenders, but others were perfectly ready to take a share in the sport. As a result of such treatment, which had been going on from time immemorial, the Kikuyu villages were sited on the edge of the forest into which the inhabitants could disappear when the alarm was sounded. On the surrounding plains they never venture and one night walk 20 miles in a day and see no living thing save vast hordes of game. From such an existence we rescued them, and we can have just pride in the achievement and their, surely, have some cause for gratitude.

The newspaper promoted Boyes’ account as proof that antipathy toward Europeans was never inherent among the Kikuyu, they welcomed protection from their aggressive neighbours. In this sense, John Boyes represented a leading example of the many settlers who acted as agents of peace and stability within Kikuyuland. In light of these observations, readers at the time may have been perplexed by the “sudden” rebellion of the Kikuyus against their most valuable allies.

On other occasions, the newspaper claimed that, despite the Kikuyu’s supposed acceptance of Boyes, their violent actions against Europeans were inevitable due to the “warlike” nature of the tribe. Framing Boyes’ rise as a personal triumph rather than evidence of Kikuyu goodwill, one article underscored how settlers perceived the group:

First, they were contrasted in the minds of the early settlers with their neighbours, the Masai, who happened to be one of the great warrior tribes; secondly, almost all writers on the Kikuyu agree that they are wily, suspicious, and deceitful. Then, as now, their mentality was that of guerilla. They preferred the tip-and-run rather than the standing battle, to strike at the weak rather than at the strong.

What becomes evident today is that relying on King of the Wa-Kikuyu as evidence was misleading as it presented an exceptional and ultimately distorted account of British–Kikuyu relations as typical. Historian Peter Rogers states that Boyes exaggerated his exploits and that his trading ventures were “modest in dimension and transitory in effect.” He also argues that the book’s disproportionate influence stemmed from its rarity and detailed descriptions of local disputes in Kikuyu territory. But for The Times, the autobiography fitted into the imperial myth of what Caroline Elkins called the “Pax Britannica,” a narrative portraying British expansion as a civilizing force that brought order, stability, and benevolent governance to regions depicted as chaotic and violent. By invoking King of the Wa-Kikuyu and its portrayal of the Kikuyu’s character, The Times reinforced this myth and raised a fundamental question: if the Kikuyu had once lived peacefully under European rule,  or at the very least restraining their supposed warlike nature, what had changed to provoke the violent insurgency led by the Mau Mau?

The Times answered by placing the blame on the Mau Mau leadership, then on the education received and provided by the Kikuyu. When Jomo Kenyatta was tried and convicted for allegedly leading the rebellion, public debate around his anthropological study Facing Mount Kenya (1938) resurfaced. The newspaper acknowledged that Kenyatta’s book contained numerous flaws yet maintained that it was “the best existing account of Kikuyu social organisation.” To support this claim, journalist Lord Hailey turned to the authority of the late Professor Bronisław Malinowski of the London School of Economics, under whom Kenyatta had studied in the 1930s and 1940s. He also notes that Kenyatta’s work had been evaluated by the Ethnological Survey of Africa and published by the International African Institute. Kenyatta’s education, charismatic personality, and proximity to British ideals of respectability earned him a degree of esteem among Times editors. Paradoxically, these qualities were also presented as evidence of the potential danger of African leadership in Kenya.

In fact, Kenyatta and Facing Mount Kenya challenged both imperial paradigms of the “civilizing mission” and White rule. On the one hand, Kenyatta embodied the goal of colonial uplift as he was an African who had mastered Western education and scholarly discourse. Yet, his example also suggested that “civilization” could produce subversive radical ideas and thus undermine British imperial authority. For instance, Facing Mount Kenya presents such subversive thought when explicitly questioning the ability of Western “experts” to produce relevant knowledge about Africa, arguing that scholars who did not come from the continent could never fully understand its societies. It also characterized White settlement as a form of territorial “theft,” a claim that the Times swiftly rejected:

There is no doubt that we have in the constant repetition of this charge by the Kikuyu political associations the dynamic which has given such strength to the Mau-Mau subversive movement. But the charge rests on a very slender basis of fact. The Land Commission of 1933 found that the proportion of the unequivocal Kikuyu land which had been alienated amounted only to about six per cent. Of Kikuyuland proper, and steps were afterwards taken to make up this loss to the tribe. No one reading this book would realize that the Kikuyu are in possession of over 1700 square miles of some of the best land in the Kenya Highlands.

For the most “civilized” representative of the Kikuyu to spread misinformation about the colony and discredit the Western expertise that had trained him, the Kikuyu must have had characteristics that limited the anticipated trajectory of the civilizing mission. The Times identified this characteristic as their “inherent recidivism,” which made the “backward” Kikuyu behaviour and customs resilient.  A Times’ correspondent in Nairobi highlighted that many Kikuyu people lived in rural areas and continued to be “subject, in their villages of mud-walled grass huts, to the tyranny of tribal laws and customs, witchcraft, and the mystical terrors of the old Africa.” He attributed this “pagan way of life” to their resentment of European influence and their desire to return to the state of Africa before colonialism. In this sense, the paradigm of a backward Africa is exemplified by the Kikuyu way of life after more than half a century of colonization, and their involvement in the rebel movement only served to reinforce the idea that the civilizing mission was justified.

Added to the Times’ discussion on Kikuyu recidivism was the assumption that education in Kenya was a key factor in incentivizing the Mau Mau to overthrow White rule. The newspaper identified the Kenya African Union’s (KAU) Independent School system as guilty of proliferating anti-European propaganda among younger generations. It claimed that, in the name of African nationalism, the schools condemned European land ownership in the Highlands, preached anti-Christian doctrines, and blasphemously taught hymns in which Kenyatta replaced the figure of Jesus. The paper also highlighted the importance of such institutions in the secrecy of Mau Mau: oath administrators could be disguised as teachers, and they could intimidate parents into enrolling their children. As historian Susan Carruthers adds, this discourse was part of a larger propagandistic agenda of the British government to portray Mau Mau as a senseless organization that antagonized the British way of thinking and living. The school system was then portrayed as perpetuating Kikuyu recidivism and promoting the violence associated with the Mau Mau movement.

In summary, The Times presented Kenya as the “White Man’s Country,” describing British rule as a civilizing and stabilizing force, and portraying the Kikuyu rebellion as a disruption of this imperial order. The press’s selective use of pre-Mau Mau works, written at very different historical moments, gave these works new purposes, integrating them into an epistemological system designed to legitimize the contemporary context of imperial counterinsurgency.

The Kamiti Scandal, Morality and Lessons from The Pilgrim’s Progress

​The press’ narrative of the Mau Mau Emergency was fraught with twists and turns, causing controversy among the British public. One of the most resounding controversies was raised by the Quaker missionary Eileen Fletcher in a series of articles published in Peace News and her pamphlet The Truth About Kenya. The press coverage of this scandal, especially in relations with ideas of Christian morality and femininity as understood in The Pilgrim’s Progress, demonstrated the secularization of British ideas of justice, which limited the impact ofwhistleblowers during Mau Mau.

For context, Fletcher detailed the abuses committed by the British authorities in the Kamiti Detention Camp. At that stage of the Emergency, detention camps had been publicly branded as sites for the rehabilitation of Mau Mau rebels. The Kamiti camp became more significant when an earlier androcentric view of the rebellion, characterizing women as victims and men as perpetrators, shifted toward a recognition of women’s involvement in Mau Mau and the building of a gender-blind punitive system. With villagization, or the forced relocation of Kikuyu people into government-supervised villages, Kamiti meant to undermine the role of Mau Mau women in supporting rebel civilian networks. By 1954, the camp was detaining approximately  2000 women.

Appointed by the Commissioner for Community Development and Rehabilitation, Fletcher designed new rehabilitation schemes, believing she was working within an institution that was Christian in intent. However, what she encountered in the seven months following December 1954 was radically different. In her eyewitness account, The Truth About Kenya, Fletcher exposed the camp’s inhumane machinery: torture during interrogation (“screening”), indefinite confinement, forced labor and malnutrition. Her revelations were accompanied by striking photographs of children behind barbed-wire fences and women rounded up by police, alongside headlines accusing Kamiti of perpetrating White supremacy, and condemning innocents to death. Fletcher’s testimony demonstrated that detainees were treated like prisoners of war in a punitive system that failed to meet the imperial standards of respectability. Her denunciations reverberated across numerous newspapers, raising urgent questions about the conduct of the counterinsurgency and its implications for human rights.

Fletcher’s work at Kamiti, as well as her report of the institution, were articulated through the lens  of transnational Christian ideas about morality and femininity. In 1956, she published an article in the Manchester Guardian explaining the roots of the rehabilitation scheme she built. Believing that telling Christian fables was similar to the pedagogical methods used in Kikuyu culture, she gave women detainees lessons that drew on The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). John Bunyan’s Christian allegory follows the journey of a man named Christian on his symbolic path to salvation. More importantly, the second part of Bunyan’s allegory presents Christiana, Christian’s wife, as a model of femininity defined through domestic roles and moral virtue. Her journey offers an image of women’s agency, but one that remains embedded within gendered social norms: Christiana’s authority arises from her role as mother and moral guide, and her spiritual path is understood as an extension of her husband’s journey. Her story thus emphasizes feminine virtues that are synonymous with passivity, submission, and reliance on male leadership. Fletcher made sure she mirrored Christiana’s symbol in the education she delivered to women in Kamiti, especially since these women had been convicted as agents of violence and social disruption — the very antagonists of Bunyan’s ideal of femininity. She taught women detainees how to become effective homemakers and child bearers, as well as provided training in literacy. This Quaker-inspired approach to rehabilitation, she claimed, transformed the women convicts from treating her with enmity to friendliness.

Eileen Fletcher’s engagement with The Pilgrim’s Progress gains particular significance in view of the text’s transnational circulation. As Isabel Hofmeyer observes, the work circulated across the British Empire as a tool for Nonconformist Christians, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, and others dissenting from the Church of England, to legitimize overseas missions while maintaining domestic support. Translated religious texts, such as Bunyan’s allegory, publicized mission work and fostered a belief in a shared moral framework among diverse peoples. Fletcher also drew on England’s “Basic Education Scheme,” part of UNESCO’s literacy program promoting education as a means of peace and development. By combining The Pilgrim’s Progress with transnational development ideas, Fletcher advocated moral values that supported women’s “respectable” education, values that resonated with British audiences while framing them as beneficial within the rehabilitation policy in the Mau Mau Emergency. By denouncing the inhumane fate of Kamiti detainees, she created spaces for public discussion on those shared values. She hoped to rehabilitate the victims of Kamiti prison as individuals who could potentially embody these ideals of morality and progress.

In liberal newspapers, Fletcher’s story found a more receptive audience as these outlets were more willing to engage with critiques of colonialism and platform dissident voices in the Emergency. The Manchester Guardian, for example, often reported public statements by Fenner Brockway, the prominent anticolonialist leader in the House of Commons. The newspaper reports here the impression of the MP of Fletcher’s character : “Mr Brockway told the Manchester Guardian yesterday that he was raising the matter because at his meeting with Eileen Fletcher he had been deeply impressed by her sincerity, reliability and professional ability. ‘I am also impressed by her record of fourteen years in the Government service,’ he said.”

However, liberal newspapers remained largely skeptical toward Fletcher’s revelations, revealing the extent to which imperial notions of moral justice had become secularized. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, repeatedly stressed that the Kamiti scandal represented an exceptional failure within the colonial judiciary rather than evidence of systemic abuse. A letter to the editor by the General Secretary of the Christian Council of Kenya insisted that the events Fletcher described were outdated and did not reflect the government’s ongoing efforts to prevent such deviations from justice. He maintained that such incidents were declining and Fletcher’s account was “misleading” and failed to provide a balanced picture. In response, another reader rejected the General Secretary’s accusation that Fletcher lacked a balanced perspective, while nevertheless reiterating that her purpose was to expose an exceptional flaw in the punitive system. This exchange illustrates how the secular framework of justice shaped discussions of imperial moral responsibility. While Fletcher drew on both transnational Christian ideas of morality and formal justice, liberal newspapers reframed her critique solely in terms of institutional responsibility.

Returning to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Hofmeyer also notes that following the First World War, Nonconformist evangelicalism lost ground as a public intellectual force. On the contrary, secular ideas that sought to give Britons a distinct racial and cultural identity, both within the country and throughout the empire, eventually replaced this transnational moral paradigm. In this context, discussions on morality were less dependent on Christian universalist ideas and more attuned to racialized hierarchies. Fletcher’s engagement with Bunyan thus intersected with a moral environment where her Christian rhetoric in reporting the abuses in the Kamiti detention camp was less impactful.

This secular framework also shaped the gendered perception of the victims in the Kamiti scandal. Both The Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald focused heavily on the imprisonment of juveniles while giving far less attention to the fate of women detainees. The Manchester Guardian primarily covered parliamentary debates concerning the credibility of Fletcher’s accusations and the potential violation of Kenya’s Juvenile Offenders Ordinance, which prohibited the detention of children under fourteen. The Daily Herald featured more sensationalist headlines, such as “They’re ‘lifers’ at 12,” which deplored the “terrified” condition of the child convicts. What stands out is that although women occupied a central place in Fletcher’s testimony, the press’ attention gravitated toward children. As Katherine Bruce-Lockhart argues, femininity and childhood were key frameworks through which Fletcher sought to elevate Kamiti into a matter of imperial urgency. Yet in the secular framing of the liberal press, childhood, constructed as a universal category of innocence, overrode the specifically gendered violence. As Bruce-Lockhart explains here, the press mirrored the government depiction of Mau Mau women:

In the case of the Kamiti controversy, the government portrayed Kenyan females as violent. […] Further ballast for this argument was provided by the international media, which claimed that Mau Mau women had become “every bit as fanatical as their menfolk.” One article in a Canadian newspaper gave accounts of young girls who were imprisoned for “serious activities on behalf of the terrorists,” such as a sixteen-year-old girl who served as a judge in a Mau Mau court and “sentenced many Africans to death.”

As mentioned earlier, women were then included in a broader concept of perpetrators of insurgent violence. They were no longer entitled to the qualities of innocence and vulnerability that Fletcher had associated with femininity (as symbolized by Bunyan’s Christiana). In this way, the secular framing of the press not only marginalized women’s victimhood but erased the possibility of their rehabilitation into innocence, even in the face of the brutal treatment they suffered at the hands of the colonial authorities.

​While Fletcher’s revelations did spark debates about the legitimacy of counterinsurgency methods, their influence on metropolitan views of colonial violence remained limited, particularly because liberal newspapers’ secular notions of justice did not fully capture the significance of Kamiti’s abuses or the extent of the victims’ suffering. This case study illustrates implicit intermedial relationships, in that the press indirectly challenged previously established moral principles of the Empire. Ultimately, the liberal press’ focus on secular moral justice constrained the impact of Fletcher’s whistleblowing on metropolitan recognition of the human rights abuses inherent in the Mau Mau detention camps.​

A Favourable Resolution: The End-of-Empire according to Elspeth Huxley and the British Press

Finally, like all stories, the Mau Mau rebellion came to an end. By 1959, the majority of the rebel forces had been neutralized by the colonial government, their leadership had been either imprisoned or executed, and loyalists had taken control over Kikuyu territory. Yet, as historian David Anderson notes, the imperial power did not feel like a victor. The Kenyan conflict had brought global attention to the colonial violence perpetrated throughout the war. After Kamiti, many scandals came to light, such as the Hola massacre, in which eleven detainees were beaten to death and many more were injured after refusing to take part in hard labour. The attempt by the detention administration to hide this massacre made headlines and reignited public debates about the Empire’s raison d’être. At the same time, the global wave of decolonization made the end of the British Empire inevitable. While it was difficult for the British to control how the Empire would end, it was still possible to influence how decolonization was perceived in the metropole, particularly through shaping memories of the colonial past and planning the postcolonial future.

In this context, the British press turned to the voice of Elspeth Huxley, a British novelist and journalist who grew up in Kenya, to reiterate the symbol of a benevolent Britain. Huxley’s work belonged to the female middlebrow novel, a literary genre that significantly shaped popular perceptions of decolonization.  Rather narrating the politics of Britain’s End-of-Empire, middlebrow fiction narrated decolonization through the lived experiences of Britons on the ground Literary scholar Anne Wetherilt defines middlebrow literature as the product of the author’s “careful balance between meeting and challenging readers’ expectations.” This genre particularly appealed to middle-class women, who were considered culturally influential tastemakers. By engaging with Huxley and this particular readership, the press was able to mold perceptions of colonialism and Britain’s benevolence into a single metanarrative.

Firstly, the press’ promotion of The Flame Trees of Thika fueled popular nostalgia for the colonial past. Published in 1959, this autobiographical novel recounts Huxley’s childhood in Kenya and the early experiences of British settlers in East Africa. The weekly magazine Country Life introduced the book thus: “It was in Kenya. Nairobi, then, had not become a sophisticated capital, and the Kikuyu had not become in the indiscriminate popular imagination ‘the Mau Mau.’ Things went with reasonable smoothness between the native inhabitants and the settlers. It was a wonderful time and a wonderful place to be growing in.” The Scotsman praised the ingenuity of the author and her parents as they learned to navigate new forms of human and natural knowledge, and The Observer regarded it as one of the few memoirs of life in Africa that achieved such quality. This widely favourable reception is significant given that Huxley wrote the book at a moment when Kenyan independence was imminent. Knowing that decolonization was imminent, she sought to sanitize Britain’s imperial legacy, whatever her own political stances may have been. Patricia Lorcin adds that the success of the novel was enabled by Huxley’s reputation as an Africanist and “a moderate with expert knowledge, [someone] in the best position to describe what Kenya had been about.” The press and public therefore saw Huxley’s Flame Trees of Thika as an authentic way to reminisce about the colonial past. It fed into nostalgic sentiments about the end of the Empire by offering a vision of colonial Kenya untainted by the violence later associated with Mau Mau.

On the other hand, the press’ discussion on A New Earth (1960) encouraged Britain’s post-independence paternalistic relations with Kenya, understood under the guise of benevolence. This memoir was Huxley’s account of Kenya’s social and political landscape during the final years of the colonial period. It explained how Britain was responsible for helping Kenyans in their planning of the country’s future, especially when it came to land management.The Scotsman reiterates this lasting relationship here :

Much remains to be done. Mrs Huxley’s evidence seems to show that only by a reorganization of society which brings landholdings to their most productive economic level will the increase of population be supported in the absence of new industries. Certainly the Africans will need white technicians for many years to come. Mrs Huxley performs many useful services in this admirable book: one of them is to underline tacitly the need for a genuine partnership of the races.

This positive reception of the book becomes even more significant when juxtaposed with Jomo Kenyatta’s nation-building policies following his imprisonment and at the outset of his rule in Kenya. By the time of Kenyatta’s release in 1961, the British press had largely abandoned the radicalized rebel image attached to him since the advent of the rebellion, portraying him instead as a great reconciler who had never endorsed the extreme violence associated with Mau Mau. His land management policies were reformist in nature: he insisted that all Kenyans, particularly former Mau Mau detainees, purchase the land that had once been expropriated, thereby maintaining the socioeconomic standing of the elite who had benefited from the colonial political economy. The British press endorsed this cautious approach to land redistribution, emphasizing that property should not fall into the hands of the “riot hooligans” of Mau Mau. It also highlighted the continued value of British agricultural methods, especially after Mau Mau, as exemplified in this Times article : “[Progress] has stridden the farthest in Kikuyuland because the Mau Mau emergency put out of the circulation those politicians who had been preaching resistance to everything designed to improve the African lot, from artificial insemination and cattle-dipping to terracing and tree-planting.” In this way, the reception of Huxley’s work helped consolidate a narrative in which Britain’s colonial legacy was imagined as indispensable to Kenya’s stability. It allowed the press to frame decolonization not as a moment of rupture, but as the promise of a continued relationship between Britain and the nation it claimed to have benevolently guided toward progress.

One of the most important ways middlebrow novelists met their readership’s tastes was by fulfilling their desire for a resolution. While Huxley’s bibliography had shaped public understanding at multiple stages of the Kenyan Emergency (Red Strangers fictionalizing the years preceding the rebellion, and A Thing to Love depicting the politics of colonial intervention) it became even more influential as the conflict drew to a close. As public opinion increasingly rejected the violence of counterinsurgency and grew more receptive to decolonization, the intermedial relationship between the press and Huxley’s works sustained a benevolent image of Empire, encouraging readers to interpret its legacy favorably despite the undeniable violence that had taken place.

Conclusion

This study shows how the British press shaped metropolitan understandings of the Mau Mau Emergency through implicit and explicit intermedial conversations with autobiographical writings, ethnographies, religious allegories, and fictions. Rather than simply reporting events of the rebellion, conservative and liberal newspapers strategically sustained or transformed moral and sociopolitical imperial orders to maintain Britain’s grandeur. Thus, in the face of brutal colonial violence, metropolitan readers could still view Britain as a morally legitimate and stabilizing power and consume narratives framing the Empire’s actions as benevolent and necessary for the advancement of civilization.

While this paper has focused on the press, the intermedial dynamics it reveals were not limited to print. Audiovisual media—newsreels, BBC broadcasts, Illustrated London Newscovers, and Universal News footage—participated in the same processes, reinforcing and extending the narratives constructed in newspapers. As Erik Linstrum notes, newsreels depicted civilians, especially women, as resilient combatants, while coverage of colonial Britons highlighted settler courage. In this sense, audiovisual media added a new layer of intermediality, further blurring the boundaries between the collective imagination and the realities presented by institutions with specific political agendas. This dynamic remains highly relevant today, as evolving media technologies continue to shape how individuals engage with and interpret the world around them.

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By Dia Deepak

Edited by Maximilian Kabjian & Leila Van Glabeke , Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright

What does it mean when the most intimate aspects of human experience become instruments of imperial control?

This paper argues that intersectionality transforms the anthropological study of sexuality by revealing how it is constituted through overlapping regimes of race, gender, religion and colonial power. Rather than treating sexuality as instinct or identity, it will be approached as a contested site of governance and struggle. The paper proceeds in three movements. It begins by establishing the theoretical stakes, arguing that whilst Foucault's account of sexual discourse offers a productive starting point, his universalising framework fails to account for the uneven ways in which power is experienced across race, gender and colonial history. Intersectionality is mobilised not as an additive lens but as a corrective to this abstraction. The analysis then turns to two case studies through which this corrective is applied: colonial concubinage in the Dutch East Indies and sexualised torture in U.S. military detention. The first, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler's work, examines how indigenous women's reproductive and domestic labour was strategically organised to serve imperial economic and demographic interests; and further how the arrival of European women intensified racial segregation rather than ameliorating it. Here, intersectionality reveals how race, gender and colonial capitalism were not parallel systems but mutually constitutive ones, forging the very conditions of European modernity. The second case turns to Bonnie Mann's work, focusing on the systematic deployment of female bodies and violated Islamic moral codes as instruments of humiliation against Muslim male detainees. This case exposes how sexuality operated not merely as a vector of gendered or heteronormative power, but as a culturally and spiritually loaded site of violation, one that cannot be adequately grasped without attending to the intersection of religion, race, gender and colonial power. In both cases, the paper examines how bodies are rendered legible and governable through biopolitical techniques, how social categories are exposed as unstable and historically produced, and how domination is simultaneously naturalised, internalised, and sometimes resisted. Taken together, these cases demonstrate that sexuality is not merely shaped by power but is generative of it, a condition of colonial modernity rather than its consequence.

To understand how sexuality becomes a site of governance rather than merely expression, it is necessary to  engage with the theoretical apparatus through which power itself has been most influentially theorised; it is here that Foucault's analytics of power offers an indispensable, if ultimately insufficient, point of departure. Michel Foucault’s theorization of power marked a radical break from earlier models that saw power solely as coercive or repressive. Most notably the sovereign model advanced by Hobbes (1651), understood power as fundamentally repressive and top-down, emanating from a centralised authority and operating primarily through law, prohibition and the threat of punishment. Marxist (1840) frameworks conceived of power as rooted in economic domination, treating culture and sexuality as mere superstructural reflections of material class interests rather than as autonomous sites of governance in their own right.

Power, Foucault posits, operates through mechanisms of confession, surveillance, and scientific classification. This is perhaps best illustrated through his concept of the Panopticon (a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well), in which inmates, unable to determine when they are being watched, internalise the gaze of the guard and regulate their own behaviour. The Panopticon illustrates how modern power does not need to physically coerce; it operates most effectively when subjects police themselves. Subjects become simultaneously an ‘object and agent’ (94), produced through discourses of self-surveillance and truth-telling, embedding power within intimate life. His stance is compelling in that it invites a critical interrogation of the ostensibly neutral or autonomous dimensions of everyday life. It exposes how subjects are subtly governed through internalised norms. Yet Foucault overlooks how power operates differentially across race, gender, and colonialism. His universal subject, a white European male, is analytically limited by its universalising tendency; it cannot account for how power and sexuality operate and is layered systems of domination. Intersectionality, then, intervenes not merely as an additive framework but as a corrective to this abstraction, grounding power in historically situated, embodied experience. In my essay, this is crucial to understanding how colonial sexual economies and modern forms of sexualized violence operate through racialized and gendered logics that Foucault overlooks.

Intersectionality is a demand for power to be understood as it is actually lived, in bodies marked by race, gender, and colonial history. In Sojourner Truth’s oration of ‘Ain't I a Woman?’ (1851) she contends that race systematically overrode her gender, rendering her womanhood socially illegible. She describes how, in moments where femininity could be seen to denote privilege, Black women were structurally excluded from such treatment. In her speech, she articulates:

“Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?

I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”

Being helped in and out of carriages, shielded from physical labour or treated with gentleness were markers of womanhood that Black women were disqualified from, expected instead to endure gruelling field work and physical violence without any social protection. Femininity here, is consanguineous with a as a set of protections and courtesies reserved exclusively for white women, a form of racialised social currency. Yet, within the lived experience of a Black woman, ‘race – and racism – trumped gender’ (Brahm 2019: 160). Mainstream feminism anchored its political project in the analytical category of ‘woman,’ presuming a universality of struggle and subjugation that collapsed the profound differences in how oppression is lived across race, class, and colonial histories. In doing so, it systematically failed to apprehend, nor sincerely represent, the experience of non-white women; rendering their particular forms of domination either invisible or subordinate to a politics that was, in practice, racially exclusive. Black feminism emerged as a rejection of mainstream feminisms’ false universalism, exposing gender as an insufficient analytical lens through which to apprehend the compounded nature of Black women's subjugation. Black feminism launched a rejection of the use of women and gender as a ‘unitary and homogenous category reflecting the common essence of all women’ (McCall 2005:1776). Intersectionality, thus, had its ‘roots in Black feminism’ (Brahm 2019: 1), emerging in response to the failings of universal feminism and the acute awareness of gender’s limitations as a ‘single analytical category’ (McCall 2005: 1771). It is a framework for understanding how various social and political identities overlap and intersect to create unique, compounded experiences of discrimination or privilege. Intersectionality is defined by a consanguineous logic to Black feminism that ‘nothing fits neatly except as a result of imposing a stable and homogenizing order on a more unstable and heterogeneous social reality’ (McCall 2005:1779). Kimberlé Crenshaw formalised this concept, showing how identity politics ‘frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences’ (1991:1242). She evidenced that a large range of different experiences, identities and social locations failed to fit neatly into any single master category. Crenshaw demonstrated that black women, as an empirical matter of documented fact, faced discrimination in hiring not only as black or as female, but specifically as persons whose lives were lived at the ‘intersection of race and gender’ (Brahm 2019: 162). Intersectionality stands as a critique of gender-based and race-based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of intersection, ones that tended to reflect multiple ‘subordinated locations as opposed to dominant or mixed locations’ (McCall 2005:1779). Rather than treating gender, race, and class as static and separable, intersectionality insists they are co-constitutive.

This insistence on co-constitution makes intersectionality indispensable to the colonial archive. Within the viscerally legible entanglement of race, gender, and economic governance, the regulation of indigenous women's bodies under Dutch colonial rule is where this paper will take its exploration. In “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” (2010), Ann Laura Stoler describes sexual governance, marriage and reproduction in European settlements across Indonesia. She argues that the regulation of sexual activity, reproduction and marriage were an essential ‘part of the apparatus of colonial control’ (Stoler 2010: 42). Sexual relations were ‘strategically employed’ (Pervez 2008: 115) to sustain the colonial economy, with indigenous women categorized as concubines, prostitutes, or coerced partners. Indigenous women made ‘fewer financial and affective demands’ than European women (Stoler 2010: 42) and so were central to imperial expansion. The colonial state enabled the ‘controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production’ (Foucault 1978: 141). Concubinage allows ‘power to be situated and exercised at the level of life’ (Foucault 1978: 143), turning indigenous wombs into tools for demographic control and imperial accumulation. Whilst the Foucauldian address of this situation has engaged with the analytical apparatuses of sexuality, Stoler would highlight that he has not paid enough attention to the historical content of his analysis (Stoler 2010: 145). I would argue that colonial rule did not simply impose capitalist logics onto sexuality but rather forged them through the management of racialised reproduction. Intersectional analysis reveals that sexuality may not be an extension of European modernity, but a condition of its possibility. Diffusionist accounts of power position Europe as the originary site of modernity, casting non-European societies as passive recipients of capitalist and governmental logics that flow outward from the metropolitan centre. In this framework, the colonies appear as derivative spaces, shaped by European power rather than generative of it. Yet as both Mitchell and Stoler will be shown to demonstrate, this genealogy is fundamentally inverted; the techniques of surveillance, spatial organisation, and bodily regulation that came to define European modernity were, in many instances, first conceived and rehearsed in the colonial periphery before being repatriated to the metropole. Timothy Mitchell’s analysis of colonial Egypt destabilises conventional genealogies of power by revealing that the panopticon, held as the quintessential metaphor of European modern governance, originated in Egypt and later repatriated to Europe. Similarly, urban planning innovations trialled in Paris were rehearsed first in Rabat and Haiphong, both African and Asian cities under French protectorates. These perspectives recast the colonies not merely as sites of exploitation but as laboratories of modernity, spaces in which forms of governance, spatial organisation, and bodily control were first invented and refined.

Applying this logic to sexuality, one might ask whether colonial economies did not simply reflect European capitalist values but were generative of them. The management of concubinage in the Dutch East Indies, for instance, exemplifies how reproductive labour was monetised and aligned with imperial interests. Economically, indigenous women represented a cheap consolidation of domestic, sexual and reproductive labour, requiring neither the financial maintenance nor the costly transatlantic passage of European wives, reducing the economic burden of sustaining a European male presence in the colonies. Demographically, the arrangement served to stabilise colonial settlements by providing men with domestic anchorage, improving military retention and securing a continued European foothold in the Indies. Rather than viewing this as a local application of European biopolitics, it becomes plausible to see colonial control over sex and reproduction as foundational to the very conceptual infrastructure of capitalist modernity. Intersectionality enables this shift in perspective by foregrounding the co-constitution of race, gender and economic governance; it traces not only how these vectors intersect in lived experience, but how they produce one another historically. In doing so, this reframing allows anthropologists to move beyond diffusionist accounts of power and instead examine the colonial world as a generative site, where sexuality is not only regulated but also conceived through the convergence of empire, economy, and bodily discipline.

Generative potential is not confined to those who resist; even actors who reproduce dominant structures do so in ways that are unstable and capable of inversion. The arrival of European women altered the lives of indigenous women by intensifying racial segregation. European women were not only the ‘the bearers of racist beliefs’ (Stoler,2010 :57) but were the ‘hard-line operatives who put them in place’ (Stoler,2010 :57). Their presence reinforced segregationist standards because they were central to maintaining ‘white male prestige’ (Stoler 2010: 55). Fears of ‘sexual contamination, physical danger, [and] climatic incompatibility’ (Stoler,2010, 46) fuelled the increased ‘policing of sex’ (Balhatchet, 2010, 45). Relations with native women were framed as physically dangerous as they were believed to house ‘contagions’ (Stoler, 2010,46). Central to the justification of racial policing was the fear of miscegenation; the prospective mixed-race child born from the sexual union between a European man and indigenous woman was constructed as an existential threat to white racial purity. The child represented a moral transgression, but more pertinently as a biological contamination of the European race, threatening to dissolve the very boundaries upon which colonial hierarchy depended. The mixed-race body thus became a site of profound imperial anxiety, prompting the colonial state to regulate interracial intimacy with increasing juridical rigour in order to preserve the fiction of white racial integrity. This case exhibits the main qualm of intersectionality: the violence that many women experience is ‘often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class’ (Crenshaw 1991:1242). The intersection of racism and sexism permeates the experience of indigenous women’s lives in ways that cannot be wholly captured by looking at ‘the race and gender dimensions of those experiences separately’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1244). Intersectionality provides a vocabulary for describing the tensions within and between marginalized groups. We must reject the idea that one can ‘simply add women and stir’ (McCall 2005:1776) into pre-existing theoretical frameworks. Indeed, the approach of ‘ignoring such difference[s] within groups contributes to tension among groups’ (Crenshaw 1991: 1242). Many scholars have reduced racial conflict and subordination to expressions or projections of repressed sexual desire, ignoring other power relations and inadvertently essentializing race. Freud posits that racial conflict is a manifestation of repressed sexual anxiety, locating the origins of colonial domination in the white male's simultaneous desire and dread of the racialised body. In doing so, such frameworks inadvertently essentialised race, displacing attention from the structural, economic, and juridical mechanisms through which racial hierarchy was materially constructed and sustained. Libidinal explanations implicitly ‘naturalise racial antagonisms as a primal aspect of human nature’ (Schmitt 1997:497). Understanding sexuality as ‘discursively constructed, thus historically mutable… reveals sexualised racism itself as a social and historical product’ (Schmitt 1997: 497). If instead of treating sexuality as a primal instinct, we understand it as discursively constructed, produced through language, institutions, laws and social norms; it becomes something that changes across time and place. And crucially, if sexuality is historically mutable, then sexualised racism is not a timeless feature of human nature but a specific historical product, shaped by particular political and economic conditions. It can therefore be analysed, critiqued and dismantled rather than accepted as inevitable. Intersectionality allows us to reconceive racism not as an ‘aberrant pathological development of state authority … but as a fundamental indispensable technology of rule’ (Stoler 2010: 156). Both racial and sexual classifications appear as ordering mechanisms that shared their emergence with the bourgeois order. Intersectionality draws attention to the fact that dominant discourses such as feminist, antiracist, or class-based often ‘silenced those at the margins of the margins’ (Crenshaw 1991: 32). Intersectionality is not only a way of understanding how oppression works, but how solidarity often fails. It demands attention to the silences, the contradictions, and the frictions that arise when lived realities defy neat categorization.

What follows from this is a more unsettling claim; the categories through which domination operates are not merely exclusionary but fundamentally fictitious, a tension the colonial archive renders with particular clarity. In colonial contexts, racism did not rely on the ‘visual and social clarity’ (Hazel 2019: 89) of difference amongst groups but operated through anxieties surrounding identities that were threatening because ‘such crafted differences were not clear at all’ (Stoler 2010: 92). Intersectionality reveals that social categories are not grounded in any inherent or objective reality but are instead the outcome of discursive practices. Racism gains its strategic force, not from the fixity of its essentialism, but from the ‘internal malleability assigned to the changing features of racial essence’ (Stoler 2010:94), allowing racialisation to remain flexible, unstable and deeply effective as a tool of governance (Stoler 2010: 102). This is illustrated in the colonial strategy of divide and conquer, whereby administrators did not simply recognise pre-existing racial or ethnic distinctions but actively fabricated and hardened them as instruments of governance. This fabrication of racial categories as instruments of governance is perhaps most catastrophically illustrated in colonial Rwanda, where Belgian-imposed ethnic classifications ultimately contributed to the conditions of the 1994 genocide[1].

[1] In 1930s Rwanda, Belgian colonisers introduced identity cards, institutionalising a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi people, previously fluid and socioeconomic categories in Rwanda. Ethnicity was cast as rigid and heritable. Belgian colonisers favoured Tutsis over Hutus, granting them preferential access to education and administrative positions whilst constructing their superiority in explicitly racial terms. Upon independence in 1962, this hierarchy was violently inverted as Hutu-led governments came to power and Tutsis faced decades of escalating political exclusion and violence. When President Habyarimana’s (Hutu President) plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994, Hutu extremist militias mobilised immediately utilising state-controlled radio broadcasting to make explicit calls for Tutsi extermination. The resulting genocide culminated in the slaughter of an c.800,000 people in one hundred days.

In Rwanda, categorisation itself became a form of control as ‘demarcation leads to exclusion, and exclusion to inequality’ (McCall 2005: 1777). This critique invites a radical reconsideration of how knowledge is produced and urges caution in the use of categories that may themselves be implicated in the reproduction of power. These ambiguities are sharply revealed in the position of European women in the colonies, whose role in ‘promoting white solidarity’ came ‘partly at their own expense,’ as they were ‘almost as closely policed as colonized men’ (Stoler 2010: 96). Bourgeois femininity was not the product of autonomous will but of practices not ‘contingent on the will to self-affirmation alone’ (Stoler 2010: 96). European femininity was dependent on others to provide the ‘leisure for such self-absorbed administering and self-bolstering acts’ (Stoler 2010: 153). Although whiteness sought to ‘cordon’ itself off from colonial entanglements, it was continually breached by ‘cultural proximities, intimacies and sympathies that transgressed them’ (Stoler 2010: 153). The irony of this attempt at separation was that it depended on the very closeness it feared. The colonial home, rather than shielding white respectability from native influence, became the primary site where racialised sexuality was produced and regulated. Indigenous women, employed as domestic servants, wet nurses and concubines within the European household, were simultaneously indispensable to its functioning and constructed as a threat to its racial integrity. The intimacy of this proximity meant that the colonial home was not a sanctuary from racialised sexuality but conversely, its most immediate and contradictory site of production. It was precisely here, in the ostensibly private space of domesticity, that the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality were most anxiously policed and most persistently undermined. Intersectionality enables us to grasp these contradictions in their ‘simultaneity, complexity and irreducibility’ (Carastathis 2014: 304), making visible the unstable and contingent processes through which sexuality is governed, and knowledge itself is formed.

The colonial archive does not exhaust the terrain on which intersectionality does its most unsettling work. What the Dutch East Indies makes visible in the register of reproduction and domestic labour, the U.S. detention complex makes visible in the register of pain. Damningly, in both cases, it is the body that bears the weight of intersecting imperial logics. We shall turn now our exploration to the sexualised torture of Muslim detainees in the U.S, which will reveal the theatrical brutality of contemporary imperial violence, enabling an understanding of the multifarious cruelties defining each act.  In Bonnie Mann’s Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (2014), the author draws on the testimony of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, an Iraqi detainee whose interrogation documents the systematic deployment of female bodies as instruments of sexualised torture and racial humiliation. The ‘Invasion of Space by Female’ torture method involved forcing the prisoner to ‘look at pictures of … scantily clad women’ (195), dress up in a ‘fake burka and take dance lessons’ (196) and female torturers ‘straddling him and shoving her breasts in his face’ (197). This sexualised torture was a deliberate technique to humiliate the prisoner; to ‘destroy [his] humanity and relational place in the community’ (190). Mann objects to the ‘characterizations of female interrogators as innocent,’ arguing they are ‘bearers of the power of the regime’ (195). Despite this assertion, I would contend that the women are primarily subjugated through their bodies. Beauvoir, in ‘The Second Sex’ (1949), argues that patriarchal culture establishes a foundational dualism in which man is associated with culture, reason and transcendence; equipping him with the capacity to shape and exceed his biological condition. In contrast, woman is anchored to nature, the body and immanence, condemned to no more than biological repetition via menstruation, pregnancy and reproduction. This association is hierarchical; culture is valorised over nature and reason over the body. Woman ‘ascribes a purely negative connotation to the ways in which women differ from men’ (Chanter 1995: 49). As woman identifies with ‘nature’, she is in turn, ‘identified with the disgust generated by her sexual organs’ (Beauvoir, 1949: 143). In one tragic moment, as the female soldier tries to enact the power of the regime, she is at once admitting to an inferiority of the female body through its ability to elicit shame from the prisoner. Shame is described as a ‘wrenchingly painful feeling that is focused on a negative evaluation of the self as a whole’ (Mann 2010:56). By pursuing the reaction of disgust from the prisoner, I would argue that, inadvertently, her body becomes aligned with the very ontology it has been tasked to undo. This is the ontology that reduces woman to her body; where her sexuality is constructed as inherently shameful and abject, where her nature is so damning that even when wielding institutional power, the female soldier cannot escape the patriarchal logic that renders her femininity a source of disgust rather than authority. And of course, sexualised torture would not be successful without ‘shared misogyny across cultural contexts’ (Mann 2010:56). Biology becomes prosocial and determinative of existential possibilities. The female soldier is then in constant indecision between inwardness and externality. This irresolvable tension between her agency and subjugation, between institutional power and bodily diminishment is not incidental to her position but constitutive of it. The paradox, of her enacting the regime’s power and being subjugated to macroprocesses herself, cannot be resolved; ‘it can only be endured and executed in various ways’ (Beauvoir 2003:11)..For Beauvoir, the human relation to nature is fundamentally ambiguous, nature is the inescapable condition of human existence, yet it cannot be fully brought under the control of human will or meaning. Patriarchal culture exploits this tension by collapsing woman into nature entirely, denying her the capacity for transcendence that man is presumed to possess, and condemning her instead to the repetition of biological life. Beauvoir is unsettling in insisting that our relation to nature is constitutively irresolvable; nature appears as the precondition of human experience yet remains at once indifferent to it and in perpetual excess of it. In this way sexual difference can be understood as a ‘metaphysical question that served to mask or mystify a political reality’ (Mann 2014: 35). It allows us to notice the ways in which the ‘forces of man-made injustice feed on nature’ (Mann 2014: 36). What we gain here, different to feminist denaturalising accounts where material and political interests act causally on material bodies to constrain or shape them as sexed, is an approach that accounts for women’s bodily differences as backgrounded causes for symbolic formations that are potentially generative of different meanings for sexual difference. Far from being merely passive actors, women ‘can [be] both subject to violence and agents of violence’ (Puar, 2007, 90), revealing how gendered roles within systems of power do not always align with simplistic binaries of oppressor and oppressed. This echoes the position of European women in the colonial context, who were simultaneously subjugated by the very racial and gendered order they were tasked to uphold. In both instances, women are conscripted into structures of domination as instruments rather than architects, their agency circumscribed by the same patriarchal and racialised logics they are made to enforce. The female body is wielded as a tool of power whilst remaining subordinate to it; its utility contingent on its continued subjugation within it. The very force and ‘directionality of causality is not eliminated but diffracted’ (Mann 2014: 38). These are not isolated operations of power but overlapping and mutually sustaining ‘justificatory entanglements' (Mann 2014: 38). Intersectionality reveals how bodies are instrumentalised through intersecting structures of power, but how those same bodies trouble fixed distinctions between domination and subjugation, agency and constraint.

Yet to read this torture solely through the lens of gendered humiliation is to miss its most devastating dimension; the effectiveness of these techniques derived not only from their assault on masculine dignity but from their deliberate violation of Islamic moral codes, targeting the detainee's religious self-conception as much as his body. The use of sexualized violence against Muslim men in U.S. military detentions was not only designed to break them psychologically but to dismantle their communal ties. As touched on previously, the female torturer through a ‘racially gendered theatre of subordination’ is a ‘tool of the regime’ (Mann 2014: 48). Through a process of ‘analogical substitution’, the ‘ephemeral’ power of the regime becomes tangible by borrowing the ‘incontestable reality’ of pain and ‘the sheer material factualness of the human body’ to shift its ‘sentience’ into reality. This substitution has the dual action of ‘undoing a man’ through various acts of torture and ‘[attacking] the groupness of the group’ (Mann 2014:190). In traditional Islamic teachings, moral behaviour focuses on ‘premarital and extramarital abstinence, piety and decency in dress’ (Beckmann 2010: 62). Any sexual relation outside of marriage is considered ‘zinaa or sin’ and is ‘socially and legally condemned’ (Beckmann 2010: 621). For Iraqi detainees, the body becomes the site where two distinct biopolitical agendas, Islamic piety and liberal secularism, collide. Biopower is identified as having two distinct forms: one concerned with the life of the individual, the other concerned with the life of the species. Biopolitics is the encasement of a disciplinary power targeting the individual within a state power targeting the social body. Sexualized violence does not just punish; it attempts to reorder the subject according to a different moral logic, using the language of flesh to dismantle the authority of faith. Sexualised violence works precisely because it leverages Islamic moral codes; it succeeds not just in humiliating the prisoners but in desecrating his religious self-conception. Significantly, these violated modesty codes are not external to gender hierarchy but constitutive of it; the same religious framework that prohibits unsanctioned contact between men and women also structures the terms of female subordination. The torture thus exploited a double bind through instrumentalising religious prohibition as a mechanism of humiliation whilst simultaneously reproducing the gendered hierarchy embedded within that very prohibition. In Mann’s writing, we can see ‘the intersections of religion with gender, class and colonialism’ (Freidman 2015: 109). What a single axis or purely gendered analysis misses in this context is how sexuality operated not just as a vector of power, but as a culturally loaded site of spiritual violation. Queer perspectives might identify sexualised violence as tools of masculine domination or heteronormative control, but they often misrepresent the centrality of religious meaning in how such violence is experienced. The effectiveness of this torture cannot be disentangled from the specific religious and cultural prohibitions it was designed to violate. To read this torture solely through the lens of heteronormativity is to impose a secular analytical vocabulary onto an experience whose most devastating dimension was spiritual rather than sexual. Religion is often a site of complex negotiation that is not fully explained ‘by a binarist model of oppression/ resistance’ (Freidman 2015 :105). Religion occupies a ‘complex and contradictory role,’ (Friedman 2015: 105) simultaneously oppressive and ‘generat[ive]’ of identity, much like sexuality, which is both ‘creative and enjoyable’ yet ‘dangerous and corrupting’ (Beckmann 2010: 621). Adding religion to our understanding of sexuality is not additive but ‘transformative’ (Friedman 2015 107), it restores the full complexity of what was at stake in the violation of the detainee's body. It requires a thinking beyond an exclusive focus on ‘power over and power against’ (Friedman 2015 107). It makes clear how the assault on Muslim male bodies simultaneously targets their faith, ethics and communal identity. Intersectionality forces scholars to grapple with the inherent entanglements of power, embodiment and social structure, where ‘the complexity that arises when the subject of analysis expands to include multiple dimensions of social life’ demands new forms of inquiry that resist reductionism (McCall 2005:1772). Intersectional analysis reveals how sexuality operates as a conduit for power across religious, racial, and gendered lines, whilst also remaining attuned to the corporeal intensity of that violence; the ways in which shame, pain, and bodily exposure mark the limits of what can be fully explained by structure or discourse alone.

Overall, neither case study resolves neatly into a story of domination and resistance; what they share, and what intersectionality makes visible, is the constitutive instability of the very categories through which power operates. Indeed, defining sexuality has become increasingly complex. Questions of ‘power, pleasure, survival, labour, consumption, symbolic meanings, emotion and agency’ (Lyons 2006: 156) must all be considered in approaching this vital domain of human life. In colonial settings, not only indigenous women but also European women were shaped by imperial logics, at once enforcers of racial purity and subjects of patriarchal control. Shame, desire and the management of proximity expose how sexuality mediates collective identities and moral authority. The aforementioned are not just scenes of violence, but of categorical instability; where desire becomes discipline and care, control. Intersectionality does not resolve these tensions; it keeps them open. It turns away from the comfort of linear causality and towards the generative recognition that the body is where histories sediment, and where new possibilities might still emerge.

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By Vaishnavi Suganthan

Edited by Sofia Gobin & Julie Raout, Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright

Introduction

The Sri Lankan civil war is often examined through the lenses of ethnic conflict, insurgent strategy, and post-war accountability, yet far less attention has been given to the framing processes that shaped Tamil political consciousness across Sri Lanka and its global diaspora. Tamil interpretations of the conflict emerged not only from immediate wartime conditions but from a much longer history of structural discrimination, state violence, and unaddressed grievances. These accumulated experiences produced an interpretive tradition in which protection, survival, and political betrayal became central political themes among Tamil communities. These themes shaped both everyday understandings of security and broader forms of political mobilisation. Within this historical and emotional landscape, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) framed themselves as the only reliable defenders of Tamil life and dignity. At the same time, the Sri Lankan state’s longstanding pattern of evading accountability for mass violence created a political environment in which Tamil communities increasingly understood armed resistance as both justified and necessary.

This paper examines how the LTTE’s protective framing interacted with state impunity to shape Tamil mobilization inside Sri Lanka and across the diaspora. The central research question asks how the LTTE’s claim to act as a protector, articulated through diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing, intersected with decades of unpunished state violence to produce a durable political consciousness. This paper argues that the LTTE’s dominance within Tamil politics cannot be explained solely by military capacity, organizational discipline, or diaspora financing. Instead, its power rested on a sustained framing project that aligned closely with deeply rooted historical experiences of exclusion and vulnerability. State impunity amplified this effect by undermining faith in institutional justice and reducing the credibility of non-violent political strategies. As a result, both wartime mobilization and post-war diaspora activism were shaped by the belief that Tamil survival required alternative protective structures. This analysis suggests that persistent Tamil mobilization is often misread as ideological radicalization when it is more accurately understood as the afterlife of unresolved legitimacy failure.

Literature Review

The Tamil struggle for self-determination has generated a rich body of scholarship that examines how movements negotiate legitimacy, articulate political meaning, and mobilize communities under conditions of repression. This literature review situates the current project within social movement framing theory, drawing on diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing to explain how Tamil political consciousness emerged from Sri Lanka and its diaspora. Framing scholars argue that movements do not simply respond to material conditions, but rather engage in what we can describe as “ideologically structured action,” events in which actors construct interpretive frameworks that transform grievances into collective action. In the Tamil case, framing helps explain how the LTTE’s depiction of itself as the protector of the Tamil people gained credibility and shaped the contours of mobilization.

Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah provide one of the most influential analyses of Tamil political framing. Their work demonstrates how the “politics of naming” structured global perceptions of the LTTE and, by extension, of Tamil claims to sovereignty. They argue that categorizing the LTTE as a terrorist movement enabled the Sri Lankan state to legitimize extraordinary counter-insurgency practices while displacing the historical record of anti-Tamil violence. As they write, labeling the LTTE as terrorists helped produce a “narrowed deliberative space” in which Tamil political claims were silenced through the global War on Terror (Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005, p. 92). Their analysis demonstrates how framing battles not only shape international diplomacy but determine who is permitted to appear as a legitimate political subject. Within this constrained discursive environment, the LTTE’s effort to frame itself as a protector of civilians was a deliberate attempt to reclaim moral authority and counter the state’s narrative.

Stokke expands this discussion by showing how the LTTE’s framing was translated into institutional practice. His ethnographic study of Tamil Eelam governance during the 2002 ceasefire demonstrates that the LTTE did not rely solely on rhetoric to cultivate legitimacy. Instead, the organization built courts, police structures, welfare programs, and administrative bodies that performed state-like functions. Crucially, Stokke argues that the LTTE’s project produced a “Sri Lanka (that) has a de facto dual state structure, with LTTE also exercising considerable influence on state institutions and officials in the government-controlled parts of the northeast province. Local government institutions continue to operate in LTTE-controlled areas, resulting in a dual state structure within those regions (Stokke 2006, p. 1022). This political-territorial division made the LTTE’s presence not simply oppositional but constitutive: a parallel authority that governed large segments of Tamil life. Stokke argues that these LTTE institutions exhibited a “dual function of coercion and care,” simultaneously providing security and enforcing order (Stokke, 2006, p. 1027). He describes this model as “hegemony armoured by coercion,” drawing on Gramsci to show how authority was produced through both service provision and disciplined governance (Stokke, 2006, p. 1026). By embedding governance within everyday life, the LTTE converted its protective framing from an abstract political claim into a lived experience. Yet Stokke also identifies a central tension: while the movement delivered stability, welfare, and predictable rule, it constrained democratic participation and dissent. This dynamic demonstrates how framing and governance can reinforce each other while also generating contradictions within movements that rely on militarized authority. In this way, Stokke’s analysis extends framing theory by illustrating how interpretive claims become durable when they are institutionalized in state-like structures that enable populations to experience protection as an everyday reality.

Beyond territorial governance, diaspora analyses highlight Tamil political consciousness beyond Sri Lanka’s borders. Guyot’s study demonstrates that diaspora activism was shaped by what she calls a “moral economy of obligation,” in which guilt, loss, and collective responsibility underpinned participation (2022, p. 18). During the war, the LTTE’s dominance in diaspora networks meant that Tamil identity was frequently equated with loyalty to the movement, and dissent was marked as betrayal. After 2009, this landscape changed. New diaspora organizations reframed Tamil identity through the language of human rights, legal accountability, and transnational justice. Guyot shows that younger activists blended cultural identity with global political norms, shifting from a nationalist framing of protecting the homeland to a cosmopolitan framing of seeking justice (Guyot, 2022, p. 9). This evolution demonstrates that framing is not static. It adapts to new political contexts while preserving core elements of collective memory, especially those related to vulnerability and protection.

Scholarship on Tamil civil society and wartime legitimacy provides essential secondary grounding. Orjuela’s work shows that civil society actors operated within a political field structured by violence, fear, and state surveillance, which constrained their ability to articulate Tamil grievances or pursue rights-based advocacy (Orjuela, 2005, p. 129). This research supports the diagnostic framing analysis by showing that Tamil civilians encountered the state not as a neutral arbiter, but as an actor that actively limited political participation. At the same time, Orjuela highlights how Tamil organizations attempted to create spaces for community protection and social welfare, indicating that protective practices extended beyond the LTTE into broader Tamil political life.

Höglund and Orjuela further argue that legitimacy during conflict is relational and shaped by state violence, historical narratives, and community perceptions (Höglund, 2011, p. 167; Orjuela, 2005, p. 13).In their analyses of Sri Lanka, they indicate that the failure to protect minorities, and widespread perception that violence against Tamils occurred with impunity, undermined state legitimacy. This directly supports the current project’s argument that state impunity created the conditions in which the LTTE's protective framing could resonate among Tamil communities. Their work also demonstrates that legitimacy in war is relational: state practices shape insurgent legitimacy, and vice versa. This relational model helps explain why Tamil communities gravitated toward actors who appeared to offer protection in a context where state institutions were widely distrusted.

Taken together, these studies provide a multidimensional understanding of Tamil political framing. Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah reveal how global discursive structures shaped Tamil legitimacy. Stokke shows how framing becomes durable when institutionalized through governance. Guyot illustrates how frames are carried and reinterpreted across diaspora contexts. Orjuela and Höglund deepen the analysis by showing how civil society constraints and state failures of protection shaped the political environment in which framing occurred. Across these works, a central insight emerges: Tamil political consciousness was constructed through a layered process in which framing, governance, memory, and international discourse interacted to produce meaning and mobilization. This provides the conceptual and empirical foundation for analyzing how the LTTE’s protective framing operated and why it had lasting effects on Tamil mobilization in Sri Lanka and across the diaspora.

Methodology

This study employs a qualitative, framing-centered methodology grounded in social movement theory. The research question examines how the LTTE’s protector framing interacted with state impunity to shape Tamil mobilization within Sri Lanka and across the diaspora, the method must capture interpretive meaning, moral claims, and narrative construction. Framing theory is the most appropriate analytical foundation as it explains how movements interpret injustice and assign responsibility, which is central to this study’s focus on how state impunity shaped Tamil political meaning. Quantitative approaches cannot account for the symbolic, emotional, and experiential dimensions through which legitimacy takes shape. The methodology, therefore, treats framing as both a conceptual lens and an analytic tool, allowing a close examination of how political actors interpret violence, protection, and belonging.

Framing theory conceptualizes social movements as actors engaged in meaning work that defines problems and assigns responsibility. These are several types of framing. Diagnostic framing identifies the source of injustice, prognostic framing outlines strategies for addressing harm, and motivational framing provides the moral imperative for action. Applied to the LTTE, this framework illuminates how the organization framed state repression as an existential threat, portrayed itself as the only reliable guardian of Tamil civilians, and mobilized emotions such as duty, sacrifice, and grief as political motivations. It also provides a structure for examining how the Sri Lankan state constructed a counter-frame of terrorism to delegitimize Tamil claims, and how diaspora actors later adapted the protector frame into a rights-based discourse after 2009. This interpretive structure follows Della Porta’s argument that contentious politics is constituted through “interactive meaning production,” which links experiences of violence to political identity (Della Porta, 2014, p. 131). The methodological design is based on comparative frame analysis across three interconnected sites of meaning production. The first site is LTTE wartime governance and communication, where the protector frame was initially formed. The second site is the Sri Lankan state and international institutions, whose counter-framing and longstanding refusal to pursue accountability shaped the discursive environment in which Tamil claims circulated. The third site is the post-war diaspora, where memory, displacement, and transnational activism reshaped the meaning of protection in a new political context. Treating these sites as interdependent rather than discrete follows Della Porta’s emphasis on multi-sited interpretive research, which traces how frames circulate and evolve across political environments (Della Porta, 2014, p. 279). This design also aligns with Höglund’s argument that the legitimacy of wartime actors must be understood relationally, through the interaction of violence, representation, and institutional performance (Höglund, 2011, p. 159).

Primary and secondary sources were selected because they represent the key discursive arenas in which Tamil political meaning was produced. These sources include ethnographic documentation of LTTE governance (Stokke, 2006), analyses of nationalist discourse and the politics of naming (Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah, 2005), United Nations investigations that detail patterns of state violence and impunity (UN Panel of Experts, 2011; OISL, 2015), and diaspora studies examining post-war reframing and moral obligation (Amarasingam, 2015; Guyot, 2022). Each text was treated as a discursive event in which legitimacy, protection, and collective identity were articulated. Close reading involved identifying recurring symbolic terms such as protection, justice, martyrdom, sovereignty, obligation, and innocence. These terms were then organized using Snow and Benford’s triadic model to trace how diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames emerged and shifted across time and political space. Framing analysis alone cannot fully explain how power shapes which narratives resonate and which are marginalized. For this reason, the study integrates critical discourse analysis to examine how counter-frames operate within unequal political structures. This clarifies how the Sri Lankan state’s designation of the LTTE as a terrorist organization functioned to silence Tamil political grievances in global forums. Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah’s observation that the politics of naming narrows the discursive space available to Tamil claims provides a central foundation for this layer of analysis (Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah, 2005, p. 96). Critical discourse analysis also helps interpret how international institutions selectively amplified or muted human rights narratives. For example, the OISL (OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka) report documents decades of systematic state violence, yet its reception varied widely, illustrating how institutional power determines which frames become actionable and which remain symbolic (OISL, 2015, p. 7).

The methodology further draws on Orjuela’s analysis of Tamil civil society during the war, which shows how community organizations navigated repression, humanitarian need, and political pressure (Orjuela, 2003, p. 128). Incorporating her framework helps situate the protector frame within a broader ecosystem of Tamil political actors whose agency is often overlooked. Her discussion of how civil society groups managed the tension between service provision and political alignment provides an analytical bridge between governance, framing, and lived experience. This supports the methodological choice to treat LTTE and non-LTTE Tamil actors as part of a shared moral and interpretive field rather than isolating the insurgency as a self-contained entity. Diaspora materials require a different interpretive approach. Following Guyot’s study of post-war activism, diaspora political identity is shaped by affective ties, inherited memories, and moral obligations rather than direct wartime experience (Guyot, 2022, p. 2). Amarasingam’s interviews with Tamil youth demonstrate that narratives of protection and loss are transmitted intergenerationally and reactivated through political action (Amarasingam, 2015, p. 69). These insights justify treating diaspora discourse as an essential site of meaning production rather than a derivative reflection of homeland politics. Methodologically, this involves analyzing diaspora sources as active producers of political meaning who reshape frames through new political opportunities and constraints. Reflexivity is central to the analytical process. Studying a movement embedded in extreme violence requires what Della Porta describes as an interpretive frame that seeks to understand claims without endorsing them (Della Porta, 2014, p. 208). This research, therefore, treats LTTE and state narratives as competing interpretations of legitimacy rather than objective truths. Triangulation across ethnographic studies, institutional reports, and diaspora publications strengthens the analysis by allowing interpretive claims to be cross-checked against multiple perspectives. Because many materials involve trauma, loss, and contested memory, textual interpretation was conducted with attention to political context to avoid oversimplification or harm.

However, there are methodological limitations. Frame analysis relies on available texts, meaning that perspectives absent from published material, such as marginalized Tamil communities or dissenting LTTE cadres, remain underrepresented. UN reports provide critical documentation of state violence, yet reflect institutional constraints and cannot fully capture everyday political meaning. Diaspora sources may overrepresent highly engaged activists rather than the broader community. Framing analysis also cannot establish causality with precision; it reveals how meaning structures mobilization but cannot measure its effects. Finally, because LTTE governance materials are mediated through ethnographers, analysts, and post-war political pressures, the study works with representations of institutions rather than direct administrative archives. These limitations define the study’s scope. The methodology is designed to analyze how protection was framed, interpreted, and mobilized across Tamil political contexts, not to reconstruct organizational decision making or measure participation rates. It provides a theoretically grounded, multi-sited interpretive analysis of meaning-making under repression, consistent with the advanced standards of political science research.

Positionality and Reflexivity

This study approaches political violence and insurgent legitimacy as objects of analytical inquiry rather than as matters of moral endorsement. The analysis does not seek to justify or legitimize violence by any actor. Instead, it examines how legitimacy, protection, and authority are constructed, experienced, and sustained by communities living under conditions of prolonged repression and institutional failure. Legitimacy is treated as an interpretive and relational category shaped by historical memory, governance practices, and lived experience, not as a normative judgment about political correctness or ethical acceptability. By analyzing state and insurgent narratives as competing claims to authority within an unequal field of power, this research prioritizes explanation over evaluation. Reflexivity is central to this approach, ensuring that interpretations remain grounded in empirical evidence, theoretical rigor, and sensitivity to the asymmetries of violence, representation, and vulnerability that structure political meaning in contexts of conflict.

Case Study

Any serious analysis of Tamil mobilization must begin with the patterned, institutional, and state-driven violence that produced Tamil vulnerability as a political condition. Tamil resistance did not emerge devoid of historical context. It was formed through decades of what Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah describe as systemic and structural violence (Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005, p. 88). This violence was not merely a series of isolated discriminatory practices; it functioned as a state project that reorganized political opportunity structures and fundamentally reshaped the meaning of security, citizenship, and belonging for Tamil communities. The historical memory of this exclusion was not episodic but cumulative. Tamils interpret political time as a continuity of unaddressed grievances and repeated betrayals, which have created a collective sense that discrimination is embedded in the very architecture of the postcolonial state (Hellmann-Rajanayagam, 2007, p. 9). This interpretive tradition meant that each new episode of violence was understood through a longer historical arc, reinforcing the perception that the conflict was rooted in foundational questions of belonging and survival rather than temporary policy disagreements.

The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 set the legal foundation for a majoritarian political order that structurally excluded Tamils. This was followed by targeted pogroms in 1958, 1977, and most infamously 1983, where police and military forces either participated in violence or enabled it by refusing to intervene. Black July, in particular, became a central interpretive memory through which Tamils understood the intentions of the Sri Lankan state. Historical records show that security forces did not simply fail to protect Tamil civilians; they actively facilitated the violence or withdrew to permit it. These patterns created a political reality in which the state was understood not as a guarantor of safety but as a source of existential threat.

United Nations investigations reinforce this interpretation. The OISL report concludes that violence against Tamil civilians was widespread, deliberate, and carried out with impunity across multiple decades (OISL, 2015, p. 6). The UN Panel of Experts similarly states that state forces engaged in large-scale and systematic attacks on civilians amounting to potential war crimes and crimes against humanity (UN Panel, 2011, p. 22). These findings do more than record historical abuses; they describe a structural environment where the state repeatedly violated the core principles of humanitarian protection. Tamils experienced these events not as isolated crises but as part of a long chain of betrayals dating back to the colonial period and early post-independence reforms. This continuity of perceived historical abandonment produced a collective political consciousness in which protective claims held deep resonance. Tamil identity formation, shaped by exclusion, violence, and the erasure of grievances, created an interpretive field wide enough for the LTTE to construct diagnostic claims that aligned with lived experience.

Framing theory clarifies why these structural conditions mattered. Diagnostic framing identifies what the injustice is and who is responsible for it. Tamil communities did not require movement actors to interpret the source of harm; their experiential knowledge had already established the Sri Lankan state as the central threat to their security. However, the LTTE’s diagnostic framing was significant not because it introduced a new interpretation, but because it consolidated, intensified, and organized these existing beliefs. By consistently naming the state as the source of violence, the LTTE transformed diffuse experiences of harm into a coherent collective narrative, strengthening group identity and clarifying lines of political opposition. The LTTE’s diagnostic framing drew on decades of massacres, disappearances, land seizures, militarization, and sexual violence by state forces. The failure of the state to prosecute perpetrators reinforced the belief that Tamil safety was impossible within the existing institutional framework, which UN reports identify as a climate of impunity that encouraged further violations (OISL, 2015, p. 246). Impunity was therefore not only a legal failure; it was a political mechanism that shaped mobilization by signaling that the state itself was structurally incapable of delivering justice. In this context, framing worked to polarize communities, narrow perceived political options, and legitimize more radical forms of resistance. As Della Porta argues, state violence reconfigures perceptions of threat, vulnerability, and moral legitimacy, thereby structuring contentious action (Della Porta, 2014, p. 233).

This is exactly what occurred in Tamil political consciousness. Tamils constructed their modern identity through a narrative of repeated denial and injustice, which positioned the postcolonial state as an inheritor of colonial forms of exclusion. When the LTTE articulated diagnostic claims, they fit into a well-established cultural script in which state betrayal was a central theme. Labeling the LTTE as a terrorist organization erased the historical experience of mass violence inflicted by the state. This politics of naming displaced the record of systemic state repression and replaced it with a narrative of insurgent criminality, narrowing the discursive space available for Tamil claims. Diaspora testimony strengthens this diagnosis. Guyot notes that many diaspora Tamils carried a persistent memory of existential insecurity, with one interviewee stating, “When the state is the one that kills you, who else do you turn to but those who promise to defend you” (Guyot, 2022, p. 17).

Motivational framing explains why individuals should act, why resistance is urgent, and why participation becomes a moral obligation. The LTTE’s motivational framing transformed vulnerability into responsibility. Participation was not framed as optional but as an ethical responsibility to a condition of unprotected Tamil existence. The LTTE mobilized emotions already embedded within Tamil society, including grief, loss, humiliation, gratitude, and duty, and reframed them as motivations for collective action. Hellmann-Rajanayagam explains how Tamil narratives of martyrdom, sacrifice, and historical perseverance were deeply rooted in earlier political movements and cultural traditions, making them powerful sources of moral justification (Hellmann-Rajanayagam, 2007, p. 16).

Amarasingam’s diaspora interviews showed that martyrdom was often described as the highest expression of philodemic love for the Tamil nation (Amarasingam, 2015, p. 68). Participants repeatedly stated that the LTTE fighters were perceived as the sole protectors and representatives of the Tamil community (Amarasingam, 2015, p. 119). Motivational framing linked participation to loyalty, dignity, and the moral demand to protect the community. Diaspora evidence shows this frame transcended geography. Many diaspora Tamils articulated a sense of obligation rooted in transnational kinship networks where stories of violence circulated between relatives. Guyot shows how diasporic political identity was shaped by guilt, duty, and the shared experience of loss (Guyot, 2022, p. 5). Tamil youth abroad often described a responsibility to act because their safety abroad contrasted sharply with the insecurity faced by relatives in Sri Lanka. Motivational framing also relied on urgency. UN reports documenting ongoing and unpunished violations made the threat appear continuous. The UN Panel’s finding that the government maintained a climate of fear (UN, 2011, p. 25) provided empirical reinforcement. The LTTE’s frame thus positioned resistance as both morally necessary and temporally urgent.

A crucial strength of the LTTE’s protective framing was that it did not remain discursive; it was institutionalized. Prognostic framing identifies solutions and strategies. The LTTE’s proposed solution to state violence was the creation of parallel governance institutions that embodied Tamil autonomy and protection. Institutionalization transformed interpretive claims into lived experience. Stokke’s ethnography shows the LTTE built an emergent state structure including courts, police, taxation bodies, administrative councils, and welfare systems (Stokke, 2006, p. 1035). These were not symbolic; they constituted real governance across large areas of the northeast. Their existence validated the LTTE’s prognostic claim that Tamils required self-administered protection. The idea of Tamil self-rule has deep historical roots, shaped by narratives of ancient sovereignty and a collective belief that Tamil political autonomy was repeatedly denied by external powers. This long-standing historical imagination made the LTTE’s institutional project appear as the continuation of a much older struggle rather than an entirely new political formation. Legal institutions were especially important. Stokke reports civilians contrasting LTTE courts with state police, noting that LTTE courts treated them fairly while state police only harassed them (Stokke, 2006, p. 1028). Such experiences consolidated trust in LTTE rule and reinforced the movement’s diagnostic and prognostic frames. Security institutions similarly inverted the meaning of authority. LTTE police forces provided safety in areas where state forces produced insecurity. Welfare programs like food distribution, humanitarian coordination, and social services reinforced the perception that the LTTE was committed to Tamil well-being beyond military defense. These institutions deeply shaped diaspora perceptions. LTTE governance became a symbol of self-reliance and collective protection. Even after 2009, diaspora activism continued to draw legitimacy from memories of LTTE governance. Institutionalization, therefore, created a durable infrastructure of meaning that outlived the movement’s military defeat.

The state’s failure to pursue accountability allowed the LTTE's framing to continue after the war, resonating across generations and beyond Sri Lanka. Opportunity structures shape how frames circulate and gain resonance, and in the Tamil case, domestic impunity closed pathways for justice while diaspora networks opened new transnational pathways for political mobilization. United Nations findings confirm that impunity was continuous and systemic. The OISL report states that the government failed to investigate or prosecute violations, perpetuating a climate of impunity (OISL, 2015, p. 107), while the UN Panel similarly concluded that no meaningful accountability mechanisms existed (UN, 2011, p. 10). This signaled to Tamil communities that the state could not be trusted as a protective authority. Protective framing, therefore, remained credible long after the war because the structural conditions that produced vulnerability did not change.

Building on this continuity, diaspora activism did not simply replicate LTTE framing; it transformed it into a rights-based justice frame focused on accountability and dignity. Guyot demonstrates that diaspora youth shaped their political identity through inherited experiences of civil war, oppression, and violence (Guyot, 2022, p. 12), while Amarasingam shows that activism was often articulated through moral vocabularies of obligation and survival rather than ideological alignment (Amarasingam, 2015, p. 136). State impunity created the conditions for the transnational continuation of Tamil political mobilization and protective framing by foreclosing domestic avenues for justice and redirecting activism toward international forums such as United Nations investigations, foreign parliaments, and human rights bodies. In this sense, post-war diaspora activism mirrored the LTTE’s earlier prognostic framing: when the state failed to protect, protection was sought elsewhere.

Stokke’s observation that LTTE governance built a sense of Tamil political capacity explains why diaspora activism continued to defend Tamil autonomy even after 2009. When the LTTE’s institutions collapsed, diaspora communities inherited the task of articulating protective claims. Tamil political identity has always been shaped by a narrative of survival in the face of structural injustice, and this narrative persists as long as the underlying conditions remain unresolved. Thus, state impunity produced the structural necessity for the frame, LTTE governance institutionalized it, and the diaspora ensured its survival.

At the same time, the institutionalization of protection did not eliminate coercion or internal contestation within Tamil society. LTTE governance relied on disciplinary practices that constrained dissent, regulated political participation, and enforced compliance, particularly against rival Tamil groups and civilians perceived as undermining collective security. Courts and police structures that many civilians experienced as fair and predictable also served as mechanisms of surveillance and control, blurring the boundary between protection and punishment. These dynamics are not unique to the LTTE, but reflect a broader pattern observed in insurgent movements operating under conditions of extreme repression, where legitimacy is often constructed through the simultaneous provision of security and regulation of political life. In the Tamil case, however, prolonged state impunity intensified this dynamic by narrowing civilian alternatives, making coercive governance appear not as an aberration but as a necessary condition of collective survival. Acceptance of LTTE authority therefore often reflected constrained choice rather than unqualified consent, illustrating how protection and discipline became mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory within the movement’s claim to legitimacy.

Analysis

The case study demonstrates that Tamil mobilization cannot be understood through narrow accounts of insurgency or ethnic conflict. It emerged from a sustained interaction of structural violence, meaning-making practices, institutional performance, and transnational political work. The LTTE’s framing of itself as the protector of the Tamil people did not operate as an isolated narrative but as an interpretive structure through which Tamil communities understood vulnerability, political possibility, and collective obligation. This section synthesizes the case study to show how the LTTE’s diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames operated together within a context of state impunity to shape mobilization in Sri Lanka and across the diaspora.

Framing theory clarifies how movements construct the interpretive conditions that make particular forms of action appear logical, moral, and necessary. The LTTE’s diagnostic frame identified the Sri Lankan state as the primary source of danger, not as an incidental actor but as an institution structurally configured to undermine Tamil safety. This diagnosis gained credibility because it aligned closely with lived experience and with findings produced by international bodies such as the OISL and the UN Panel of Experts. These investigations documented widespread and systematic state violence, failures of accountability, and policies that directly harmed Tamil civilians. The convergence between experiential knowledge and institutional documentation transformed the LTTE’s diagnostic frame into a widely accepted interpretation of Tamil political reality.

The prognostic frame advanced this interpretation by offering a concrete and materially grounded vision of protection. Unlike parliamentary Tamil parties or civil society organizations, which lacked coercive capacity and territorial control, the LTTE positioned itself to translate protective claims into institutional practice. This was shown through the construction of parallel systems of justice, welfare, policing, and social regulation in areas where the state was either absent or experienced as predatory. These institutions reinforced the claim that Tamil safety required an authority capable of operating independently from a state that had consistently produced harm. Prognostic framing, therefore, bridged interpretation and practice by embedding the movement’s protective narrative within everyday governance.

Motivational framing supplied the moral and emotional force necessary for sustained participation. The LTTE framed resistance as an ethical response to injustice, linking participation to duty, dignity, and collective survival. This frame resonated because it drew upon existing memories of violence and transnational kinship networks. Diaspora youth interviewed by Amarasingam described engagement not in strategic terms but through moral vocabularies of obligation and responsibility rooted in shared suffering. Motivational framing thus connected personal identity to collective struggle and transformed trauma into a resource for mobilization. The durability of this framing extended beyond wartime institutions through transnational memory. For many members of the Tamil diaspora, particularly those who did not directly experience the war, the LTTE no longer operates primarily as a military organization but as a symbolic register of protection through which historical violence is interpreted and remembered. Narratives of repression, displacement, and loss circulate within families and community institutions, shaping political identity through affective inheritance rather than direct participation. Guyot shows that diaspora youth often understand their political consciousness through inherited memories of civil war and oppression rather than personal experience (Guyot, 2022, p. 12), while Amarasingam similarly demonstrates that engagement is frequently articulated through moral vocabularies of obligation, survival, and collective responsibility rather than ideological alignment or strategic calculation (Amarasingam, 2015, p. 136). In this way, the protector frame persists not as an operational blueprint but as a moral and interpretive lens that organizes trauma, identity, and political meaning across generations and geographic distance.

State impunity played a central role in sustaining all three framing dimensions. The absence of accountability for the state’s violence created conditions in which protective claims could not be dismissed as paranoia or exaggeration. When institutions fail repeatedly and in patterned ways, alternative protective structures gain legitimacy. Impunity also undermined rival political strategies. Negotiation-based approaches lost credibility when state actors continued to commit violations without punishment, shifting the opportunity structure in favor of the actors who framed protection as a collective necessity rather than a negotiable demand. Diaspora communities became essential sites for the reproduction and extension of this frame. Tamil activists abroad carried memories of state violence into new political settings and reframed protection in the language of international law, transitional justice, and human rights. This evolution did not displace the original protector narrative but translated it into new political idioms capable of operating in global arenas.

The LTTE’s success in converting protective claims into lived institutional experiences mirrors contemporary experiments in autonomous governance, most notably the Kurdish project in Rojava in northern Syria (Yagmur, 2016, p. 7). In both cases, movements established local governance structures that shifted authority away from hostile or absent states toward community-based institutions. Legitimacy in these contexts was not derived solely from military capacity but from the ability to provide security, social order, and stability. This comparison suggests that the Tamil case reflects a broader pattern in which unresolved state violence sustains mobilization long after armed conflict has formally ended. What distinguishes the Tamil case is not merely the intensity of violence or the organizational capacity of the LTTE, but the way prolonged state impunity transformed protection from a strategic claim into a durable interpretive necessity. When accountability fails repeatedly, legitimacy does not disappear with the defeat of armed actors; it migrates into memory, governance imaginaries, and transnational political practice. In this context, continued mobilization should not be read as ideological persistence or residual radicalization, but as a response to unresolved legitimacy failure embedded in institutional collapse. The Tamil case, therefore, challenges post-conflict frameworks that treat demobilization and reconciliation as temporal endpoints. Instead, it shows how political contention can persist in non-military forms when the conditions that originally made alternative authority credible remain structurally intact. Framing endures not because communities are unable to disengage from the past, but because meaning-making becomes a survival mechanism in the absence of credible state protection.

This analysis challenges a dominant tendency in social movement and post-conflict scholarship to interpret persistent mobilization primarily as evidence of ideological extremism, failed reconciliation, or residual radicalization. In the Tamil case, continuity is better understood as a response to unresolved legitimacy failure rather than an inability to disengage from a defeated movement. When state institutions repeatedly fail to account for mass violence, claims to protection do not disappear with military defeat; they are displaced into memory, governance imaginaries, and transnational political practice. Approaches that assess post-war mobilization without attending to meaning-making and legitimacy risk misdiagnosing survival-oriented political consciousness as pathology rather than as an unresolved political condition. The Tamil case demonstrates that framing is not peripheral to political struggle but foundational. It shows how movements organize experience into narrative and narrative into action, embedding meaning in institutions, emotions, and transnational networks. Most importantly, it reveals how political legitimacy is constructed not only through force but through the capacity to articulate and enact protection in contexts of sustained danger. Understanding these framing processes provides critical insight into why Tamil mobilization took the form it did, why it endured across decades and continents, and why it continues to shape political engagement long after the war’s end in 2009.

Conclusion

This paper has examined how the LTTE’s protective framing interacted with decades of state impunity to produce a durable political consciousness among Tamil communities in Sri Lanka and across the diaspora. Rather than treating insurgent legitimacy as a function of military capacity or organizational discipline, the analysis demonstrates that legitimacy emerged through processes of meaning-making that closely aligned with lived experiences of vulnerability, betrayal, and institutional abandonment. Protection did not merely function  as rhetoric, but as an interpretive framework through which security, justice, and political possibility were understood. By applying framing theory, this paper shows that the LTTE’s diagnostic claims resonated because they articulated widely shared understandings of state violence and exclusion. The systematic absence of accountability undermined confidence in formal institutions and narrowed the range of credible political strategies, amplifying the plausibility of alternative protective authorities. In this context, protective framing translated historical memory, grief, and obligation into moral imperatives for mobilization. State impunity thus operated not only as a legal failure, but as a constitutive condition shaping political meaning and legitimacy.

The persistence of protective framing within the diaspora after the LTTE’s military defeat underscores how political meaning can outlive organizational collapse, continuing to shape activism through memory, identity, and transnational justice claims. More broadly, the Tamil case illustrates how prolonged state failure to protect or account for violence can generate enduring interpretive structures that shape mobilization long after the conflict’s formal end. Post-conflict frameworks that focus narrowly on institutional reconstruction without attending to meaning-making risk misinterpreting persistent mobilization as ideological radicalization rather than as an unresolved legitimacy failure. The Tamil case therefore demonstrates that framing is not simply a mobilizing device but a mechanism through which legitimacy is constructed, sustained, and transmitted under conditions of prolonged institutional breakdown.

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by Miranda Blell

INTRODUCTION

On the afternoon of July 30, 1914, Nicholas II issued the General Mobilization Order (GMO), effectively committing the Russian Empire to a war against Austria-Hungary and Germany. The decision was not linear; in the preceding twenty-four hours, Nicholas II had approved, rescinded, and then reinstated the order. This hesitation comports with historians' characterization of the Tsar as Russia's "peace-loving" master. Yet Nicholas II's eventual sanctioning of the GMO represented a divigation between his alleged commitment to a settlement and the mobilization that occurred under his authority. This dissonance is best understood when situated within assessments of his character, wherein he was described as "weak and excessively kindhearted." Indeed, McKinney (2018) observes that "the Tsar's resolve against the counsel offered by his hawkish advisors was weak." Clark (2012) advances this characterisation by identifying a contradiction within Nicholas II's disposition: "an ingrained aversion to conflict" conjoined with "exceptional pliancy in the face of external pressures." Considered together, these assessments portray a sovereign whose autonomy—and, by extension, authority—was susceptible to the exigencies of his advisors. By concentrating trust in his cabinet—principally War Minister Sukhomlinov, Chief of the General Staff Yanushkevich, and Foreign Minister Sazonov—the Tsar institutionalized an informational environment that favored the military establishment. This instability was compounded by the effects of the 1905 Revolution, which diminished the Tsar's authority through concessions that redistributed power to ministerial departments. The resulting configuration produced a quasi-fragmented autocracy in which discrete centres of influence operated with autonomy, thereby producing a state in which "the waxing of one node in the system produced the waning of others." Taken together, these conditions rendered the Tsar's sovereignty contingent upon the prerogatives of his advisors, who circumvented and, at times, outright subverted his executive oversight.

The issuance of the GMO was the outcome of a process in which procedural sequencing allowed the Tsar's cabinet to pre-emptively structure—and thereby pre-determine—executive assent. Drawing on diplomatic correspondence, autobiographical accounts, and contemporary testimony, this study reconstructs the mechanisms through which these officials constrained the sovereign's policy options. It contends that the GMO represented the culmination of a sequence in which Russian policymakers—through informational control, procedural orchestration, and the manipulation of perceived constraints—compelled Nicholas II's consent.

THE JULY CRISIS OF 1914 | A CHRONOLOGY

Upon being informed of Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia on July 24, Sazonov exclaimed: "It's a European war!" His reaction accorded with the dominant interpretation among Russian officials, who regarded the démarche as the precursor to a continental war; this perception situated the subsequent deliberations within a framework that assumed the imminence of a Europe-wide conflagration, rather than a conflict localized to the Balkans. With minimal effort expended toward securing a settlement, this perception was advanced as the only practicable course of action. That same day, the Council of Ministers authorized the War Preparation Period. Outlined in 1913 by Sukhomlinov, this phase was defined as "the period of diplomatic complications preceding the commencement of hostilities, during which all departments are required to undertake preparatory measures essential for the security and efficacy of mobilizing the army, navy, and fortresses, [and] for the deployment of forces to the threatened frontier." According to Fay (1921), the War Ministry's "Survey I" and "Survey II" regulations were authorized by the General Staff. "Survey I" permitted the call-up of reservists to complete the peacetime establishment of active units and to replace men recently discharged, thereby bringing regiments to wartime strength. These preparations were exemplified by the accelerated promotion of officers stationed at the Tsar's residence in Krasnoe Selo, as well as by the redeployment of the 2nd and 3rd Independent Cavalry Brigades to positions deemed advantageous. Moreover, General Danilov's orders stipulated the deferment of the Kazan 5th Cavalry Division's transfer to Poland, thereby preserving its readiness for operations against Germany. In parallel, "Survey II" vested Sukhomlinov with the authority to summon additional classes of reservists for training, even when such measures exceeded the appropriations fixed by the military budget. The concurrent activation of both surveys effectively constituted a Partial Mobilization Order (PMO), while preserving the legal fiction that mobilization had not yet been formally proclaimed. According to Kennedy (2014), these measures were in agreement with the Tsar's wishes.

On July 26, the War Preparation Period was instituted in the military districts of Kiev, Odessa, Moscow, and Kazan, while the municipal governments of St. Petersburg and Moscow declared a state of siege. Diplomatic correspondence from July 25 sought to minimize the significance of these measures, reporting that "His Majesty has decided in principle to mobilize the thirteen army corps ultimately earmarked for operations against Austria-Hungary," which had been framed as contingent upon an attack on Serbia. However, Florinsky (1927) stated that the operational constraints inherent in a PMO rendered its discontinuation impracticable, thereby necessitating a transition to a GMO under most conditions. Indeed, contemporary assessments corroborate this interpretation. Discussing the PMO, the French ambassador in St. Petersburg, Paléologue, concurred with his Russian counterpart, Izvolsky, that "It's war this time." The importance of the PMO's preemptive measures is evidenced in Nicholas II's telegram on July 30, wherein the Tsar acknowledged that "The military measures which have now come into force were decided five days ago." This admission is significant for two reasons. First, it locates the inflection point of 'no return' as occurring not with the Tsar's assent to a GMO, but with the antecedent, extra-imperial initiation of the Period Preparatory to War. This substantiates the contention that the institutional mechanisms of Russian mobilization had been operationalized before—and autonomous from—the Tsar's assent. Second, it underscores Yanushkevich's agency in exploiting the distinction between "preparation" and "mobilization" to advance Russia's war effort under the guise of administrative routine. This enabled Yanushkevich to initiate measures functionally indistinguishable from a GMO, thereby pre-empting Nicholas II’s ability to veto it, as discussed in a later section.

During this time, Nicholas II attempted to avert a continental war. On July 27, the Tsar proposed a mediation effort, suggesting that Austria-Hungary's conflict with Serbia be adjudicated by the Hague Tribunal after a consultation with France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. In a telegram to Sazonov, the Tsar urged immediate action: "Perhaps there is yet time before events happen which cannot be undone. To gain time, try to take this step today." However, Wegerer (1928) observes that Sazonov ignored the Tsar's injunction to seek Franco-British engagement or to initiate arbitral proceedings.

On 28 July, Yanushkevich participated in a conference with Generals Danilov, Dobrorolsky, and Ronzhin, all of whom reaffirmed the necessity of instituting a GMO. Acting upon this consensus, he prepared two separate edicts for the Tsar: one authorizing a GMO, and the other codifying the provisions of the PMO. According to Kennedy, this deviated from the policy agreed upon by Sazonov and Yanushkevich on 24 July, and from the preferences that, as previously stated, had been expressed by the Tsar himself. Turner (1968) argues that, although such a policy was practicable had the General Staff chosen to pursue it, Sazonov's confidence in its diplomatic innocuousness was ill-founded. Under the stipulations of the Schlieffen Plan, just the PMO would have compelled Germany to pursue mobilization. On July 27, the German Foreign Secretary, Jagow, stated that "if Russia only mobilized in the south, Germany would not mobilize; but if she mobilized in the north, Germany would have to do so." Nonetheless, on July 28, Sazonov and Yanushkevich issued divergent communications regarding their intentions to proceed with mobilization. According to Turner, Sazonov—likely with the Tsar's support—dispatched a telegram to Berlin, with copies to Vienna, Paris, London, and Rome, declaring: "In consequence of the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, we shall tomorrow proclaim mobilization... Inform the German Government of this and lay stress on the absence of any intention on the part of Russia to attack Germany." By contrast, later that night, Yanushkevich dispatched an antithetical directive to the commanding officers of all military districts, issued even before the formal ratification of any plan: "July 30 will be proclaimed the first day of our general mobilization. The proclamation will be followed by the regulation telegram." This latter instruction, which presupposed a definitive course of action, suggests a degree of operational foresight at odds with the Tsar's disposition. Nicholas II’s discomfort with the policy adopted by his staff is discernible in a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which he conceded his political impotence:

"I foresee that soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me[,] and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far."

Throughout July 29, Sazonov persisted in his circuit of diplomatic consultations. To the German Ambassador, Pourtalès, he reiterated similar assurances. Sazonov tempered such rhetoric with the contention that mobilization need not be synonymous with war, and that Russian forces could, if required, remain indefinitely at readiness without crossing the frontier. Yet by evening, Pourtalès warned that any further escalation would compel Germany to counter-mobilize, thereby precipitating a European war. Almost concurrently, the War Ministry obtained reports indicating that Germany and Austria-Hungary had already initiated the GMO's measures under conditions of secrecy. With this intelligence, Sazonov pressed for an audience with Nicholas II; the meeting, lasting roughly an hour, concluded with the Emperor's "reluctant" assent to the first GMO. In his memoirs, Buchanan identified this moment as an inflection point, recalling that "the Emperor, yielding to the pressure brought to bear on him by his military advisors, unwillingly consented to issue a GMO." However, Turner contends that this interpretation places undue emphasis on a single exchange. Turner argues that the momentum toward a GMO had become irreversible as a result of the cumulative logic of diplomatic commitments, operational planning, and the sequence of military alerts. Indeed, Yanushkevich sought to secure signatures from the Council of Ministers for the General Mobilization Order; as Albertini (1953) records, this reflected his determination to have everything ready “in advance, so as to lose no time once the final consent had been obtained,” stating further that Dobrorolsky “would never have waited till evening,” notwithstanding the absence of the Tsar’s authorization. This interpretation finds corroboration in the diary of the Russian Foreign Office:

“...Sazonov requested His Majesty to receive him today, to enable him to present a report concerning the political situation which admitted of no delay. After a silence, the Tsar asked: ‘Is it all the same to you if I receive you at 3 o’clock, at the same time as Tatistchev, as otherwise I have not a free minute today?’ The Minister thanked His Majesty and said that he would present himself at the hour named. The Chief of the Staff heatedly pleaded with S.D. Sazonov to persuade the Tsar without fail to consent to a general mobilization in view of the extreme danger that would result for us if we were not ready for war with Germany, should circumstances demand the taking of decisive measures by us after the success of a general mobilization had been compromised by recourse to a partial mobilization…During the course of nearly an hour, the Minister attempted to show that war was becoming inevitable, as it was clear to everybody that Germany had decided to bring about a collision, as otherwise she would not have rejected all the pacifying proposals that had been made and could easily have brought her ally to reason. Under these circumstances, it only remained to do everything that was necessary to meet war fully armed and under the most favourable conditions for ourselves. Therefore, it was better to put away any fears that our warlike preparations would bring about a war, and to continue these preparations carefully rather than by reason of such fears to be taken unawares by war.”

The effort to secure Nicholas II's approval of a GMO is best understood through an examination of diplomatic correspondence. In a dispatch to Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Berchtold, the Hapsburg's ambassador in St. Petersburg, Szápáry, recorded having told Sazonov that "it would be a good thing if his Imperial master were informed of the true situation, especially as it was urgently necessary, if one wanted to maintain peace, to put an end to the attempts of the military to outbid each other, which now seemed to threaten as a result of the false reports that were in circulation." Szápáry later reported that Sazonov "endeavored to belittle the monarchical aspect of the question," recasting the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum as a prelude to a broader offensive against Serbia, rather than a punitive measure in response to regicidal provocation. Sazonov's conduct embodied the broader predisposition of the Russian government to interpret any of Austria-Hungary's démarches as a German-supported initiative. Upon receipt of Vienna's ultimatum to Serbia, Sazonov reportedly "detected Germany's hand in Austria's demands," thereby reframing the issue from a circumscribed dynastic-legal dispute over regicide into putative evidence of a premeditated design to destabilize the European balance of power. This was accentuated during the ministerial deliberations of July 29, in which Sazonov portrayed Russia as having been "bullied" by "arrogant" German diplomacy and insisted it was "time to stop," thus transmuting mobilization from discretionary policy into a defensive necessity. In effect, the imperial staff restructured Nicholas II's perceived sphere of action, embedding his consent to mobilization within an informational matrix constructed with selective intelligence, despite Szápáry's assurances that Austria-Hungary's past conduct obviated such assumptions.

Nonetheless, inflammatory—if not outright false—reports proliferated during this period. Szapáry observed that, "It is by no means out of the question that military circles are busy trying to reduce this complicated political problem to some simpler formula in the hope that, as soon as a certain degree of readiness for war has been reached, they may precipitate events as far as possible by influencing the mood of the Tsar through false reports." The telegram pointed to deliberate manipulation of intelligence within Russian military and diplomatic circles, with distorted reports used to pressure Nicholas II into ordering a premature mobilization. It was not the only such instance; Sazonov appears to have relayed to his counterparts reports of a German mobilization which, in reality, rested on unsubstantiated rumor. In his foreword to the Diary of the Russian Foreign Office, Sazonov recalled the disruptive effect of a misprint in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger. The newspaper prematurely announced the beginning of German mobilization; its arrival in St. Petersburg preceded the appearance of any retraction. Sazonov conceded that "absolutely false" reports of German mobilization "were reported at Petersburg as fact, despite the absence of verified evidence at the time." Among the reports circulating in St. Petersburg was that from the Russian military attaché in Athens, Colonel Yerkovich. After traveling through the German banlieue on July 28, Yerkovich claimed to have observed indications of mobilization already underway, including what he interpreted as troop re-organization. While the Russian ambassador to Germany, Sverbeiev, informed Sazonov that reports of German mobilization were unfounded—explaining that the extent had been orders had been pre-printed for various contingencies—the Tsar’s staff nonetheless treated such information as incontrovertible evidence of German mobilization. However, there is no historical evidence of any German mobilization—partial or full—before August 1. As Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, President of the German Delegation, later asserted: "The general Russian mobilisation determined upon on the 29th, and ordered on the 30th, was in no way justified by any military measure on the part of Germany or Austria-Hungary."

These fabrications concerning German mobilization were compounded by misreports about Austria-Hungary. On July 29, Szápáry urged Sazonov to apprise the Tsar of the "true" state of affairs, emphasizing that the preservation of peace required an immediate cessation of the escalating 'bidding up' between militaries, which was aggravated by the dissemination of unfounded reports. According to Wegerer, the most significant of these was the allegation of Austrian mobilization, which can be traced back to a telegram sent by Ambassador Shebeko on July 28—a telegram whose authenticity was questioned by contemporaries and possibly antedated. Indeed, during this time, Austria-Hungary had only mobilized against Serbia. However, when Szápáry rejected Sazonov's assertion that Austria had mobilized, Sazonov reportedly terminated the exchange with the remark, "Let us drop this chronology!" Wegerer contends that such exchanges resulted from a persistent tendency within Russian intelligence to overestimate the mobilization capacity of the Austro-Hungarian army. This predisposition was derived from the General Staff's familiarity with Habsburg mobilization procedures, which inclined analysts to interpret minor irregularities as precursors to full-scale mobilization. For example, an internal estimate prepared in March 1914 concluded that five to six corps would be sufficient to defeat Serbia, yet the 1913 benchmark—seven corps—continued to serve as the prevailing standard in Russian assessments. By mid-July 1914, field reporting from Vienna pushed the figure upward: Shebeko wired that "thus far in all eight corps are undergoing mobilization," while attaché traffic cited sightings of VIII Corps at Prague and IX Corps at Leitmeritz, encouraging analysts to assume covert activation of the three Galician corps as well. Indeed, staff officers reasoned that as many as thirteen Austro-Hungarian corps were nearing wartime strength—an inference that fed St. Petersburg's portrayal of Habsburg preparations as a threat to Russia's western frontier, and thus as justifying counter-mobilization. In a telegraph to Berchtold, Szápáry underscored the degree to which such misinformation had shaped the Tsar's judgment, reporting to Berchtold that:

"I observed that it had been brought to my notice that some apprehension was felt in Russia because we had mobilized the Eighth Army Corps of action against Serbia. M. Sazonov stated that the Chief of the General Staff had expressed uneasiness and that he knew nothing about it. I endeavored to convince M. Sazonov that any unbiased person could be easily convinced that our Southern Army Corps could not be a menace to Russia…"

According to Wegerer, Danilov admitted that Austria-Hungary's mobilization of its Eighth Army did not constitute a direct threat to Russia. One of the army's corps, he noted, was earmarked for contingencies against Italy, further attenuating its relevance to operations on the Serbian front. Serbian defensive measures, including the demolition of the Save River bridge on July 28 and the preemptive withdrawal of the Belgrade garrison on July 25, further diminished the plausibility of an immediate Austro-Hungarian assault on the Serbian capital, much less Russia. Yet, such realities were subsumed to the political imperatives of selective intelligence. Concurrently, despite the General Staff's admission about "the slowness of [its] operational work," the Russian press advanced a triumphalist narrative. This was exemplified by the Birzhevye Vedomosti of February 27, wherein Sukhomlinov declared that "Russia wants peace, but is ready for war." Nonetheless, Sazonov sought to leverage public opinion, reportedly insisting before the Crown Council that "Russian opinion makes clear that it is both politically and morally impossible for Russia to allow Serbia to be crushed." This argument, however, has been discredited. The Interior Minister, Maklakov, confided to Dobrorolsky that: "In Russia, war will never be popular with the masses. Revolutionary ideas are more to their taste than a victory over Germany." Similarly, the British Ambassador to Russia, Buchanan, recounted that "The German Ambassador [in St. Petersburg] had predicted that the declaration of war would provoke a revolution." The discontent, desertion, and apathy prevalent among the Russian populace at the outset of the war further undermine Sazonov's claims. Nonetheless, declarations of Russia's putative readiness for war, when combined with inflated estimates of Austro-Hungarian mobilization capacity, engendered an optic in which Nicholas II's decision-making likely became reactive rather than deliberative. As a result, the Tsar confided in Wilhelm II that "the indignation in Russia shared fully by me is enormous," a sentiment that contributed to his eventual agreement to the GMO.

As several accounts of the July Crisis suggest, the convergence of misinformation, manipulation, and political coercion delimited Nicholas II's decision-making power. Issued on the afternoon of July 29, the Tsar's first authorization of the GMO was the product of competing institutional agendas within the imperial administration. That night, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent the Tsar a telegram urging a de-escalation. According to McMeekin (1974), the Tsar expressed "extreme agitation" and directed the Court Minister that "everything possible must be done to save the peace," appending that he "would not become responsible for a monstrous slaughter." He contacted Sukhomlinov, who cautioned that mobilization was "not a mechanical process" susceptible to arrest and resumption at will, and then Yanushkevich, who offered a parallel objection. Nonetheless, Nicholas II succeeded in instructing Yanushkevich to suspend all mobilization activity. This order, however, was effectively nullified by his advisors. Indeed, his advisor's actions amounted to outright insubordination. Sukhomlinov's account of the subsequent events, offered under oath during his 1917 criminal trial, constitutes one of the most damning windows into the dysfunction of Russia's civil-military hierarchy:

"General Ianushkevich asked what he was to do then. I replied to him, 'Do nothing at all.' I knew that the responsibility rested on me, and I gave orders that mobilization should not be suspended, for which General Ianushkevich thanked me… The next morning, I lied to His Majesty, explaining that mobilization was proceeding only in the districts of the Southwest. On this day, I nearly lost my reason. I knew that mobilization was in full swing and that it was impossible to stop it. Fortunately, on the same day, the Tsar was convinced afresh, and I was thanked for the good execution of mobilization; otherwise, I should have been in jail long ago."

Sukhomlinov's testimony reveals the degree to which Nicholas II's formal authority had, by this stage, been subordinated to the discretion of his advisors, among whom "general war was regarded as almost inevitable." By contravening the emperor's directive, he shifted the issue from the sphere of administrative negotiation to that of a fait accompli. In concert with Yanushkevich, Sukhomlinov wagered that, once the GMO had progressed past an irretrievable stage, Nicholas II would deem compliance preferable to the ignominy of publicly overruling his general staff. The wager ultimately succeeded, albeit only through the intervention of other officials—foremost Sazonov—who secured the emperor's assent to a second GMO. Sazonov presented Wilhelm II's attempts at reconciliation as subterfuge, contending that their objective was to secure Germany a temporal advantage. In an audience with the Tsar, he stated: "We shall not escape war now!… I don't think Your Majesty can postpone the order for general mobilization any longer. The war will break out just the same at Germany's appointed time—and will catch us in hopeless confusion." However, Sazonov's assertions were not confined to the immediacy of "these circumstances"; even before the promulgation of the first GMO, he had alleged that the Kaiser's objective was "to delay our preparations so that he can demolish us after having overpowered France." Considered together, these statements exemplify the instrumentalization of imminent-threat narratives to delimit Nicholas II's decision-making abilities. Paléologue recorded that Sazonov's intervention of July 30 was the final argument put before the Tsar before he reinstated the GMO. Irrespective of the Tsar's assent, the episode underscores the determination of Nicholas II's advisors to ensure the GMO proceeded to completion. Reportedly, Yanushkevich expressed his desire to insulate himself from any countermanding orders, remarking, "I shall go away, smash my telephone, and generally adopt measures which will prevent anyone from finding me to give contrary orders which would again stop our general mobilization." On July 31, upon learning that the second GMO had been implemented, Sazonov joked to Yanushkevich, "Now you can smash your telephone."

CONCLUSION

Debating the signing of the second GMO, Paléologue described the Tsar as "deadly pale" and recorded his protest: "Just think of the responsibility you're advising me to assume. Remember, it's a question of sending thousands and thousands of men to their death!" The Tsar recognized that the impending deaths would be the result of determined decisions made within his council, rather than merely the contingencies of combat. The audit conducted by G. F. Krivosheev approximated Russian fatalities to be approximately 2.05 million soldiers, comprising 1.20 million killed in action, 440,000 missing, 240,000 succumbing to wounds, 11,000 killed by gas, and 155,000 from disease. His willingness to proceed, despite consistent professions of pacifism, demonstrates the degree to which the decision was determined by intra-cabinet pressures rather than by personal conviction. Accordingly, this study construes the order as the culmination of a decision-making process shaped by the efforts of imperial advisors to supplant the sovereign's preferences. By engaging with contemporary historiography, primary sources, and recent scholarship, this study reinterprets Nicholas II's decision-making within the context of the imperial cabinet's internal politics, wherein competing military agendas worked to erode his authority. Rather than representing an autonomous exercise of his will, the Tsar's decision emerges here as the product of misinformation, manipulation, and deceit on behalf of his ministers—who, as Sazonov ironically remarked to Pourtalès, "could have prevented the war by one word: you didn't want to."

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By: D. Micah Stark

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Introduction

On November 15th, 2022, nearly a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a missile struck the Polish village of Prezewodów, near the country’s southeastern border with Ukraine, killing two Polish civilians (Euronews, 2022). Given Poland’s signatory status to the North Atlantic Treaty, the attack immediately raised fears that NATO’s collective defense mechanism, enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, might be invoked, compelling member states—including the United States—to respond militarily against the Russian Federation. Although the strike was later determined to be an errant Ukrainian air defense missile (Myre, 2022), the tragedy and resulting fear underscored the legal and geopolitical complexities of collective defense obligations and raised a critical question: Does Article 5 automatically bind the United States to military actions, or must Congress authorize any such response?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is founded on the principle of collective self-defense, meaning that an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all (U.S. Department of State, 2025; Britannica, 2025). However, in the U.S. constitutional system, the authority to declare and wage war rests not with a treaty or international organization, but with the legislative and executive branches (U.S. Constitution, 1787). This raises a critical legal issue: Does Article 5 function as a “self-executing” treaty provision that has direct legal effect upon ratification, or is it “non-self-executing,” requiring additional congressional action before its obligations take effect?

The answer to this question has significant implications for both U.S. constitutional law and international treaty enforcement, and debates over the binding nature of NATO’s collective defense clause are not merely theoretical. In 2023, President Donald Trump publicly stated that the United States would not defend NATO allies who, in his view, failed to contribute sufficiently to the alliance’s military expenditures (Linskey, 2024). Alternatively, congressional reluctance to declare war highlights concerns about whether a willing president could even receive approval to commit forces beyond the scope of the War Powers Resolution (Fay, 2018). Such remarks illustrate broader uncertainty about the legal force of treaty obligations and whether a sitting president could unilaterally disregard them.

The following sections examine whether NATO’s Article 5 qualifies as a self-executing treaty under U.S. law. The first section outlines the relevant constitutional and statutory framework governing war powers and treaty implementation in the United States and the doctrinal distinction between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties. It draws on key precedents, including Medellín v. Texas, and explains how courts and legal scholarship have interpreted the binding force of international agreements. The second section applies the existing legal framework to the North Atlantic Treaty, analyzing the treaty’s language and the intent of its drafters to determine whether it meets the threshold of self-execution. The third section critiques the current interpretive test established in Medellín, arguing that it is overly vague and insufficiently structured to provide consistent results. In response, the fourth section proposes a new five-part test grounded in textual clarity and constitutional limits. Finally, the fifth section applies this new test to Article 5, concluding that NATO’s collective defense clause qualifies as a self-executing provision that imposes binding domestic obligations on the United States government upon ratification.

Historical Background

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in the aftermath of World War II, during a period marked by escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union (U.S. Department of State, 2025). Seeking to contain the spread of communism and solidify alliances in Western Europe, the United States spearheaded the formation of a collective defense arrangement (U.S. Department of State, 2025). This effort culminated in the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and its subsequent ratification by the U.S. Senate under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority for treaty approval (Chen, 1994). The treaty marked a significant departure from the United States’ longstanding tradition of isolationism, formally committing the country to a binding collective security pact for the first time in its history.

NATO’s founding members included the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations, most of whom were allies during World War II or shared a common fear of Soviet expansionism (U.S. Department of State, 2025). At its core, the treaty was designed for self-defense. The key provision, Article 5, declares that an armed attack against one or more members in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all (NATO, 2025). It invokes Article 51 of the UN Charter, affirming the right of individual or collective self-defense and allowing each member to respond in the manner it deems necessary, including through armed force (United Nations Charter, Article 51, 2025). While this provision forms the treaty’s backbone, it has also been the subject of legal debate in the United States regarding congressional war powers and treaty obligations.

During the Cold War, NATO’s primary strategic objective was to deter Soviet aggression (Haglund, 2025). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO’s mission evolved. Several former Soviet Bloc countries, including Poland, sought and achieved membership in the alliance, motivated by lingering fears of Russian interference and the desire to secure political and military integration with the West. Poland officially joined NATO in 1999, an expansion that has since raised questions about the scope of Article 5—particularly in cases of ambiguous or accidental attacks on member state territory (Haglund, 2025).

NATO has also adapted its operations beyond traditional collective defense. It has intervened in regional conflicts such as the Yugoslav Wars and cooperated with coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, NATO has increasingly embraced peacekeeping, stabilization, and counter-terrorism as part of its modern mandate (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2022).

Recent geopolitical developments have brought renewed scrutiny to NATO's role and obligations. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was partially provoked by Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, a move perceived by Russia as a direct threat to its sphere of influence (North American Treaty Organization, 2024). While Ukraine is not a NATO member and therefore not protected under Article 5, the war has reignited debates about the limits and implications of NATO’s collective defense commitments (Ciaramella & Green, 2025).

Domestically, NATO’s relevance has been a subject of political contention in the United States. Critics have argued that Article 5 may obligate the U.S. to engage in military action without explicit congressional authorization, potentially undermining the constitutional separation of powers. President Donald Trump’s public skepticism of NATO—particularly his suggestion that U.S. support should be conditional on other members' defense spending—highlighted concerns about the enforceability and political will behind collective defense obligations (Linskey, 2024).

The ambiguity of Article 5 has further fueled legal discourse. While it commits members to assist an attacked ally, it allows each country to determine what form that assistance should take. As a result, interpretations of what constitutes a “sufficient” or “legally binding” response vary widely. In the case of Poland, for instance, had the 2022 stray missile incident been interpreted as a direct attack, it could have triggered NATO’s collective defense mechanism. Yet such invocation would inevitably raise questions about the scope, necessity, and method of each member’s response—questions that continue to test the legal and strategic coherence of the NATO alliance.

Introduction of the Law

Classifying the North Atlantic Treaty—particularly Article 5—as a self-executing treaty raises essential questions at the intersection of U.S. constitutional law and international treaty obligations. The answer has profound implications for how and when the United States is legally compelled to act in defense of its NATO allies.

Issues surrounding a nation’s commitment to war implicate both domestic and international legal frameworks. Under the U.S. Constitution, war powers are distributed across Articles I, II, and IV (U.S. Constitution, 1787). Specifically, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 vests Congress with the exclusive authority to declare war, while Article II, Section 2 designates the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces (U.S. Constitution, 1787). This separation was deliberately designed to limit executive overreach and ensure democratic accountability. Chief Justice John Marshall emphasized this principle in Talbot v. Seeman, stating:

The whole powers of war being, by the Constitution of the United States, vested in Congress, the acts of that body can alone be resorted to as our guides in this inquiry. (Talbot v. Seeman, 1801)

In 1973, the War Powers Resolution reinforced this balance by allowing the President to initiate military action, but only temporarily: Within sixty days, Congress must either authorize continued military engagement or mandate withdrawal (War Powers Resolution, 1973). Though often contested, this resolution reflects the U.S. government's attempt to reconcile swift military response with legislative oversight.

From an international law perspective, treaty interpretation is primarily governed by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) (VCLT, 1969). Though the U.S. is not a party to the VCLT, American courts and legal scholars frequently invoke its principles. The Convention outlines the methods for interpreting treaties—examining text, context, object, purpose, and state practice—and distinguishes between self-executing and non-self-executing obligations (VCLT, 1969).

Under U.S. law, the President holds the constitutional authority to negotiate and enter treaties, but the requirement of Senate ratification checks this power (U.S. Constitution, Article II, 1787). However, the President also has certain statutory powers. According to the 1987 Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law, the President may:

• Suspend or terminate an agreement in accordance with its terms;
• Determine that a breach or supervening event justifies withdrawal or suspension;
• Choose not to enforce or terminate an agreement even when justified. (Socarras, 2011)

Yet, this broad presidential discretion was recently curtailed. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes a provision requiring congressional approval before the President can unilaterally withdraw from NATO (Linskey, 2024). This statute reinstates a measure of legislative control over treaty termination and reinforces the binding nature of ratified agreements.

U.S. courts have long recognized the role of international law within the domestic legal system. In The Paquete Habana (1900), the Supreme Court held that “international law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts...” (The Paquete Habana, 1900). Similarly, in The Nereide (1815), the Court emphasized that international law obligations apply unless overridden by a contrary statute or constitutional provision (The Nereide, 1815). These decisions affirm the doctrine of international legal supremacy, under which treaty obligations—once incorporated into domestic law—carry the force of federal statutes.

Nonetheless, a critical distinction in U.S. treaty law remains: whether a treaty is self-executing or non-self-executing. In Medellín v. Texas (2008), the Supreme Court clarified:

Not all international law obligations automatically constitute binding federal law enforceable in United States courts. A treaty is self-executing when it operates of itself without the aid of any legislative provision. Conversely, non-self-executing treaty stipulations require implementing legislation. (Medellín v. Texas, 2008)

This distinction is pivotal. A self-executing treaty has immediate legal effect upon ratification and can be enforced in U.S. courts. A non-self-executing treaty, by contrast, merely constitutes an international commitment until Congress enacts enabling legislation (Medellín v. Texas, 2008).

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has elaborated on this point. In a 2023 report, it explained that self-executing treaties:

• Have the status of federal statutes;
• Supersede conflicting state laws;
• Are subordinate only to the U.S. Constitution. (Congressional Research Service, 2023)

Meanwhile, non-self-executing treaties “bind the United States as a matter of international law” but “do not create rights or obligations enforceable as domestic law in U.S. courts.” Therefore, implementation hinges on congressional action.

Classifying a treaty as self-executing or not affects the separation of powers. For example, treaties requiring appropriations, creating criminal liability, or authorizing war are typically considered non-self-executing because they intrude upon Congress’s exclusive powers. (U.S. Constitution, Article I, 1787)

Nevertheless, courts use interpretive tools to make this determination. As Medellín explained, treaty interpretation “begins with its text,” but also considers “the negotiation and drafting history of the treaty as well as the post-ratification understanding of signatory nations.” (Medellín v. Texas, 2008).  These are consistent with the VCLT’s guidance.

Application to the North Atlantic Treaty

The text of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is central to this inquiry:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all [...] each of them [...] will assist the Party or Parties so attacked [...] such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force. (North Atlantic Treaty, 1949)

This language affirms a mutual obligation to respond, though it allows each state to determine the nature and extent of its response. While the discretion over how to assist could appear to weaken the binding nature of the provision, the obligation to act in some form remains clear.

The original intent also supports a self-executing classification. Internal documents from the Truman administration and NATO archives show that the drafters anticipated real-world application. The Treaty was signed by the Secretary of State and ratified by the Senate, indicating full constitutional compliance. NATO’s own records describe the treaty as a shift away from U.S. isolationism, made in the face of mounting Cold War threats (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2025).

Thus, the North Atlantic Treaty—particularly Article 5—meets the established criteria for self-execution: it was signed, ratified, and its language conveys a binding obligation without the need for further legislative implementation.

Application of the Law

Determining whether the North Atlantic Treaty—specifically Article 5—is self-executing follows the two-pronged interpretive framework laid out in Medellín v. Texas: (1) the language of the treaty and (2) the intent of its drafters (Medellín v. Texas, 2008). Both support the conclusion that Article 5 is, in fact, self-executing.

Language

Article 5 states that an “armed attack against one or more [signatory nations] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and that each member will “assist [...] by taking forthwith [...] such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” (North Atlantic Treaty, 1949). While this provision allows for discretion in the type of assistance rendered, it does not allow discretion over whether assistance must be rendered at all. The language imposes an affirmative obligation—action is required; only its magnitude and nature is subject to national interpretation.

Although this strategic ambiguity provides diplomatic flexibility, it still creates a binding commitment. There is no language that conditions this obligation on further congressional approval or domestic implementing legislation. Accordingly, under the Medellín framework, the treaty contains the necessary self-executing language.

Intent

The intent behind the treaty further supports its classification as self-executing. NATO’s official account of the treaty’s formation emphasizes that American officials, though cautious of isolationist sentiments in Congress, sought to embed the United States within a permanent transatlantic security structure. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2025). As NATO itself explains, the 1948 Berlin Blockade and the communist coup in Czechoslovakia transformed U.S. public opinion, strengthening support for a binding collective defense arrangement (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2025).

Statements by President Truman at the 1949 signing ceremony confirm this intention. He described NATO as “a shield against aggression” and emphasized its role in building a “fuller, happier existence” through peace (Truman Library, 2025). The treaty was duly signed and ratified by the Senate, and no implementing legislation was introduced as a prerequisite for its effect.

Given the treaty’s purpose—to deter aggression through credible and immediate obligations—the notion that Article 5 would lack domestic effect absent future legislative action is implausible. Practically and legally, the commitment must be binding to serve its deterrent purpose.

Critique of the Current Test and Proposal of an Alternative

While the Medellín framework provides a foundational distinction between self-executing and non-self-executing treaties, it suffers from interpretive vagueness and doctrinal inconsistency. Courts are directed to assess treaty text, drafting history, and intent—yet these elements can be conflicting, indeterminate, or unavailable. Moreover, the framework fails to account for the evolving nature of international threats and the practical expectations of treaty enforcement in modern geopolitics.

This article proposes a more objective and concrete test that provides greater clarity and judicial efficiency. The proposed five-part test is as follows:

1. Was the treaty signed by the executive?
2. Was the treaty ratified by the Senate?
3. Does the treaty obligate the U.S. government—conditionally or unconditionally—to take action either domestically or internationally?
4. Does the action require further legislative implementation (e.g., appropriation of funds, creation of criminal penalties, declarations of war)?
5. Does the treaty explicitly state that it is self-executing, or contain language indicating such intent?

If the treaty was signed and ratified (1–2), imposes obligations on the U.S. government (3), and either does not require further legislation (4) or contains explicit self-executing language (5), it should be classified as a self-executing treaty.

This model draws from the VCLT’s emphasis on text, ratification, and functional obligation, as well as U.S. constitutional law’s focus on the separation of powers (United Nations, 1969; U.S. Constitution, 1787). It also considers modern realities: that treaty enforcement must evolve alongside shifts in the global security landscape.

For example, NATO's original role as a bulwark against the Soviet Union has transformed into a check against post-Soviet Russian aggression. The interpretive framework should recognize that, while threats evolve, the binding nature of a defense pact does not.

Application of the New Test

Applying the revised five-part test to the North Atlantic Treaty produces a clear result.

1. Signed: Yes. Signed on April 4, 1949, by Secretary of State Dean Acheson on behalf of the President (Truman Library, 2025)
2. Ratified: Yes. Ratified by the Senate on July 21, 1949, fulfilling the requirements of Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2025).
3. Obligation to Act: Yes. Article 5 obligates the United States to assist any NATO member that is attacked, invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and affirming the duty to respond (Truman Library, 2025).
4. Further Legislation Required? No. The treaty does not call for congressional legislation to operationalize the defense obligation. While Congress retains the power to declare war, the War Powers Resolution allows for executive-initiated action within sixty days. Beyond this, as the treaty was approved by both executive and legislative action, both branches can be viewed as having already authorized the use of force should the Article 5 be invoked (North Atlantic Treaty, 1949).
5. Self-Executing Language or Intent? Yes. Article 5 contains strong operative language, and the legislative and executive branches both understood that the commitment would have automatic effect. As the Truman Library archives and NATO documentation show, there was a clear intent for the treaty to bind the U.S. upon ratification (Truman Library, 2025; North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2025).

Thus, under both the traditional and proposed frameworks, the North Atlantic Treaty—particularly Article 5—qualifies as a self-executing treaty. While the President and Congress retain some discretion over how to respond, the obligation to respond exists by operation of law. Neither branch can legally deny that war can be legally invoked through this article.

Critically, even under the constraints of the War Powers Resolution, the President would be required to initiate action within the time window prescribed by statute. Political actors may question the wisdom or equity of U.S. participation in NATO, but their arguments hold no legal weight. Once an attack occurs, U.S. obligations are activated.

In the same way, Congress could not claim that military action taken by the President through Article 5 subverts congressional power, as the self-executing nature of the treaty means that Congress has already authorized the use of military force should the treaty be invoked. As a result, Congress cannot deny the President the authority to commit troops in response to a call from NATO.

As the Supreme Court affirmed in Medellín, even if courts cannot compel presidential compliance with non-self-executing treaties, the consequences of breach “on the international plane” are real (Medellín v. Texas, 2008). In the case of a self-executing treaty like NATO, those consequences would be domestic as well: failure to act would violate binding federal law.

Conclusion

The classification of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty as a self-executing treaty is supported by both textual analysis and historical intent. Its binding nature is essential to its function as a deterrent against aggression, and its ratification by the United States without accompanying legislation confirms that it was intended to have immediate domestic legal effect.

While foundational, the current doctrinal test from Medellín v. Texas fails to provide a sufficiently concrete analytical framework. The revised five-part test proposed in this paper addresses that shortcoming, offering a more structured and objective methodology for classifying treaties. Applying this test to NATO’s Article 5 confirms its self-executing status under both constitutional and international law.

In an increasingly complex global order, the predictability of legal obligations is vital—not only to the integrity of the U.S. legal system but to the credibility of its international commitments. NATO’s value as a strategic alliance depends on the enforceability of its promises. Political rhetoric may challenge these obligations, but the law does not. Under both the Constitution and longstanding precedent, the United States is legally bound to come to the defense of its NATO allies.

By Wendy Lin, Lily Molesky, Nylah Moosa, Annika Pavlin-Jamal, and Eloïse Schlachet

Introduction

This document serves as a formal proposal addressed to Mr. Graeme Reid, the United Nations Mandate Holder on the Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (OHCHR 2023). As a global advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and a leader in addressing violence against individuals for their sexual orientation and gender identity, your mandate is uniquely positioned to confront the alarming and systemic human rights crisis of “corrective” rape in South Africa.

‘Corrective’ rape, a form of sexual violence intended to supposedly ‘cure’ the victim’s sexual orientation, disproportionately targets queer women and serves as a manifestation of deeply entrenched homophobia and patriarchal control (Anguita 2011, 493; Koraan 2012, 46). The brutal physical and psychological consequences of this crime, compounded by systemic discrimination and a lack of institutional response, demand immediate action.

We address this proposal to you due to the United Nations' vital role in setting global human rights standards and fostering accountability. Your mandate provides a platform through which this issue can be amplified, while also exploring ways of engaging with South African institutions and offering actionable solutions rooted in international law and best practices. The present proposal seeks to delineate the scope of “corrective” rape, the international legally-binding framework that demands intervention, while describing comprehensive remedies to empower survivors and prevent further violence.

Background

South Africa, despite its progressive constitution that enshrines equality and prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, continues to grapple with pervasive homophobia and heteronormativity, patriarchal ideology, and gender-based violence present within exogenous social convention.

The brutal murder of Noxolo Nogwaza in 2011, a lesbian activist, exemplifies the lethal intersection of homophobia and misogyny in South Africa: her body showing signs of extreme violence, including lacerations and fractured bones (Carter 2013). Although investigated by the local Tsakane police, no arrests were made (Mwambene & Wheal 2015, 65). Nogwaza’s case demonstrates violations of South Africa’s constitution of equal protection and benefit of the law, as well as protection from discrimination based on gender, sex, and sexual orientation, setting a dangerous precedent that allows more instances of “corrective” rape to continue unchecked (Mwambene & Wheal 2015, 67-68).

Estimates suggest that ten queer women are victims of a “corrective” rape each week (Koraan & Geduld 2015, 1931). Very few cases ever reach trial, and many are dismissed outright or postponed in favour of ‘more important’ matters, allowing perpetrators to walk free (Mwambene & Wheal 2015, 62). A 2004 study found that 33% of queer individuals in Gauteng, South Africa feared disclosing their sexual orientations to authorities, while 43% hesitated to report assaults due to fears of police abuse (Mwambene & Wheal 2015, 61). Of the cases that are reported, most are misclassified as unrelated to sexual orientation, despite the targeting of queer women (Mwambene & Wheal 2015, 61). The social marginalization of LGBTQ+ identities that survivors face further deters them from seeking justice or medical care, exacerbating their vulnerability.

Survivors of rape often endure severe physical injuries, as well as exposure to sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. With 19.6% of South Africa’s population aged 15-49 living with HIV, combined with rapists’ tendency not to use condoms, survivors of rape are at a heightened risk of infection (South African Government, “People of South Africa,” n.d.). Lesbian survivors are at a greater risk of unintended pregnancies, as they are less likely than heterosexual or bisexual women to use birth control (Doan-Minh 2019, 172). This increases their vulnerability to complications from unsafe abortions, particularly in South Africa, where nearly 50% of abortions occur outside medical facilities, and in Sub-Saharan Africa more generally, which has the highest abortion case-fatality rate in the world (HEARD, 2016; Bankole et al, 2020.) These physical harms are compounded by deep psychological scars, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and suicidal ideation, worsened by the discriminatory and targeted nature of the violence (Doan-Minh 2019, 188; Padmanabhanunni and Edwards 2013, 385). The collective impact of these assaults further isolates survivors, forcing them to bear not only personal trauma but also the societal stigma of being doubly marginalized for their gender and sexual orientation.

‘Corrective’ rape does not occur in isolation; it is a collective, socially constructed form of violence embedded in power dynamic of community and regional structures (Naidoo et al. 2023, 318). It is not merely an assault but an attack on the entire LGBTQ+ community, reinforcing a system that prioritizes heteropatriarchy over the rights, safety, and freedom of LGBTQ+ women.

International Legal Framework

South Africa’s obligations under international law necessitate decisive action against “corrective” rape. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) defines torture as any act inflicting severe physical or mental pain for purposes such as punishment or discrimination. “Corrective” rape, driven by the intent to punish individuals for their sexual orientation, falls within this definition. Article 2 of CAT mandates that each State Party takes effective measures to prevent acts of torture within its jurisdiction (United Nations 1984). Additionally, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) recognizes gender-based violence as a form of discrimination. General Recommendation No. 19 of CEDAW emphasizes that gender-based violence impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms (United Nations 1979). Furthermore, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and its Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol) obligate State Parties to adopt measures to ensure the protection of women from all forms of violence, including sexual abuse (African Union 2003).

United Nations’ Role and Past Interventions

The UN has previously demonstrated its capacity to address gender-based violence through integrated support mechanisms and policy reforms. The establishment of Thuthuzela Care Centres (TCCs) in South Africa, supported by UN Women and UNICEF, serves as a pertinent example. These centers provide survivors of sexual violence with comprehensive services, including medical care, counseling, and legal assistance, under one roof (UN Women 2015; South African Government, “Thuthuzela Care Centres,” n.d.). The TCC model has been instrumental in improving the reporting and prosecution rates of sexual offenses and offering holistic support to survivors. However, while the TCCs have made significant strides in addressing general sexual violence, they must be adapted to cater specifically to the unique challenges faced by LGBTQ+ survivors. “Corrective” rape is deeply rooted in homophobia, necessitating interventions that specifically address discrimination against sexual minorities. Current TCCs often lack LGBTQ+-specific training for healthcare workers and do not adequately address the stigma that LGBTQ+ survivors face when seeking support.

Proposed Actions and Remedies

Building upon the lessons from the TCC model and other UN interventions, the following actions are recommended to combat “corrective” rape more effectively:

1. The Establishment of LGBTQ+-Specific Support Centers: These centers should provide healthcare services, legal aid, and counseling tailored to the needs of LGBTQ+ survivors. Healthcare providers must receive training in LGBTQ+ sensitivity to ensure non-discriminatory care. Legal aid should assist survivors in navigating the justice system and pressing charges. Community-based counselors who understand the unique challenges LGBTQ+ survivors face should be available to offer support.
2. Legislative Reforms and Anti-Discrimination Laws: Amendments to South Africa’s Criminal Code should explicitly classify “corrective” rape as a hate crime, with enhanced penalties. Comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation protecting sexual orientation and gender identity should be enacted, aligning with CEDAW and ICCPR obligations.
3. Police Training and Accountability Mechanisms: Mandatory LGBTQ+ rights training for law enforcement is essential to reduce bias and ensure respectful treatment of survivors. Human Rights Desks should be established in police stations, staffed by officers trained to handle LGBTQ+ cases sensitively and efficiently (Human Rights Watch 2023).
4. Community-Based Education Programs: Partnerships with local LGBTQ+ civil society organizations (CSOs) can facilitate community dialogues addressing homophobia and patriarchal norms. Implementing LGBTQ+-inclusive education in schools can challenge stereotypes and promote acceptance.
5. Monitoring and Data Collection: A national task force should be created to track cases of “corrective” rape and monitor state compliance with international human rights obligations. Collaboration with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) can ensure consistent oversight and accountability.
6. International Advocacy and Funding: Mobilizing international donors to fund grassroots LGBTQ+ initiatives in South Africa is crucial. Global solidarity campaigns should be advocated, highlighting “corrective” rape as a human rights crisis requiring immediate attention.

Effectiveness of Proposed Solutions

The proposed solutions draw upon successful interventions and best practices in addressing gender-based violence and discrimination. The TCC model, for instance, has been effective in providing holistic support to survivors of sexual violence, leading to increased reporting rates and improved prosecution outcomes (UN Women 2015). Adapting this model to cater specifically to LGBTQ+ survivors can enhance its effectiveness in addressing “corrective” rape. Legislative reforms that explicitly codify “corrective” rape as a hate crime can serve as a deterrent and signal a strong commitment to protecting LGBTQ+ individuals. Training law enforcement officers and healthcare providers in LGBTQ+ sensitivity can reduce discrimination and improve the quality of support services.

Conclusion

As the UN Mandate Holder on the Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, your leadership, Mr. Reid, is essential in addressing the crisis of “corrective” rape in South Africa. This violent act is a gross violation of international human rights obligations; South Africa’s inaction perpetuates cyclical violence, heteronormativity, patriarchal ideology, discrimination, and impunity. This crisis demands immediate action through targeted solutions, and your mandate offers a powerful platform to mobilize resources and drive substantive and sustainable change. By championing these measures, you can ensure justice for survivors, dismantle systemic discrimination, and uphold global human rights commitments.

By Matias Wheeler Næss

It is impossible to understand Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Balkans today without understanding how Yugoslavia disintegrated. Bosnia remains hugely divided, and the same nationalisms that caused the war inspire modern Bosniak, Serb, and Croat movements for integration, separation, and even annexation. As Yugoslavia stagnated and dissolved, the West eagerly expected the new democratic nation-states to join their fold.[1] The Yugoslav idea had failed, and ultranationalists had made coexistence impossible. However, BiH, with its mixture of ethnoreligious nations, could not easily become independent or be partitioned without conflict, especially after democratic elections empowered nationalist parties. Even Bosniak leaders realized an independent Bosnia would become “inoperable.”[2] Yet, Bosnian independence was recognized, and fighting began. Planned and premeditated ethnic cleansing soon followed. The West and UN chose not to react even as civilians fled the advancing armies. The UN established ‘Safe Areas,’ but peacekeepers were not authorized to protect them. Only when thousands were massacred in Srebrenica did NATO decisively act, and quickly stopped Serb advances. Peace came but failed to reconcile the ethnic groups or establish true Bosnian statehood. Conflict is ever-present in BiH but remains frozen. That conflict was not inevitable, nor did it have to escalate as far as it did, except because of the choices of nationalists and the international community.

When war broke out in Croatia and Slovenia, few Bosnians expected the violence would affect them.[3] Ethnic parity was an assumed fact in Bosnia, which demanded all nations agree to significant constitutional change.[4] Though the region was divided between Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats, under Tito’s Yugoslavia, those from BiH were usually called Bosnian or Herzegovinian by regional rather than ethnic denomination.[5] Towards the end of the 1980s, this began to change.

In 1986, a memorandum of the Serbian Institute of Arts and Science was leaked which claimed Tito had culturally and economically repressed Serbs and compared Ustaše murders of WWII and actions by Albanians in autonomous Kosovo.[6] Slobodan Milošević, president of Serbia, and allies claimed genocide against Serbs was inevitable in a multinational state.[7] Serb nationalists claimed the only future for Serbs was in their own state.[8] When Milošević on this basis asserted Serb control of Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1989 Serbs and Montenegrins controlled half of Yugoslavia’s collective presidency. Many Croats and Slovenes no longer felt they could “pursue their republics’ interests within the federation.”[9]

In the elections of 1990, nationalist parties committed to independence won in Croatia and Slovenia.[10] In BiH, the vote was split along ethnic lines. Of the 240 seats of the Bosnian parliament, 86 were won by the Bosniak-led SDA, 72 by the Serb SDS, and 44 by the Croat HDZ.[11] A Bosniak, Alija Izetbegović, became president, while a Serb friend of Radovan Karadžić, leader of the SDS, became president of the parliament. Nationalist parties controlled most municipalities. Like the rest of Yugoslavia, Bosnia had been divided along national lines.

Bosnian Serbs “claimed they were threatened and victimized”[12] and wished to join a Greater Serbia including all Serbs. Bosnian Croats wanted to break away from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia and unite with Croatia. Chauvinistic nationalists on both sides did not want an independent BiH, but partition or outright annexation. Since Bosnia was largely intermixed, either outcome would lead to the disappearance or domination of the Bosniaks, who, therefore, felt they needed to strengthen their independent Muslim identity.[13] In 1991, Serb politicians announced the formation of Serb Autonomous Regions (SAOs), including the Autonomous Region of Krajina.[14] Serb leaders, including Karadžić and Milošević, said privately they were designed to undermine and intimidate the government of BiH and would be used to “destroy”[15]  the Bosnian state in any confrontation. After removing Bosnian state authority, they would form the base of Serb control. In a meeting with Milošević, Karadžić said he “would remove Bosniaks from Serb land when time and conditions permitted.”[16]

Despite this, Serb leaders attempted to convince Izetbegović and supporters to remain in rump Yugoslavia.[17] Milošević believed most Bosniaks would prefer a union; Karadžić did not think much would come of an agreement with the SDA and was committed to Serb separation. Bosniak leaders objected to staying within Milošević’s “corrupt Serb-nationalist” Yugoslavia,[18] so negotiations stalled.

The European Community (EC), seeking to end hostilities in the Balkans, declared “Yugoslavia is in the process of dissolution”[19] in November 1991. Citing the principle of self-determination, they allowed the Yugoslav constituent republics to declare independence. Contrary to Serb hopes, the same right did not extend to the Serbs in Bosnia.[20] If BiH declared independence, the Serbs would be left as a minority in Bosnia, so they attempted to block independence with the principle of national parity: no constitutional change without ethnic consensus. To Bosniak and Croat leaders, the EC declaration provided a final opportunity to leave Milošević’s Yugoslavia, so they voted to apply for recognition.[21] Serbs cast every opposing vote. The EC accepted the application but cited Serb opposition to independence, demonstrated by the establishment of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, the Serb plebiscite on remaining in Yugoslavia, and the declaration of the Republika Srpska (RS), and required a referendum on independence. None of those actions had any basis in the Bosnian or Yugoslav constitutions, nor were they sanctioned by the EC.[22] Since the referendum would not account for ethnic groups, its result was a foregone conclusion. This decision by the EC is strange since they recognized that Bosnia would not be able to control its territory nor have a consensus of its population, yet the EC required an action that would not achieve either.[23] Serbs would not be able to prevent international recognition, so they began preparing for war.

Having largely disarmed the multiethnic Territorial Defense (TO) increased the proportion of Serbs in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), and sidelined non-Serb control of the army,[24] the JNA began arming Serb communities in BiH via the RAM plan.[25] Along with their JNA support, Serb paramilitaries would be better armed than their opponents for much of the war. A UN arms embargo made it difficult for Croats and Bosniaks to arm themselves, so they had to rely largely on the black market and support from Muslim countries respectively.[26]

The SDS developed a plan to create separate Serb institutions in municipalities, even those without Serb majorities, which could assume administration after the Serb military occupation.[27] Already speaking of the “disappearance of the Muslim nation,”[28] Karadžić was prepared for a war of conquest in Bosnia.

There were also attempts to peacefully partition BiH between Serbia and Croatia. In March 1991, in Karađorđevo, Vojvodina, presidents Milošević of Serbia and Franjo Tuđman of Croatia agreed that western Herzegovina and Posavina, two regions with Croat majorities, would join Croatia and the rest of Bosnia would join Serbia, ending BiH statehood to prevent war.[29] The agreement collapsed when the war began in Croatia, but Tuđman continued arguing for republics’ self-determination and territorial inviolability for Croatia, not Bosnia. Bosnian Serbs and Croats again agreed to partition BiH in May 1992, but the plan again failed.[30] Croats would fight independently until 1993 when they joined a Bosniak-Croat federation under US pressure to oppose RS together.

Though fighting had begun as early as 22 March,[31] EC recognition of Bosnian independence as the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (RBiH), 6 April 1992, marks the formal beginning of the war.[32] Serb forces launched an offensive aimed to occupy 65% of Bosnian territory for the RS.[33] The siege of Sarajevo began in May.[34]By summer, RS would control two-thirds of BiH and began the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs, including “massacres, rapes, torture, and deportations to concentration camps”,[35] especially of elites.[36] Bosniaks and Croats were expelled from previously mixed areas to make them easier to hold and ensure Serbs would become the majority.[37] An important question in the Bosnian war is how ethnic violence so quickly led to ethnic cleansing.

Western media as early as 1991 portrayed the conflicts in former Yugoslavia as “impossibly complicated, rooted in arcane ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’”,[38]implying that nothing could be done to prevent or stop it. This ignores the significant planning that preceded the conflict. Yugoslavia could have broken up peacefully, but Serb elites chose war to maintain their privilege. They convinced Serbs to imprison, rape, and murder their Bosniak neighbors to prevent an imagined “jihad”[39] and genocide against Serbs. Radovan Karadžić’s threats of Bosniak extinction were actively implemented in conquered areas to ensure that peaceful coexistence of the ethnic groups became impossible.[40] It was not a war between three ethnic groups doomed to hate one another but between conflicting nationalist views of what Bosnia was.

A second factor in the rapid turn to ethnic cleansing was the recent memory of interethnic violence. Memories of Ottoman domination and Ustaše murders during WWII were mobilized to inspire fear in Serb populations.[41] Violence occurred not against people, but “Turks.”[42] Offensives were presented as defensive in nature, meant to prevent a ‘jihad’ against the Serbs. Past traumas made violence a more acceptable option. Bosnia was polarized by ultranationalist leaders’ speeches, designed to generate and mobilize fear of one’s neighbors, which allowed other ultranationalist leaders to portray them as threats.[43] Fear of annihilation created a perceived need to pre-empt the other groups. In Bosnia, the Serbs acted first and were most prepared.

However, this leads to a misconception of the war in Bosnia as solely a Serb atrocity.[44] Though Serbs were responsible for the most crimes because they were more powerful and numerous and occupied significant non-Serb areas, Croats and Bosniaks each engaged in ethnic cleansing against other ethnic groups and operated concentration camps. The violence occurred between all three ethnic groups, and even within them, as extremists killed moderates or sacrificed members of their group for some “tactical or strategic aim.”[45] An estimated 10,000-12,000 women were raped during the war, sometimes ordered by low-level officers.[46]This occurred with the motives of imagined or mythologized revenge and humiliation, which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) considered a tool of genocidal war. Some women were forced to bear children of other ethnicities as further humiliation. Violence against civilians was ubiquitous and something the international community failed to stop.

Before the war, the EC attempted to prevent bloodshed by partitioning Bosnia. In February and March 1992, Portuguese Foreign Minister Jose Cutileiro negotiated an agreement between Izetbegović, Karadžić, and Croat representatives to internally divide BiH into ethnoreligious entities called cantons.[47]The Cutileiro agreement would create a Bosnia that was not unitary; Serb negotiators had ensured it was never allowed “to be called a state”.[48] Therefore, the plan lacked the support of Bosniaks and would be reneged upon by Izetbegović.[49] Another agreement was reached in principle which would partition the country, giving Serbs 65% and Croats 20%. Bosniaks, 44% of the population, were offered just 15%. The agreement failed because Serbs and Croats could not agree on who would control Mostar. When the EC recognized Bosnian independence, they did so without guaranteeing that RBiH could survive as a multiethnic state.[50]

After the fighting began, the UN and EC failed to stop it because they were not committed to risking their own soldiers or the principle of international neutrality. Believing peacekeeping would not work in Bosnia, the UNSC committed to a policy of bare minimum action, seriously limiting the mandate of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR).[51] Its first task in Bosnia was merely to keep the airport in Sarajevo open. Britain and France provided 9,000 troops, not because they wanted to fight Serbia, nor prevent violence against civilians, but to ensure they could control UNPROFOR. The UN Secretariat withheld and delayed vital information to prevent UN involvement in what Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali described as a “rich people’s war.”  Thus, peacekeepers lacked the mandate to prevent the establishment of concentration camps, nor to close them when they were exposed.  UNSC resolution 770 authorized member states to take “all measures necessary”[52] to “facilitate”, not ensure, delivery of relief supplies. Resolution 771 called on member states to report abuses of international law. This was not “a direct mandate for a coalition of the willing to liberate Serb-occupied Bosnia,”[53] but could be used to justify military action, which did not occur. Therefore, humanitarian aid could be stopped by a single combatant with a gun, and it frequently was.

The UN wanted to protect its principle of neutrality, which was crucial to protecting the lives of peacekeepers.[54] However, this effectively neutered peacekeepers, who could not use force to protect civilians. When Bosnian Vice Prime Minister Hakija Turajlić was murdered in front of his French escort, they did not respond, according to the letter of their mandate. Serbs would continue firing on the French in Sarajevo.  The shelling stopped when Danish troops responded to Serb shelling with a burst of fire from their tanks.[55] UN diplomats expected difficulties over the incident but were met with none. There were those in the UNSC who called for stronger mandates, notably Venezuelan and Bosnian ambassadors Arria and Sacirbey, but they were “marginalized”[56] and “outmaneuvered”[57] by the P5. Nowhere would the consequences of this be clearer than in Srebrenica.

Srebrenica, a majority Bosniak town in eastern Bosnia, was surrounded by Serb forces in January 1993.[58] Its population was bolstered by refugees from nearby captured towns. On the brink of humanitarian disaster, Srebrenica was visited by UNPROFOR commander General Morillon on 11 March 1993, when he declared “You are now under the protection of UN forces.”[59] Morillon had no authority to make that promise, so the UNSC scrambled to act. Ambassador Arria demanded a significant commitment of force to protect civilians, but British, French, and Russian representatives ensured only a weakly worded resolution would pass. Thus, the UNSC declared that Srebrenica “should”[60] be a “Safe Area.” If they had declared it ‘shall’ be a ‘protected area,’ UNPROFOR would have a mandate to use military force to protect the enclave, but that was not the intention. Instead, the resolution was “totally meaningless,”[61] and could be interpreted however the UN chose.

UNPROFOR negotiated a deal for Bosniak disarmament within the Safe Area in exchange for  a ceasefire and free access to humanitarian supplies.[62] Bosniaks were offered evacuation but would have been agreeing to an ethnic cleansing of themselves.[63] When Ambassador Arria visited Srebrenica, he discovered UNPROFOR was totally cooperating with the Serb besiegers.[64]Local command operated with direction from London and Paris, not the UN.

The siege continued until June 1995. Having already stopped supply shipments and raided the enclave, Serbs began directly shelling UN observation posts.[65] The local UN force of Dutch soldiers (Dutchbat) called for air support, but no one replied. Even in obvious self-defense, the UN would not agree to use military force to defend Srebrenica, because they did not believe the Serbs wanted to take the whole enclave. In July, the Serbs attacked and took peacekeepers hostage.[66] The UN threatened airstrikes if peacekeepers were attacked, but not if the town was captured. On 11 July, Srebrenica fell; NATO dropped only two bombs to prevent the fall, but it was too little too late.[67] Dutchbat, women, children, and elderly men fled. Peacekeepers were disarmed, and the men of Srebrenica were put on buses to the fields where they would be killed.[68] Approximately 8,000 were massacred on the orders of Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić, and Slobodan Milošević.[69]

When news of the massacre reached Washington and Paris, NATO began moving quickly.[70] The requirement for UN approval of airstrikes was abolished and the UN withdrew to leave no hostages. Operation Deliberate Force lasted between 30 August and 20 September, consisting of 3,500 sorties to destroy the Serb ability to keep fighting.[71] Serbs promised to retaliate but never did. The international community had failed to end the war in three years, but NATO did so in one month with no fatalities, based on a UNSC resolution from 1993. The war formally ended two months later with a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio.

The Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) were signed under enormous international pressure after Bosniak and Croat forces began advancing.[72] They divided BiH into two entities, a Bosniak-Croat Federation, formerly RBiH, and the RS, controlling 51% and 49% of Bosnian territory respectively. DPA accepted Serb ethnic cleansing to prevent violent retaliation by Bosniaks and Croats. Previously mixed areas became ethnically homogenous[73] and RS became a quasi-independent Serb nation-state.[74] Only a “thin roof”[75] of shared institutions was left of an integral Bosnian state. The right to return to ethnically cleansed areas was included in DPA, but no domestic institutions were created able to enforce it.[76]RS would veto attempts at reform. This division of BiH makes it difficult to redevelop a shared ‘Bosnianness’[77] and prevents reconciliation. International presence after DPA did not focus on individual human rights and oversaw the completion of ethnic cleansing, when those left on the “’wrong’ side”[78] of the boundary line left their homes. Ethnically homogenous enclaves became obstacles to future return. Those in BiH committed to a secular Bosnia-Herzegovina of equal citizens are becoming fewer and less enthusiastic as separation seems more permanent.[79] Bosniaks tend to support reintegration, while Serbs and Croats remained skeptical, supported by leaders who still dream of unity with Serbia or Croatia. Even today, those parties responsible for the war continue to be prevalent in politics.[80] At least in these respects, ethnic cleansing was successful in BiH.

Should the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia be considered genocide? The answer depends on definition and interpretation. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) estimates the death toll at 25,000-329,000, 50% Bosniaks, 30-35% Serbs, and 15-20% Croats.[81] According to the ICTY, genocide did occur in Bosnia, but only in Srebrenica in 1995.[82] Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were convicted of genocide and aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.[83]Slobodan Milošević likely would have been but he died before his judgment.[84] Other instances were deemed only ethnic cleansing, because the goal arguably was to create Greater Serbia or Greater Croatia, not by exterminating Bosniaks, but by expelling them. Normally only men between 16-and 60 and elites[85] were targeted for internment and murder, so it could be argued the goal was a military occupation, which removes the intent necessary for genocide. Only in Srebrenica was there an attempt to kill all men, hence the distinction. This may satisfy a legal definition of genocide, but ethnic cleansing did create large areas where Bosniaks became “physically and biologically extinct.” [86] Expulsion is effectively genocide when the expelled have nowhere to go. 900,000-1,200,00 Bosnians of all ethnicities became international refugees while 1,500,000 were internally displaced, 50% of them Bosniaks.[87] When civilian and military leaders of Serb forces were found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica specifically, but dissimilar actions led to similar results elsewhere, the claim that a genocide occurred in Bosnia at large is justified, regardless of an intent to exterminate, as the European Court of Human Rights ruled.[88]

Care should be taken to remember crimes by Bosniaks and Croats, between each other and against Serbs,[89] often ignored in the West for political reasons. Serbs were responsible for most crimes and the most serious atrocities, but Bosniaks and Croats also engaged in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and possibly genocide. Narratives that ignore this distort and oversimplify the complexity of the war and compromise the potential for justice.

The war in BiH is likely the best covered by media in history.[90]Atrocities and ethnic cleansing were daily news as the UN failed to act to protect civilians while actively keeping victims from buying arms in self-defense. Using justifications based on total misunderstandings of the region, significant actors chose not to get involved in a conflict they could have ended with little cost to themselves. Nationalist leaders used memories of foreign domination and violence to stoke fears of total annihilation with the goal of making coexistence impossible. History was mythologized and weaponized to imagine a future of homogenous nation-states where those would be impossible without the destruction of entire nationalities. The EC rushed to recognize Bosnian independence with no reasonable expectation it could occur peacefully and did little to aid victims of ethnic cleansing after the war began. Serb leaders had planned a policy of ethnic cleansing which culminated in the genocide of Srebrenica, the deadliest mass killing in Europe since WWII. Where they advanced, Bosniaks and Croats also engaged in significant crimes. The war ended in the legitimization of the Serb separatist RS and accepted Serb jurisdiction in the areas they ethnically cleansed and failed to reconcile the ethnic groups. To this day, some nationalists still entertain dreams of secession. Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbians continue to see the war as one of “ethnic survival and national independence,”[91] ultimately as necessary.

In Bosnia, three very similar peoples were led to believe they could not continue to live alongside each other. They were misled by their politicians and failed by the international community. They murdered and were murdered. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina shows how dangerous nationalisms can be when mobilized in mixed populations with memories of violence. It was not an accident, but the result of intentional efforts to make coexistence impossible. With that as their goal, the nationalists succeeded.

[1]Veremis, Thanos. A Modern History of the Balkans: Nationalism and Identity in Southeast Europe. London / New York: I.B.Tauris, 2017. 85-6.

[2]Veremis, Thanos. 2017. 91.

[3]Glenny, Misha. The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin Group, 1996. 139.

[4]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 141.

[5]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 143.

[6]Weitz, Eric D. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 195-6.

[7]Weitz, Eric D. 2015. 198.

[8]Weitz, Eric D. 2015.199.

[9]Weitz, Eric D. 2015. 210.

[10]Weitz, Eric D. 2015. 210.

[11]Donia, Robert J. Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 118.

[12]Mojzes, Paul. Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century. Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. 164-5.

[13]Mojzes, Paul 2011. 165.

[14] Donia, Robert J. 2015. 142-3.

[15] Donia, Robert J. 2015. 143.

[16] Donia, Robert J. 2015. 148.

[17] Donia, Robert J. 2015. 153-5.

[18]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 155.

[19]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 239.

[20]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 239-40.

[21]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 241-2.

[22]This was decided by the Bosnian constitutional court, which only had an advisory role. Actual action would have to be taken by the Bosnian parliament, but this never occurred. (Donia, Robert J. 2015. 112.)

[23]Veremis, Thanos. 2017. 85.

[24]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 164-6.

[25]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 150-1.

[26]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 170.

[27]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 231-233.

[28]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 166.

[29]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 149-50.

[30]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 168.

[31]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 167.

[32]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 170.

[33]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 170.

[34]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 170.

[35]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 170.

[36]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 188.

[37]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 172.

[38]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 24-5.

[39]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 170.

[40]Hoare, Marko Attila. “Towards an Explanation for the Bosnian Genocide of 1992-1995.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14, no. 3 (2014) & Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 172-3.

[41]Weitz, Eric D. 2015. 198.

[42] LeBor, Adam. 2008. 122.

[43]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 192.

[44]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 173.

[45]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 177.

[46] Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 184-6.

[47] Donia, Robert J. 2015. 263-4 & Glenny, Misha. 1996. 192.

[48]Donia, Robert J. 2015. 264.

[49]Glenny, Misha. 1996. 192-4.

[50]Veremis, Thanos. 2017. 86.

[51]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 31-3.

[52]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 34.

[53]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 34.

[54]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 34-5.

[55]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 65-6.

[56]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 35-6.

[57]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 40.

[58]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 37.

[59]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 39-41.

[60]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 40-1.

[61]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 41.

[62]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 41-3.

[63]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 179.

[64]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 42-3.

[65]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 93-5.

[66]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 99-100.

[67]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 104-5.

[68]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 110-1.

[69]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 181.

[70]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 129.

[71]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 129.

[72]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 171.

[73]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 190.

[74]Kofman, Daniel. “Self-Determination in a Multiethnic State: Bosnians, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.” In Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies: The Case of Bosni-Herzegovina, 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2001. 31.

[75]Belloni, Roberto. State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia. Security and Governance Series. New York: Routledge, 2007. 17.

[76]Lippman, Peter. Surviving the Peace. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019. 35.

[77]Belloni, Roberto. 2007. 42.

[78]Belloni, Roberto. 2007. 23.

[79]Lippman, Peter. 2019. 35-6.

[80] Lippman, Peter. 2019. 377-8.

[81] Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 187.

[82] Vukušić, Iva. “Archives of Mass Violence: Understanding and Using ICTY Trial Records.” Südost-Europa 70, no. 4 (2022). 588.

[83]International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. “Trial Judgement Summary for Ratko Mladić.” ICTY, November 22, 2017. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/en/171122-summary-en.pdfhttps://www.icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/en/171122-summary-en.pdf. & “Trial Judgement Summary for Radovan Karadžić.” ICTY, March 24, 2016. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement_summary.pdf.

[84]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 190-1.

[85]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 188.

[86]Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 190.

[87] Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 187.

[88] Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 189.

[89] Mojzes, Paul. 2011. 193.

[90]LeBor, Adam. 2008. 114.

[91]Veremis, Thanos. 2017. 92.

Bibliography

Belloni, Roberto. 2007. State Building and International Intervention in Bosnia. Security and Governance Series. New York: Routledge.

Donia, Robert J. 2015. Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Glenny, Misha. 1996. The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin Group.

Hoare, Marko Attila. 2014. “Towards an Explanation for the Bosnian Genocide of 1992-1995.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14 (3): 516–32.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. 2016. “Trial Judgement Summary for Radovan Karadžić.” ICTY. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement_summary.pdf.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. 2017. “Trial Judgement Summary for Ratko Mladić.” ICTY. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/en/171122-summary-en.pdfhttps://www.icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/en/171122-summary-en.pdf.

Kofman, Daniel. 2001. “Self-Determination in a Multiethnic State: Bosnians, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.” In Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies: The Case of Bosni-Herzegovina, 1st ed., 31–61. London: Routledge.

LeBor, Adam. 2008. “Complicity with Evil”: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lippman, Peter. 2019. Surviving the Peace. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Mojzes, Paul. 2011. Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century. Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

Veremis, Thanos. 2017. A Modern History of the Balkans: Nationalism and Identity in Southeast Europe. London / New York: I.B. Tauris.

Vukušić, Iva. 2022. “Archives of Mass Violence: Understanding and Using ICTY Trial Records.” Südost-Europa70 (4): 585–607.

Weitz, Eric D. 2015. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

By Omid Eliott Yeganeh

Introduction

In the wake of the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) emerged across American law schools as an avowedly ‘left-wing’ school of legal theory (Kennedy 1997, 8-11; Tushnet 1986, 505; Unger 1986, 1-5). From its origins, the movement was devoted to the critique of prevailing orthodoxy in legal academia. Key aims have included challenging the supposed moral neutrality of legal doctrine, promoting transparency in legal culture, and highlighting the sociological and empirical consequences of legal practice and theory.

One especially controversial target of the movement has been legal rights, whose political efficacy has been met with a suspicion from leading figures within CLS. This posture of skepticism towards rights has occasioned a body of literature known as the “critique of rights.” Participating in this discourse from an anti-CLS stance, David Andrew Price wrote for the Cambridge Law Journal that “[the Critical Legal Studies movement] is marked by a rejection of ‘legal rights’ as a desirable or even possible means of protecting individuals from government power” (1989, 283). That claim, which has somehow attained the rank of settled orthodoxy both within and without the movement, is based on a misreading (or non-reading) of seminal CLS texts.

This article puts a challenge to Price’s proposition on three distinct levels. (A) I begin by arguing that CLS is not marked by any given attitude towards rights. (B) Building on this argument, I add that even the most unsympathetic accounts of rights in CLS do not go as far as rejecting legal rights. (C) Finally, I argue that Price’s proposition overlooks important elements of the critique of rights, including the intrinsic (rather than instrumental) dimension of that critique, its emphasis on the language of legal rights rather than their substance, and the contextual significance of CLS’ postmodern leanings. I conclude that substantive legal rights hold a much more important place in CLS literature than its detractors (and sometimes its adherents) have suggested.

A. Diversity within CLS

It is crucial to stress, in the first instance, that the Critical Legal Studies movement is not “marked” by any particular attitude towards rights.While this paper is not the forum to litigate the precise meaning of CLS, it shall proceed on several expedient assumptions in that respect. Those who self-identify as members of CLS (Crits) will be forthrightly accepted as such, as will those treated as Crits by others within the movement. I also take for granted the distinction between CLS and the broader umbrella of Critical Theory (Stewart 2020, 148).

With those preliminaries set out, I may turn to charting the varying accounts of rights within CLS. The following typology places prominent Crits into three loose groupings in descending order of rights-aversion.

A Typology of CLS Rights-Stances (See Author's Notes, 2)

Rights-Averse Crits: Peter Gabel & Duncan Kennedy (1984, 33-34), William Simon (1985, 2, 34), Joseph Singer (1982, 1058-1059), Mark Tushnet (1984, 1386).

Rights-Ambivalent Crits: Morton Horwitz (1988, 396-397), Jeffrey Blum (1990, 71), Paul Brest (1981, 1096), Peter Fitzpatrick (2013, 100, 103-104), Allan Hutchinson & Patrick Monahan (1984, 1490), Mark Kelman (1984, 296, 302).

Rights-Affirming Crits: Edwin Baker (1974, 56), Anthony Chase (1984, 684-685), David Kairys (1982, 163), Joseph King & Zygmunt Plater (1973), Aviam Soifer (1979, 706), David Trubek (1986, 225-226, 229-230), Roberto Unger (1986, 37-40).

While my table cannot convey the breadth of scholarship within CLS, it provides a broadly representative overview of the dominant currents within the movement. If nothing else, the table illustrates a degree of nuance within CLS (Tushnet 1986, 510; Crenshaw 1988, 1350; Rhode 1990, 617) which Price overlooks.

Consider, to that effect, Fitzpatrick’s (2013, 103) concession that there have been “a multitude of instances where human rights have been drawn on effectively in the cause of the oppressed,” or Horwitz’s acknowledgment that “[o]ur modern, broad conceptions of rights have transformed our legal culture for the better, often providing legitimacy and entitlement to the weak and the powerless far beyond what their actual political power could have produced” (1988, 395).

Unger, a founding-member of CLS, dedicates a significant part of his seminal Critical Legal Studies Movement to a comprehensive account of the place reserved for legal rights in his political utopia, wherein he proposes a class of “immunity rights” which “establish the nearly absolute claim of the individual to security against the state” (1986, 36-57).

To claim that an intellectual current is “marked by” a particular stance requires that the relevant position appears with at least some consistency within its academic canon. Yet as the above analysis demonstrates, a considerable number of Crits believe that legal rights are a possible and desirable means of protecting individuals from government power (See Author's Notes, 3), such that CLS cannot be said to be marked by the opposite view in that respect (See Author's Notes, 4).

B. The Trouble with Rejection

Price is additionally wrong to suggest that the critique of rights amounts to a “rejection” of legal rights. I will take Price at his highest and rely only on the writings of rights-averse Crits, to show that even they do not “reject” rights.

Consider for these purposes Tushnet, who denies “that the idea of rights is on balance actually harmful” (1984, 1384) and concedes that “guarantees of participation in political action” (which he calls “rights”) are “obviously attractive” (1396).

Kennedy, in turn, stresses that “[t]here is nothing in the critique [of rights] that might suggest a reduction in the rights of citizens vis-à-vis their governments” (1997, 334). Elsewhere, Kennedy has proposed “working at the slow transformation of rights rhetoric… rather than simply junking it” (1981, 506).

The term “rejection” connotes considerable repudiatory weight. To say that one “rejects” a particular concept is to say that one wholly dismisses it—rejection requires more than mere critique. To provide an analogy, Crits are commonly critical of State power (See Gabel and Kennedy 1984, 26), but they do not ipso facto become anarchists. While some Crits exhibit robust hostility towards legal rights, few, if any, can be described as “rejecting” them.

More fundamentally, the post-modernist tendencies of (some) Crits make them broadly disinclined to make truth-statements of the sort Price attributes to them (Kennedy 1997, 11, 19). It is not clear, for example, how the “rejection” of legal rights can be reconciled with the CLS recommendation to “think about the law in a way that will allow students to enter into it, to criticize without utterly rejecting it” (Kennedy 1982, 599-600). Therein lies Price’s second error.

C. From Errors to Oversights

Price’s proposition is not only wrong—it is also incomplete. Whereas the foregoing sections have sought to identify mistruths in Price’s postulate, the following paragraphs will attempt to illuminate three additional omissions in his account of CLS.

Price’s first oversight is his purely instrumentalist framing of the critique of rights, which fails to acknowledge that Crits often stress the intrinsic, rather than instrumental deficiencies of legal rights. Consider, in this respect, Tushnet’s seminal exposé of the rights-critique, which contains four key arguments: (1) that the content of rights is context-dependent, and therefore unstable; (2) that rights, by their nature, cannot produce determinate outcomes; (3) that rights convert meaningful experiences into empty abstractions; and (4) that the use of rights in discourse impedes political progress (Tushnet 1984, 1363-1364). Of these four arguments, only the last is purely instrumental—the first three have an intrinsic bend. Tushnet does not merely say that rights have bad consequences—he is more crucially stressing that rights are somehow internally deficient (See also Kennedy 1982, 598). Price’s account of the critique omits this nuance.

Price’s second oversight is his failure to distinguish between the CLS critique of rights-doctrine on the one hand, and rights-discourse on the other. By failing to specify its (diverse) targets, Price leads us to believe that Crits focus on the substantive concept of legal rights, rather than the use of the terminology of rights in legal and political discourse. In fact, the opposite is true. Kennedy for example is critical of “rights discourse” but endorses the “radical expansion of citizen rights against the state” (Kennedy 1997, 334). Tushnet similarly launches a semantic rather than substantive critique of rights, as evidenced by his repeated references to “rights-talk”, “rights discourse”, and the “language/rhetoric of rights” (See Author's Notes 5; 1984, 1364) This facet of the rights-critique is absent from Price’s commentary.

Price’s third oversight is his failure to discern that Crits cannot reject rights “as a desirable or possible means of protecting individuals from government power” if they do not believe in the framing of “protecting individuals from government power” to begin with. Price overlooks the possibility that Crits do not believe in rights precisely because rights presuppose a normative tension between individual interests and government power (Tushnet 1984, 1392; Simon 1985, 29). As Kennedy puts it: “[t]his framework is, in itself, a part of the problem rather than of the solution” (1982, 598).

Conclusion

Taken as a whole, Price’s proposition is hyperbolic at best, and patently wrong at worse—it is a reductive account of CLS and of the critique of rights. There are many valid criticisms one might want to direct at CLS. Consider, to this effect, the regrettable failure of rights-averse Crits to articulate viable alternatives to legal rights (See Author's Notes, 6), or the undue degree of abstraction at which their critique of rights operates (See Author's Notes, 7). Crucially, however, none of this justifies the constant mischaracterizations endured by Crits.

While this paper may seem to operate as a vindication of CLS, I submit, in closing, that it is better understood as a meta-critique. The goal here has not been to defend Crits, but to attack their attackers. If these arguments lend strength to CLS, they do so incidentally and lack the force of an endorsement. The foregoing arguments, I hope, reveal a characteristic failure to engage authentically with CLS literature, evidenced by detractors often resorting to inflammatory exaggerations and/or generalizations of critical legal thought.

Author's Notes

1. This article draws extensively on coursework submitted as part of my Jurisprudence studies at the University of Oxford; for that reason, much credit goes to the influential seminars dispensed by Dr. Tom Adams. I am grateful also to Moayad Karar and Shivanii Arun for their considered contributions to the later drafts of this piece.
2. Authors included in this table have either associated themselves with CLS or appear in references to the movement (See Kennedy & Klare 1984, 461).
3. Rights-averse Crits often acknowledge that their views are minoritarian/controversial (See Tushnet 1986, 510, 516).
4. Elsewhere in his work, Price curiously acknowledges that "it is hazardous to refer to 'the' CLS position on a particular question" (1989, 283).
5. By my count, there are at least 25 combined references.
6. The point is made by various minority-critics: e.g. Crenshaw 1988, 1366-1367; Rhode 1990, 636. Some Crits are hostile to the very concept of alternatives: e.g. Tushnet 1984, 1398; Freeman 1981, 1230-1231; Simon 1984, 502. Others provide merely semantic substitutes: e.g. Tushnet 1984, 1394. Others still propose vague and anarchistic alternatives: e.g. Gabel & Harris 1982, 376.
7. Minority-critics have generally stressed that "we need less reliance on abstract principles and more on concrete experience" (Rhode 1990, 631). This has led scholars at the margin of CLS to conclude that: ‘[c]ritical legal theorists have built an argument of great force and yet one which... is sometimes blind to the significance of legal protections for certain fundamental human rights" (Sparer 1984, 510).

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by Ka Hang WONG

The people of the United Kingdom have had their say. They voted for a Labour government. While Hongkongers in the UK have a lot to feel gratified under Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, which introduced the British National Overseas visa scheme in 2021, with a newly elected government, it is time for healing and reconciliation to begin. The BN(O) route to British citizenship was introduced following the 2019 Hong Kong protests that led to the Chinese-imposed National Security Law. This draconian law is seen as a breach of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and a direct threat to the freedoms and autonomy of Hong Kong. However, while the Conservative government has made a courageous decision to offer a lifeboat to the Hongkongers, this decision is seen as a correction of a historical mistake (Yu, 2022, 2023). This article will outline the origin of the different classes of British nationality and argue that one of the unintended consequences of the British Nationality Selection Scheme of the 1990s is the perpetuation of political persecution in Hong Kong. Following the South African example, the article proposes a UK inquiry into the scheme that freely gave British passports to 50,000 important Hong Kong personnel and their families, including members of the civil service and the police force.

The background

After China was defeated in the First Opium War (1839-42), she continually ceded Hong Kong Island to Great Britain. The Treaty of Nanking was signed in 1842. The Second Opium War (1856-60) ended in 1860 when China ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain under the Convention of Peking, also in perpetuity. As Britain sought to expand its territory in Hong Kong, the Second Convention of Peking was signed between the Qing government and Britain in 1898, and Britain leased the New Territories for 99 years, which would expire on June 30, 1997. It is from this second convention that the significance of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty is derived.

As the 1997 date neared, political uncertainty was intertwined with economic insecurity that threatened Hong Kong’s status as an important financial centre of the world. As a result, the Sino-British negotiations began with Thatcher’s visit to China in 1982. According to Mark (2020), the Chinese insisted that their sovereignty over Hong Kong was a non-negotiable basis for discussion. Although the British initially tried to propose an administration arrangement to the Chinese in exchange for their demand for sovereignty, the British eventually conceded both sovereignty and administration to the Chinese (Mark, 2020).

After two years of negotiations, both parties signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on December 19, 1984. In the Joint Declaration, China agreed to maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system and way of life for fifty years (Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, 1984). According to Chua (1990), this was a concession in return for Britain forfeiting its legal right to Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula. Although China had claimed that the treaties were invalid because they were unfair treaties, both parties agreed to disagree on this point with the aim of a smooth transfer (Chua, 1990). Further, the PRC succeeded in requesting the United Nations to remove Hong Kong from the United Nations list of colonies after joining the United Nations in 1972 (Hung, 2022). This effectively stripped Hong Kong of the right to self-determination under the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (United Nations Human Rights, 1960). In addition, the British Nationality Act 1981 (UK) sealed the fate of Hongkongers as it stripped the British Dependent Territories Citizens (BDTC) of Hong Kong of the right to abode in the United Kingdom.

The point at which the current controversy over the BN(O)s began with the 1981 Act. Literature on the historiography covering the British Nationality Act has been scant. According to Mark (2020), discourses of the Thatcher government at the time relating to the concept of “Britishness” were based on a White Britain and ties of blood. The Hong Kong Chinese were deemed not to have close ties with the United Kingdom, and racial prejudice against them was around. The Act repealed the right of the colonial citizens of the Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC) to enter and settle in Britain and reclassified British nationality into three categories, of which Hong Kong Chinese were reclassified into the BDTC category (Benson, 2023; Mark, 2020).

The 1981 Act and the future of Hong Kong created an identity crisis among the Hong Kong elites. Within months following Thatcher’s visit to China in September 1982 for talks with the Chinese counterparts over the future of Hong Kong, the British Nationality Act came into effect. According to Mark (2020), these events threatened the “Britishness of Hong Kong” (p. 579). The weakening connection to Britain had produced a “collective identity crisis” (“A Matter of Identity”, 1981, as cited in Mark, 2020, p. 584). The people of Hong Kong felt Britain was abandoning them. They were reminded of the discriminatory policy of 1962 when non-white colonial citizens lost the right to abode in Britain (Mark, 2020).

The sharpening along racial lines became even more apparent when the United Kingdom enabled the Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians to gain full British citizenship (Benson, 2023). According to Mark (2020), the Gibraltarians could register as full British citizens because Gibraltar was part of the European Community. This registration was made possible under section 4 of the British Nationality Act 1981 (UK). Falkland Islanders were also able to become British citizens through the British Nationality (Falkland Islands) Act 1983 (UK). Inclusive provisions were made for the British populations of both places (Benson, 2023). The granting of British citizenships to the Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians caused the Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils in Hong Kong to complain that the Hong Kong Chinese were being treated as “second-class citizens” and that the United Kingdom was discriminating against Hong Kong (Mark, 2020). This put enormous pressure on the United Kingdom government. As a result, the 1981 Act was amended following the signing of the Joint Declaration to accommodate the Hong Kong Chinese who wished to retain connection with the United Kingdom beyond 1997 (Benson, 2023; Mark, 2020).

A new category of citizenship known as the British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) was created under the Hong Kong (British Nationality) Order 1986 (UK). The BN(O) passport holder is afforded British consular protection in third countries but not the right of abode in the United Kingdom (Benson, 2023; Mark, 2020). In effect, the BN(O) became the travel document mentioned in the Joint Declaration that the Hong Kong Chinese could use to travel to other states and regions. The BN(O) status cannot be passed on to the holder's children. Following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the United Kingdom made a further concession through the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act 1990 (UK) to provide 50,000 elite families of Hong Kong with full British citizenship under the British Nationality Selection Scheme. However, the purpose of this offer was more to retain important personnel in Hong Kong rather than encouraging them to emigrate to the United Kingdom (Benson, 2023; Chuang, 1990). Since then, the BN(O) issue was largely buried in the media and academic literature until the unfolding events of 2019.

The British Nationality Selection Scheme in the perpetuation of political persecution in Hong Kong

The Thatcher administration saw the British Nationality Selection Scheme as offering an incentive to 50,000 important personnel and their families to stay in the British colony rather than an offer of immigration. The British had to ensure the stability of Hong Kong and prevent mass emigration out of Hong Kong prior to the handover. But what was intended had unfortunately turned into an abuse of power. Let us revisit what Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, said in 2022:

Every one of my successors as Chief Executive of Hong Kong either had a foreign passport or had members of their family with foreign passports. The present Chief Executive had a British passport, which she gave up to become Chief Executive. Her husband has a British passport. Her sons have British passports. Now I’m not against that. I hope they’ll enjoy the liberties and freedoms which come with being a British citizen with that passport, but what is of course a rather unhappy paradox is the people at the moment, the quislings, including members of the police force, doing the persecuting, have British passports, and the ones who are being persecuted, the ones who are being locked up, don’t. I think we should address that rather unhappy imbalance in due course (Hong Kong Watch, 2022, 6:22, my emphasis).

In this extract, Patten raises an important issue. That is, the people who are persecuting ordinary Hongkongers are the very people to whom the British government awarded British citizenship. The context of Patten’s speech was to argue that post-1997 Hongkongers should be able to apply for the BN(O) route independently of their parents who hold the BN(O) nationality. Patten’s point was that although principal officials in the post-handover Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) are required to renounce their foreign citizenship before they are appointed, the connection with their immediate families meant that these officials could immediately go into exile in the United Kingdom should the political situation in the HKSAR turned tumultuous. In the example highlighted by Patten, Carrie Lam, the then Chief Executive of the HKSAR, whose term was arguably defined by her mishandling of the extradition Bill that led to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, could have escaped to the United Kingdom because of her connection with her husband and sons who were awarded British citizenships in the 1990s. Lam’s family was one of those 50,000 families who were handed British citizenship because of Lam’s work with the colonial government. The post-1997 Hongkongers who were persecuted or in jail would not have such luxury. Thus, Patten’s speech indicates that it is the inequality of British nationality law that enables the perpetuation of current persecution in Hong Kong. As a champion of those oppressed, Patten succeeded in this argument because the BN(O) scheme has been expanded since 2022.

Although Patten has succeeded in helping the post-1997 Hongkongers to gain independent access to the BN(O) scheme, this article recommends that the United Kingdom hold an inquiry into the role of the British Nationality Selection Scheme in perpetuating political violence in Hong Kong. Many Hongkongers are suffering from post-traumatic disorder since arriving in the UK (Liang, 2022). Hongkongers who do not possess the BN(O) nationality or could not afford to emigrate are grieving the loss of their hometown (Chan, 2024). In the context of South Africa, legislation that institutionalised racial segregation and domination came into effect after the Nationalists came into power in 1948 (Peacock, 2011). Similarly, after Thatcher came into power, the 1981 Act implemented a racial demarcation policy designed to segregate the white population who had the right to enter the United Kingdom from the Hong Kong Chinese who did not have such right. The 1986 Order similarly perpetuated the United Kingdom’s racial policy because the original intent of the BN(O) nationality was to exclude the Hong Kong Chinese from emigrating to the United Kingdom. It was the 1990 Act that gave 50,000 important personnel and their families full British citizenship as insurance policy so that they can have a home to go to should they wish to leave Hong Kong. The 1990 Act thus perpetuated the inequality of classes of people. Only those deemed important to the future of Hong Kong were granted British citizenship, while those who were not deemed important enough were treated as “second-class” British nationals.

Perhaps what was not realised then was the impact the British Nationality Selection Scheme would have on these “second class” British nationals. While the BN(O) route is now correcting a historical mistake of inequality, this article urges the British government to take responsibility for its nationality law that, according to Patten, perpetuates the current political persecution of Hongkongers. Following the South African example, a place to start could be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Both the perpetrators of rights abuses—including the then-British figures involved in legislating the British nationality law—and those persecuted by authority figures who were given British passports could be invited to the commission in the United Kingdom either physically or via video conferencing, where both sides could share openly and honestly about what went wrong that ultimately led to the Hong Kong protests, the extradition Bill of 2019, and the Chinese-imposed National Security Law in 2020.

A central agenda of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission could be promoting common understanding. This could include an open acknowledgment of the unintended consequences of granting full British citizenship to only a certain population of Hong Kong, the ongoing breaches of the Sino-British Joint Declaration by the totalitarian-party state after the transfer of sovereignty, the trauma resulting from the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and the silencing after the National Security Law, and more recently, Article 23. Further, the commission needs to facilitate the transformation of unjust inequality, as the BN(O) route has done, to address the dehumanising effect of being unable to enter one’s own country freely. Prior to the handover, the British colony had 3.5 million BDTCs (Hansard, 6 June 1989, col 16). With an estimated 2.9 million Hongkongers eligible for the BN(O) passport (Summers, 2022), this leaves approximately 600,000 Hongkongers out of the current BN(O) offer because they did not register for the BN(O) nationality prior to the handover. Some of these individuals may have been children at the time and are now left without the protection and potential pathway to British citizenship that the BN(O) status provides, leaving them particularly vulnerable in the current political climate.

In conclusion, we must amplify the voices of vulnerable people who are oppressed by the Chinese regime, perpetuated by an unjust British nationality law. Following his house arrest, former CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang asked the CCP leadership to revisit the verdict of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre (Zhao, 2009). The CCP leadership has repeatedly silenced his lone voice, and the massacre has been largely erased from memory on the Chinese mainland. We, therefore, know that under the hardline leadership of Xi Jinping, the Chinese and HKSAR governments are unlikely to hold the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that this article proposes. However, Hong Kong has the benefit of British involvement and responsibility that can shed light on what happened to its own history. A United Kingdom Truth and Reconciliation Commission could prevent the suppression of memories by providing amnesty to people participating in the commission through an agreement with the HKSAR government. Alternatively, it could allow people to participate anonymously. Instead of silencing those memories, the voices of suffering under a brutal totalitarian regime after the transfer of sovereignty can be amplified. As Peacock (2011) states, “from silence and forgetfulness, memory and identity need to complete the past, providing the foundations of justice for future generations” (p. 333).

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The unique struggle against apartheid in South Africa represents a remarkable chapter in African history, marked by the tireless efforts of the African National Congress (ANC) and, more specifically, its military wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). This movement spearheaded the dismantling of an oppressive system of institutional racism and stands as a testament to the power of African-led initiatives. This essay will explore the decision to adopt a policy of violence to achieve racial peace, the convergence of regional and global support during the armed resistance period, and the pivotal role of Nelson Mandela in bridging the gap between regional and international activism, further amplifying the ANC’s cause. In analyzing these aspects, this paper sheds light on the power of Pan-Africanism and its impact on global human rights history. The democratic transition in South Africa symbolized a triumph not only for its people but also for the wider African continent, exemplifying the ANC's ability to forge strong alliances and unite diverse groups on the path to liberation.

Apartheid policies in South Africa were racial segregation laws enforced by the National Party government from 1948 to 1994. These policies led to severe human rights violations against the majority Black African population, including forced removals from areas designated for white settlement, restricted movement, and the denial of basic civil liberties. Non-white populations were subjected to institutional racism, marginalization, and the destruction of their communities. Political dissent was suppressed, and activists faced imprisonment and torture. Before it was a political party, the ANC was the leading anti-apartheid movement in the country, mobilizing mass resistance and organizing protests under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.

The Sharpeville massacre, which occurred on March 21, 1960, marked a significant turning point in the ANC's shift in activism. During a peaceful demonstration in Sharpeville, South Africa, the police opened fire on the protesters, resulting in the deaths of approximately 69 people. This tragic event garnered worldwide condemnation and exposed the brutal nature of apartheid to the global community. In response, the South African government declared a state of emergency, detaining thousands of activists and banning several organizations, including the ANC. It was during this period of imprisonment that discussions surrounding armed resistance gained traction among the detainees as some members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and ANC activists began contemplating it as a means to oppose apartheid. This growing wave of subversive activity was not lost on prominent ANC leaders like Nelson Mandela, who recognized the need to adapt their strategies in the face of escalating repression. In his famous speech on 20 April 1964 during his trial by the Supreme Court, he gave reasoned justification for the ANC’s choice to adopt a policy of violence, stating that “fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights.” He proclaimed that “experience convinced us that rebellion would offer the government limitless opportunities for the indiscriminate slaughter of our people. But it was precisely because the soil of South Africa is already drenched with the blood of innocent Africans that we felt it our duty to make preparations as a long-term undertaking to use force in order to defend ourselves against force.” The massacre catalyzed the ANC’s strategic direction, pushing them towards the formation of MK in the following years.

In terms of strategy and tactics, MK guerrillas generally avoided targeting civilians and employed violence in a more calibrated manner, adhering to a high standard Code of Conduct, which prohibited violence, assault, rape, cruelty, theft, drug use, and obscene language. MK leaders contemplated targeting State President PW Botha and his cabinet but decided against it due to the likelihood of civilian casualties, demonstrating a level of restraint in their actions. While the apartheid security forces derided MK guerrillas as “commuter bombers,” MK's claims of mauling the security forces were often exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Umkhonto We Sizwe played a significant role in discrediting and targeting the regime's governing structures during the State of Emergency in 1985, rooting out regime collaborators within black communities and fighting against apartheid proxy forces. From 1981 to 1983, MK conducted numerous high-profile attacks on government, military, and economic targets. These included the bombing of the SASOL oil-from-coal plant, the rocket attack on the Voortrekkerhoogte military headquarters, sabotage at the Koeberg nuclear power plant, and the bombing of the South African Air Force headquarters in Pretoria. These attacks received significant media attention and demonstrated MK's capacity for large-scale sabotage. The armed struggle waged by MK inspired and mobilized the population against apartheid, despite struggling to establish a visible presence within South Africa. Their recruitment efforts were based on kinship networks, extending beyond traditional hinterlands and encompassing urban areas. Their activities served as “armed propaganda,” exposing the weaknesses of the apartheid regime by transmitting the ANC's leadership to communities within South Africa, strengthening the ANC's credibility and symbolizing the liberation struggle. MK's armed struggle aimed to complement the ANC's mass struggle, and the movement adopted a policy of non-racialism and moral restraint.

The Front-Line States, including Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, played a crucial role in providing sanctuary and support to the ANC and anti-apartheid activists during their years in exile. While these countries did balance the threats posed by apartheid South Africa, their support for the ANC and anti-apartheid activists went beyond mere strategic considerations. These impoverished African countries suffered significant economic losses and hardships for challenging apartheid, with an estimated $30 billion in lost development by 1988. The Front-Line States actively supported the ANC and anti-apartheid activists in various ways, including offering military training, logistical support, and diplomatic assistance. These states became bases for launching MK’s liberation movements’ operations against the apartheid regime and played a crucial role in sustaining the struggle. The apartheid regime, under President PW Botha's “Total Strategy” from 1979 to 1988, aimed at total militarization of South Africa's domestic and foreign policies. As part of this strategy, the regime engaged in destabilizing neighbouring countries by conducting raids in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and sponsoring proxy wars that led to the deaths of over 2 million people in Angola and Mozambique. The regional narrative of the struggle against apartheid offers a fresh perspective on African transnationalism, diverging from the conventional global solidarity framework.

Regional support can be understood through the lens of political culture and transnational activism. The theory of political culture, influenced by cultural sociology and neo-Marxist perspectives, emphasizes the importance of networks, groups, and institutions in shaping transnational political culture. The concept of “border thinking” offers insights into the dynamics of transnational activism by highlighting the significance of borders and boundaries in the context of globalization and colonial history. Movements and networks engage in practices that challenge fixed boundaries, including mobility, diaspora, and the construction of spaces that transcend borders. In the context of the armed resistance against apartheid, regional support involved activists and organizations crossing borders, establishing connections, and sharing experiences and strategies. The formation of MK solidified the ANC’s image as a revolutionary force committed to armed struggle, which resonated with many African countries and leaders engaged in anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. The solidarity between neighbouring countries and their active participation in supporting the ANC and MK reflected the shared goals of liberation and the rejection of racial oppression.

The emergence of international support played a transformative role in bolstering Umkhonto We Sizwe and its accomplishments in the fight against apartheid. Externally, the shifting balance of power and the end of the Cold War had a significant impact on ANC support. The negotiations between Western powers and the Soviet Union created an environment conducive to seeking solutions to conflicts in southern Africa. The removal of the “communist threat” that had helped sustain the apartheid regime's international position played a crucial role in changing perceptions and garnering support for the anti-apartheid cause. Additionally, the economic downturn experienced by South Africa during the 1980s was another factor. As the apartheid regime faced increasing financial challenges, international pressure mounted. The economic decline raised awareness of the injustices of apartheid and fueled solidarity movements around the world as the Boycott Movement in Britain mobilized public support and publicity for their consumer boycott of South African goods. The Special Committee against Apartheid, formed by ANC activist Razia Reddy, was a crucial node in the network of transnational anti-apartheid activism, providing well-researched information, financial support, and organizing conferences for representatives of anti-apartheid organizations. This allowed the ANC to increase their support and work towards the liberation of South Africa. Additionally, the advent of advanced communication technologies and the widespread dissemination of information played a vital role in mobilizing support for the anti-apartheid movement. From the 1980s, the transnational anti-apartheid movement relied heavily on mediated symbolic communication for organization and identification. The accessibility of global communication platforms allowed for the rapid spread of information, awareness, and coordination of efforts, resulting in increased international support for the cause.

Nelson Mandela's early involvement in the ANC and contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle played a significant role in establishing him as a representative figure of the organization. His unwavering commitment to justice and equality inspired people worldwide and galvanized support for the ANC, as his charisma, moral authority, and dedication to the cause made him an iconic figure of resistance against oppression. During his long imprisonment, Mandela became a focal point of international attention. The harsh treatment he endured in prison sparked outrage and fueled international campaigns for his release. The Nelson Mandela: Freedom at 70 campaign, initiated in the 1980s, mobilized global efforts to put pressure on the apartheid regime and secure Mandela's freedom. These movements played a vital role in raising awareness, organizing boycotts, and imposing economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. Once released, Mandela’s leadership during the negotiations with the apartheid government showcased his remarkable statesmanship and ability to bridge divides. Mandela's approach to reconciliation and inclusivity, as exemplified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, emphasized healing and unity as the path forward for a post-apartheid South Africa. Instead of prosecuting the guilty as the Nuremberg trials had done for Nazi war criminals, he created the commission to grant pardons to those willing to reveal their crimes. Mandela's legacy as an inspirational leader and his commitment to justice and equality continue to resonate worldwide.

The ANC's strategic shift towards armed resistance through the formulation of Umkhonto We Sizwe ensured its long-term effectiveness and ultimate success. During the armed resistance period against apartheid, both regional and global support played significant roles in the struggle. Regionally, support from neighbouring countries was instrumental in providing sanctuary, logistical support, and military training for ANC activists. These Front-Line states actively engaged in the struggle against apartheid, despite the risks and economic hardships they faced. Networks of ANC activists formed, facilitating the exchange of ideas, resources, and strategies. The shared political culture rooted in colonial history and the rejection of racial oppression further solidified regional support. On the other hand, global support for the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement was driven by factors such as the end of the Cold War, the economic decline in South Africa, and the global proliferation of communication media. These factors increased global support for the ANC, mobilizing efforts such as international campaigns, boycotts, and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela managed to bridge the gap between regional and international activism, as his message of forgiveness and healing resonated with people from different cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds, earning him immense respect and admiration worldwide. His ability to unite diverse groups, engage with global audiences, and build alliances contributed significantly to the ANC's cause. The convergence of regional and global support played a crucial role in MK’s strategies and achievements, providing resources, amplifying their message, and creating a global movement that ultimately contributed to dismantling apartheid in South Africa.

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Edward Said’s contextualization of Orientalism through The Bacchae underpins the ideologies and beliefs seen in the duality of reception between differing victims of international conflicts, where he notes how “[t]he two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant…It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative not so much of a puppet-master as of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries…Secondly, there is the motif of the Orient as insinuating danger. Rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses, those mysteriously attractive opposites of what seem to be normal values”. It is this ephemerality of the Orient that bleeds into societal conception and propagates the continuous violation of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees.

When the media depicts the crises in the Middle East, there is an implicit intangibility to their situation. CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata detailed how the problem occurring in Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen”.  In other words, following Said’s argument of the separation between the West and the East, there is an implicit separation in people’s minds that tragedy and bloodshed do not befall the ‘civilized’ world since the rest of the world is a foil of what the West must not become, even as it is thrust in front of them. European Union nations, in particular, have struggled with allowing political refugees from the Mediterranean into their countries. In this essay, I have chosen to highlight the dichotomy of treatment between Ukrainians and other migrant groups in the Mediterranean and explain why these nations have a political will to protect these marginalized groups.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped exasperate the migrant crisis in Greece. By mid-October 2020, Greece had 25,802 confirmed cases and 520 deaths from the virus throughout the nation, striking fear into the hearts of its citizens and a total barring of migrants into the nation. The strict lockdown implemented in March was eased in May, yet still, the government maintained discriminatory restrictions on thousands of migrants and asylum seekers living in camps on the Aegean islands and mainland. It failed to alleviate overcrowding or improve sanitation in the camps. Cases soared in August, adding pressure on the already-strained public health sector after a decade of economic crisis and austerity measures that included drastic budget cuts for public hospitals. Healthcare workers protested throughout the year against working conditions and lack of staff, medicine, testing, and equipment in public hospitals. As of early October, children on the Greek mainland living in migrant camps under lockdown due to COVID-19 cases in these facilities were unable to attend schools, and only around 50 of more than 4,000 school-age migrant and refugee children on the Aegean islands of Lesbos and Samos were enrolled in schools, according to humanitarian agencies. With limited exceptions, the government maintained its policy of blocking asylum seekers who arrive on the Aegean islands from moving to the mainland.

The containment policy trapped thousands in overcrowded and abysmal conditions with limited access to protection, health care, adequate water, sanitation, and hygiene products to limit the spread of COVID-19. An estimated 19,000 asylum seekers were on the islands when this governmental inaction took place, including more than 16,000 in camps designed to host around 13,000. Fires destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp at Moria in Lesbos, in September, leaving thousands, including more than 4,000 children, homeless and without food and water until the majority were rehoused in a temporary tent camp. According to aid groups, authorities failed to provide camp residents in the new camp with adequate and safe access to water, education, sanitation, supplies for menstrual hygiene management and health care, or sufficient protection from the elements and sexual and gender-based violence and harassment. Services remained insufficient, and access to pre and post-natal care and support for people with newborns remained limited. At the time of writing, there were 19 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the new camp, with a population of about 9,500. There were concerns about the risk of lead poisoning in the new camp due to its location on a former military shooting range and the spent cartridges used for practice tainting the landscape. A new asylum law that entered into force in January undermines access to protection and exposes asylum seekers to more significant risks of deportation and more extended periods of detention. In July, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said new provisions appear to introduce more restrictive procedures that may compromise the general legal principle that the detention of asylum seekers should be exceptional.

Following Turkey’s announcement in February that it would no longer stop asylum seekers and migrants from leaving Turkish territory to reach the European Union, thousands of people attempted to cross by sea and overland in March. In response, Greece barred the lodging of asylum claims for anyone crossing the border irregularly during that month, prosecuted people for irregular entry, arbitrarily detained nearly 2,000 people in unacceptable conditions in two newly established detention sites on the mainland under the pretext of COVID-19, and violently pushed back people attempting to enter Greece. Since then, law enforcement officers have summarily returned thousands of people to the Asiatic parts of Turkey, including people picked up by police hundreds of kilometers inside Greece. In June, Greece’s Supreme Court Prosecutor opened a criminal investigation into the March pushbacks in Evros, including the alleged shooting and deaths of two people by Greek security forces. The UN urged authorities to promptly and fully investigate all allegations of pushbacks, including any acts of violence or ill-treatment, and to ensure that such practices do not occur. In June, the Greek government began evicting more than 11,000 recognized refugees from government-provided apartments, hotels, and camps, leaving hundreds of people, including families, pregnant and single women, and people with disabilities, on the streets. The government announced in September a two-month pilot plan to house recognized refugees leaving the islands until they find a more permanent home.

In contrast, when the Russian offensive began its attack on Ukrainian soil, around 72,000 Ukrainians entered Greece at the end of February alone, and more than 18,000 have applied for protection under a never-before-used EU Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) that gives people escaping the fighting the right to live, work, and access to essential services in EU member states for up to two years. The reception of Ukrainians has been “astonishingly positive,” with Ukrainians referred to as “real refugees” in March by Greece’s Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi and can enter Greece without a visa. The Greek government has created an easy-to-use online platform for them to make appointments to register for protection status. Once registered, they are given social security and tax numbers that allow them to access the labor market, healthcare, and housing and food support. To contextualize, in comparison, around 7,000 asylum seekers and migrants have entered Greece by crossing the Aegean Sea or the land border between Greece and Turkey so far this year. The number is a far cry from the one million people – primarily Syrian refugees – who crossed from Turkey to Greece between 2015 and 2016 and the tens of thousands who entered annually in subsequent years.  Since March 2020, those numbers have dropped significantly as Greek authorities have systematically pushed asylum seekers and migrants back from the country’s land and sea border – an illegal practice under international law. But the Greek government denies they are taking place. For those who do make it into the country, asylum procedures are challenging to access, with too few asylum centers accepting claims and a non-functioning online appointment platform.  As a result, many people end up undocumented despite applying for sanctuary in Greece. This excludes them from essential services such as healthcare, accommodation, and the labor market. Even people who register as asylum seekers and receive refugee status face a bleak situation: The Greek government has been cutting back housing and financial support for refugees since 2019, leaving thousands of people destitute and homeless.

Troubles continue down the Mediterranean Riviera as after impeding the ability of search and rescue organizations to save lives in the Mediterranean Sea, Italian authorities have now passed Cutro decree, named after a shipwreck that killed 80, institutionally denies rights of those seeking asylum coming from the Mediterranean crossing. Far from offering a humane response to the rise in people crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe, the new legislation doubles down on the government’s focus on deterrence and criminalization. The government pushed through the legislative changes by introducing them through an emergency decree measure and limiting parliamentary oversight when the decree was converted into law. Rights organizations in Italy raised concerns over the far-right government’s use of extraordinary processes and declaring a state of emergency earlier this month to respond to longstanding, structural issues like migration. The new law will devastate migrants’ rights, including their ability to seek protection, access fair asylum procedures, and enjoy freedom of movement. The Italian parliament’s legislative committee flagged a law limiting the right of appeal, highlighting that it may be unconstitutional to continue such strict opposition.

The law, by design, will make it more difficult for people to invoke “special protection,” a temporary but renewable right to remain in Italy on humanitarian and family grounds. Under the new law, migrants will no longer be able to convert the special protection into a work permit, a change likely to increase the number of undocumented workers in Italy. The law extends the amount of time people can be detained pending deportation from a maximum of 120 days to a maximum of 135 days and introduces a new process to detain asylum seekers at the border for up to four weeks while their claim is processed under a new accelerated border procedure. Also, the law removes access to vital services in first reception centers, such as psychosocial assistance for those traumatized by political violence, facilities providing legal information, and language courses. In all aspects, these people are kept as outcasts, distinctly separate from the general population.

The law comes against a backdrop of rising discriminatory discourse, criminalization of aid to migrants, and continuing cooperation with the Libyan government, where migrants face abuses the UN denotes as crimes against humanity. The report notes that more than 670,000 migrants from over 41 countries have been in Libya since July 2022, when the Mission’s mandate was extended until March, as overwhelming evidence of systematic torture and sexual slavery, among other violations, came to light. Detention centers where migrants were enslaved were “under the actual or nominal control” of the authorities, including the Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration and the Libyan Coast Guard. The “widescale” exploitation of migrants is a lucrative business, the Mission said, noting that “trafficking, enslavement, forced labor, no imprisonment, extortion, and smuggling generated significant revenue for individuals, groups and State institutions”. Detention-related violations were also found to affect Libyans on a large scale, and the Mission points to the responsibility of State authorities and their leadership. The report notes that victims “came from every segment of Libyan society and included children, adult men and women, human rights defenders, political participants, civil society representatives, members of military or security forces, legal professionals and persons of perceived or actual diverse sexual orientations and gender identities”. Most of those interviewed by the UN Mission were held without charge in horrific conditions, “subjected regularly to torture, solitary confinement, held incommunicado” and denied access to water, food and other essentials.

Why should people be upset? Why should governments be held to this standard? Although these questions seem unanswerable in the practical sense at first glance, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, addressed delegates in Geneva regarding the circa 82.4 million displaced men, women, and children due to conflict, violence, and rights violations, double the number of a decade earlier, with 48 million within the borders of their own countries, and 26.4 million abroad as refugees. In his address, he stressed the importance of a political will for nations to become receptive, stating how “We [as a committee] have no shortage of laws and policy to protect the displaced [and] we have ample declarations of principle – the challenge is to implement them in practice”. Grandi refers to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951, a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is and deserving of protection. According to the stipulations under Articles 1-D through 1-F of the treaty, The 1951 Convention defines a refugee as an individual who, due to events before 1st January 1951 and a well-founded fear of persecution, is outside their country of nationality. The 1951 dateline was initially established to confine responsibilities to known or transpired refugee situations.

Over time, as new refugee scenarios emerged, the need arose to extend the Convention's provisions to these new cases. To address this, the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees was developed and enacted on 4 October 1967. By acceding to the 1967 Protocol, states commit to applying the substantive rules of the 1951 Convention to refugees as defined within it, without temporal limitation. The Protocol is a separate instrument linked to the Convention, available for accession by states regardless of their Convention status. The 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol encompass three provisions: Fundamental definitions of who qualifies as a refugee and who no longer holds refugee status. The interpretation of these provisions is the primary focus of this Handbook, designed for those responsible for determining refugee status. Regulations establish refugees' legal position, rights, and obligations within their host country. While these rules don't influence the status determination process, those overseeing it should be aware of these regulations, given their significant impact on individuals and families. Articles 35 of the 1951 Convention and Article 11 of the 1967 Protocol obligate Contracting States to collaborate with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in performing its functions, particularly supervising the application of these provisions. Currently, 78 states are parties to either or both the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, though, despite the almost universal acceptance of refugee protection norms enshrined in the 1951 convention, Assistant Secretary General and Assistant High Commissioner for Protection Gillian Triggs noted that 195 countries fully or partially closed their borders on health grounds during the pandemic and that 64 made no exceptions for asylum-seekers. Meanwhile, 39 countries reportedly forcibly returned them to their own or adjacent countries where they face violence and persecution. This dichotomy of reception truly encapsulates the ever-growing refugee crisis, fraught with strife and underpinning sentiments of alienation that tear up the world and perpetuate violence, chaos, and suffering.

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Après la Première Guerre mondiale et le Traité de Versailles, la France et le Royaume-Uni mettent la main sur des nouveaux territoires proches et Moyen-Orient. Cette acquisition découle d’un accord secret entre les deux puissances coloniales: l’accord de Sykes-Picot ou la France et le Royaume-Uni ont essentiellement divisé le proche-orient en zones de contrôle et d’influence afin d’assouvir leurs intérêts. La colonisation européenne a eu des effets dévastateurs sur la région. Tirées par la recherche de nouveaux marchés pour écouler leur production industrielle et exploiter des ressources naturelles, les institutions politiques mises en place étaient non seulement extractives au détriment de la population locale, mais ont perduré à ce jour. Ceci est notamment le cas du Liban ou le mode de contrôle, le système de mandat, a façonné l'état-nation libanaise. Le système de mandature stipule que la France a pour but de guider et conseiller l’administration locale afin de l'amener sur le droit chemin et de la préparer à l'indépendance. En effet, les institutions religieuses, économiques et politiques du Liban découlent des politiques de contrôle mises en place par la France avant l'indépendance obtenue en 1943.

Dans un premier temps, on analysera les conséquences du sectarisme mis en avant sous le joug impérial français qui persiste malgré la fin de la mandature française, il y a 80 ans. Ensuite, on observe que les institutions extractives mises en place par la France perpétuent un rapport de force et de déséquilibre entre le Liban et son ancienne puissance coloniale. Dernièrement, on étudiera comment le discours d'exceptionnalisme de la langue française et du Liban par rapport à ses voisins perpétué sous la colonisation a modeler les élites politico-économiques au Liban.

Un sectarisme mis en avant sous le joug impérial français

Dans un premier lieu, il est important de détailler les raisons derrière l'expédition française au Liban et au Proche-Orient de manière plus générale afin de comprendre le mode de contrôle mis en place et les impacts sur les différentes communautés ethno-religieuses du Liban. La France se positionne comme la protectrice des Chrétiens au Moyen-Orient et plus particulièrement des Maronites. Son justificatif reste dans le fait que les chrétiens sont minoritaires dans la région face aux populations musulmanes qui menaceraient non seulement la vie de ces derniers, mais aussi la culture judéo-chrétienne. Les Chrétiens sont considérés comme un allié nécessaire et “civilisé” afin de s'établir en opposition face aux communautées arabo-musulmanes. En effet, cette relation privilégiée remonte à l'expédition de Napoléon III dans la région. Son expédition l'encourage à planifier des plans pour établir un pied-à-terre sur le bord de la Méditerranée afin de non seulement protéger la relation privilégiée de la France avec les maronites, mais de projeter la puissance de la France dans la région.

Le mandat français au Liban va perpétuer ces idées de menace ethno-religieuse et tentera de rééquilibrer les rapports de force en inscrivant dans la loi la protection de chrétiens. De plus, le mandat met en place une administration coloniale qui traite la population arabo-musulmane à travers une relation patriarcale. En effet, les musulmans sont considérés comme une “race d’enfants” qui doit être éduquée et mise sur le droit chemin tandis que les chrétiens, francophones sont considérés comme Phocéens et Méditerranéens. Le statut administratif spécial français favorise explicitement ces derniers comme dirigeants de l’administration locale. L’utilisation du système de mandat consiste à avoir des intermédiaires dans la colonisation du Liban, là aussi, on observe l’utilisation de l’église comme acteur colonial. Cette dernière a pour but “d'éduquer” les Arabes afin de leur enseigner le français et de tenter de les convertir dans la portée plus large de la “mission civilisatrice.” Ceci aura des conséquences dévastatrices, car elle braque la population musulmane qui se retrouve, une fois de plus, écartée. L'éducation des missionnaires change les discours sur l'identité mise en avant par rapport à la période de contrôle ottomane. Le Français est promu au détriment du Turque et de l’Arabe, l’administration voit la jeunesse comme une opportunité de “civiliser” les foyers libanais de l'intérieur. L’idée est que la mise en place d’un cursus scolaire universel permet une transmission universelle et la création d’une nouvelle identité qui effacera le nationalisme libanais.

La conception de l'État libanais et la formation des institutions axés sur les questions d’identités représentent un legs du colonialisme français. Avoir un Liban établi en tant qu'État indépendant est lui-même un héritage du mandat français. La conséquence du mandat français est donc le fait que les institutions politiques reproduisent les divisions ethno-religieuses au Liban rendant impossible le dépassement de ces impasses religieuses et les nouvelles sources d'identité politique. Ceci découle du pacte national entre la France et le Liban lors de la décolonisation. Ce pacte national consiste en une constitution non écrite de l'État qui fait reposer son équilibre sur le confessionnalisme et la représentativité proportionnelle avec une reconnaissance explicite des confessions. On observe aussi que le Liban calque son code civil et pénal sur celui de la France montrant à quel niveau les institutions politiques libanaises étaient modelés par la colonisation.

On constate une nouvelle reproduction de ces divisions ethno-religieuses dans les accords de Taëf en 1990. L'idée est que le jeu d'équilibre entre les différentes religions maintient une stabilité politique plus payante que le socialisme de l'après-guerre. On retrouve des dispositions pour un chef d'État maronite, un Premier ministre Sunnite, et président de chambre chiite. C’est aussi le cas pour la distribution du portefeuille ministériel. Ceci permet de satisfaire les demandes de chacun des trois grands groupes religieux, mais a pour contrepartie de paralyser le pays dans une mentalité sectaire. Ainsi, on retrouve des ententes politiques locales avec des chefs des différentes communautés ethno-religieuses qui tentent de saper la légitimité de leurs rivaux.

Une économie de rente:

Il ne faut pas oublier que ces divisions sur des lignes ethno-religieuses font le jeu de la France en détournant l’attention de la population locale du pillage systématique de l'économie libanaise. En effet, les institutions ayant pour but l’extraction des ressources (humaines et naturelles) ont aussi perduré après l'indépendance. Derrière le message de mission civilisatrice et le discours patriarcal de la France, on retrouve des intérêts économiques qui ont eu de profonds impacts sur le pays. On observe alors que les institutions mises en place dans les années 1900 ont été modelées par les exportations afin de créer une économie de rente au Liban. La rente est un phénomène hautement important qui a des impacts économiques et politiques. Une économie où la rente domine et est tolérée mène à une augmentation des coûts de production. La rente est un des nombreux héritages de la colonisation française, on différencie cette dernière des prélèvements sauvages, car elle obéit à des règles institutionnalisées depuis plusieurs décennies. En effet, la rente doit faire face à deux demandes antinomies. D’un côté, les acteurs économiques veulent augmenter leurs prélèvements pour assouvir leurs besoins, mais de l’autre ces derniers ont besoin d’une croissance permanente du système économique pour assouvir leurs besoins.

De nos jours, on constate que l'élite économique libanaise perpétue cette économie de rente en créant du profit à travers de la spéculation financière et immobilière, pillant les fonds de pension et attendant les plans de sauvetage de l'Etat. Ces plans de sauvetage ont tendance à venir vu la corruption inhérente aux institutions qui ont été modelées derrière le favoritisme de la colonisation. Dans le cas de l'élite moderne, l’augmentation de la production a été fortement aidée grâce à l'émigration des classes éduqués qui envoient des devises étrangères à leur famille restés derrière. L'émigration des populations éduquées vers les pays plus développés en quête d’un futur meilleur peut être définie comme une “fuite des cerveaux.” A nouveau, on peut voir le rôle de la France dans cette fuite des cerveaux en encourageant les Libanais à venir en Métropole et en facilitant leur immigration grâce à la proximité de la langue. Par contre, il ne faut pas dénigrer le fait que la plupart de l'émigration libanaise est le résultat de facteurs qui les ont poussés à quitter (guerre civile, pauvreté) plutôt que l’attirance de la France.

La dépendance sur l’exploitation de ressources non transformées a des impacts concrets tels que la malédiction des ressources. La malédiction des ressources est une situation paradoxale ou l’exploitation de ressources naturelles mène à une croissance économique faible, du chômage élevé et une hausse des inégalités. Ceci s’explique, car lorsque un pays développe son économie sur une exploitation de ressources, il ne fait pas les investissements nécessaires dans le capital humain (santé, éducation). De plus, des exports élevés ont tendance à surévaluer la monnaie locale et encouragent la consommation d'impôts qui sont donc relativement moins chers par rapport à la production nationale. Durant le mandat français, on observait une administration française qui encourage l’exportation de ressources primaires (qui n’ont pas encore été transformées) au détriment des investissements dans l’industrialisation du pays. Ceci vient d’une mentalité de supériorité et des intérêts économiques de l'élite coloniale. En effet, le Liban était vu comme un marché ou d'écouler la surproduction industrielle de la métropole. En inondant le marché local avec les biens industriels français, l’industrie libanaise fait face à une concurrence déloyale et ne parvient pas à décoller. Vu qu’il n’y avait pas d'intérêt pour l'élite coloniale de développer une industrie locale, les institutions ne sont pas protectrices envers le développement du secteur privé et n’encouragent pas la diversification de l'économie.

Les institutions coloniales ont perduré et modeler dans les institutions modernes et placer le Liban dans la dépendance au sentier. La dépendance au sentier est le fait que les décisions prises par les anciens dirigeants ont une inertie inhérente aux institutions qui perdura le mode de développement mis en place. Ainsi on peut constater que la crise économique et politique auxquelles fait face le Liban n’est pas conjoncturelle mais a des causes structurelles profondes qui remontent au mandat français. En effet, les mutations de l'économie libanaise dans les années 1970 sous Rafic Hariri perpétuent une dépendance sur les capitaux étrangers (notamment français). Or, le fait que le Liban n’avait pas les institutions établies pour mettre en place une politique de stabilisation monétaire a entraîné une bulle financière. Afin de rassurer les investisseurs étrangers, la banque centrale promet alors de rembourser les obligations d’état en devises étrangères tel que le dollar. Cette décision peut s’apparenter comme économique, mais est purement politique. En faisant ça, l'État libanais encourage et aide les investisseurs étrangers au court-terme au détriment de la bonne santé économique de la population locale. Lorsque la bulle financière éclate, le Liban dû suivre les demandes des investisseurs et organisations financières internationales et implanter des mesures économiques néolibérales. Le néolibéralisme peut être défini comme une théorie économique qui valorise la compétition et le libre marché au-dessus de tout. Les réformes mises en place ont affaibli les institutions libanaises qui ne parviennent déjà pas à s’occuper de la population locale.

Dernièrement, les plans économiques mis en place depuis l'indépendance ont suivi le modèle “Gaulliste” de la France. Entre 1958 et 1970, le Liban connaît de nombreux dirigeants, mais le plan de développement reste essentiellement le même. Ce dernier encourage une intervention de l'État en mettant en avant des grandes lignes directrices qui encouragent des plans de développement économique sur cinq ans. Sous Camille Chamoun, le Liban tente de se moderniser et de reconstruire son été après des décennies de colonisation française. Ce plan est un calque du modèle mis en place en France sous la reconstruction avec une focalisation sur l’infrastructure essentielle (logement, routes) et peu chère. Ensuite, sous la direction de Fouad Chéhab, l'État encourage une restructuration des institutions en suivant le modèle du conseil national de la résistance mis en place par Charles de Gaulle en 1943 afin de remplacer les institutions de Vichy. Le gouvernement libanais sous Charles Hélou encourage alors la modernisation de l'État et met en place un État-providence qui se base sur la sécurité sociale de la France de l'après-guerre. Or, les investissements étant trop élevés et la corruption rampante obligent l'État à emprunter de l’argent sur les marchés internationaux. Afin de pouvoir implanter des réformes néolibérales et de ne pas avoir à se préoccuper des caprices du peuple, Suleiman Frangié se tournera une nouvelle fois vers la France du général de Gaulle pour renforcer le pouvoir exécutif avec des administrations spéciales. Ainsi, on voit à quel point, malgré l'indépendance, la France garde une influence puissante sur le système politique et économique du Liban.

Une élite francophone et francophile

Malgré l’influence de la France au niveau macro à travers les anciennes institutions coloniales et le modèle économique d’exploitation des ressources au détriment d’investissements à long terme, il ne faut pas négliger l’importance des acteurs politiques au niveau personnel et leur rôle dans la construction des institutions libanaises. De plus, ces derniers perpétuent le récit colonial de l'exceptionnalisme français en favorisant certains groupes religieux au détriment d’autres.

On constate ainsi une dérive directe du modèle de mandature. La colonisation française reposait son administration sur une élite locale pour se déchaîner des responsabilités du colonialisme. Le paternalisme ambiant de la colonisation française considère le Liban et sa population arabo-musulmane comme un enfant qui doit être éduqué et remis sur le droit chemin par les chrétiens francophones. La France représente le Liban comme non éduqué et naïf alors que la France est un parent fort, libre, compatissant et remplit de sagesse qui doit savoir être ferme avec ses enfants (colonies). Le récit colonial propagé par l’administration française sert ainsi de justificatif pour les actes inhumains de la coloniale (travail forcé, racisme systémique etc…) De plus, les anti-colonialistes reprendront le régime patriarcal de la puissance coloniale à leur guise. Dans leurs discours, ils stipulent que le Liban a grandi et que c’est dorénavant une mère qui doit s’occuper de ses différents enfants qui découlent chacun des trois grandes sectes religieuses (chiites, maronites, sunnites).

On retrouve des traces de ces idées colonialistes dans l'éducation libanaise. Le système éducatif Libanais a historiquement utilisé le français comme langue d’instruction en plus de l’Arabe. Ce système scolaire a été étayé par l’Alliance Française. L’alliance française est un organisme non-lucratif qui est voué à la propagation de la langue française et aux valeurs démocratiques à l’étranger. Cet organisme est un outil essentiel de la politique culturelle française qui utilise la langue comme véritable levier de son soft power à l’etranger. L’Alliance Française fonctionne essentiellement comme un organisme diplomatique officieux. Au Liban, l'église travaille main dans la main avec cette dernière pour créer les premiers cursus scolaires libanais. Son implantation au Liban a permis une porte d'entrée à l’alliance française afin d’avoir l’oreille des dirigeants du pays et de leur convaincre des bienfaits d’utiliser le français comme langue de l’enseignement. En effet, la fin de la politique scolaire de la France après la colonisation n’est pas la fin de l’influence de l'État français sur le Liban. Ce dernier travaille comme médiateur, à travers l’alliance française entre l'Eglise et l'État pour encourager le déploiement d’hommes religieux comme enseignants. Cette collaboration avec les écoles religieuses pour pallier le manque d’enseignant orchestrée par la France durant le mandat, perpétue une politique de néocolonialisme.

En effet, le système éducatif à deux vitesses au Liban se fait rapidement ressentir. D’un côté, on retrouve les écoles qui enseignent en français (qui ont tendance à être des établissements chrétiens) et de l'autre, les établissements de langue arabe auxquels les musulmans ont recours. Ceci perpétue les inégalités socio-économiques, car, depuis la colonisation, le français sert de passerelle de mobilité sociale pour la population arabe. Le français effectue essentiellement un rôle de statut socio-économique qui est fortement corrélé à la représentation de ces derniers comme “civilisés.” On constate alors que le récit colonial de la France se perpétue de nos jours dans la société libanaise. En effet, le système scolaire Libanais a tendance à glorifier les écoles françaises, notamment les sacro-saints “Lycées Français” financés par l’Alliance Française, donc indirectement l'État français. Ces derniers ne font pas qu’enseigner en français, car ils suivent le programme officiel de l’état français et font passer le baccalauréat à leurs étudiants, encourageant et facilitant l’émigration pour les élèves. Ceci explique en partie pourquoi l'élite politique Libanaise se tourne plus vers l’ancien colonisateur comparé à ses voisins.

On retrouve le récit colonial dans tous les aspects de la société libanaise, mais elle est la plus visible auprès de l'élite francophone et francophile. Cette dernière a tendance à glorifier la France, car elle a passer le baccalauréat et poursuivre ses études dans les universités françaises les plus prestigieuses et onéreuses (SciencesPo, la Sorbonne, Paris-Dauphine) où elle a côtoyée des autres membres de la diaspora libanaise. De plus, cette dernière a tendance à se différencier de la population Arabe en s’identifiant comme “Méditerranéenne” ou “Phocéenne.” Ces deux termes sont les mots exacts des colons français pour décrire la minorité chrétienne comme plus blanche et ayant une certaine valeur supérieure relative à la population arabo-musulmane. On constate ainsi que l'élite Libanaise, en se rapprochant le plus possible de l'idéal colonial s’inscrit dans la lignée du récit français. De par leur éducation francophone et francophile, les élites libanaises ont eu tendance à entretenir une relation spéciale avec la France à travers des forts liens économiques et des accords politiques. Ceci est tout à l'honneur de la France qui a besoin du Liban comme base arrière afin de se projeter comme puissance dans la région.

Conclusion

Ainsi, on constate que le mandat français au Liban a non seulement impacté les institutions mises en place depuis l'indépendance, mais aussi modeler la société libanaise.

D’abord, on observe que la conception de l’Etat libanais en tant que tel, avec une telle hétérogénéité de groupes ethno-religieux, n'est pas un hasard, mais une décision explicite de l’administration coloniale. En effet, le Liban a gardé les mêmes frontières du mandat français depuis son existence. De plus, les institutions politiques reproduisent les mêmes divisions ethno-religieuses que la France a mises en place depuis sa première expédition au Levant. Cet héritage politique a été affirmé lors de l'indépendance avec le pacte national puis après la guerre civile en 1990 avec les accords de Taëf qui ont perpétué les mêmes dynamiques de partage de pouvoir entre les Maronites, Chiites et Sunnites. Cette mentalité de partage de pouvoir autour de ligne sectaire rendra impossible le dépassement des impasses religieuses.

Dans un second temps, on a analysé comment le modèle économique mis en place sous le mandat français perdure de nos jours. Ce dernier repose sur une économie de rente avec des institutions faibles qui n’ont pas la capacité d'établir la loi sur le territoire comme on peut le voir dans la théorie de la dépendance du sentier. De plus, les grandes lignées des plans de développement du Liban s’inspirent de la France de l'après-guerre et du modèle économique Gaulliste. N'étant pas adaptées aux institutions locales, ces dernières échoueront.

Ensuite, on a examiné la responsabilité de l'élite francophone et francophile Libanaise dans l'état actuel des institutions. Cette élite libanaise a tendance à adhérer et à perpétuer le discours colonial. Ce dernier évoque l'idée que les Français ont menée une mission civilisatrice au Liban avec pour but l'éducation de la population arabo-musulmane qui est opposée aux “Phocéens” francophones. Afin de justifier ses actes, l’état français use donc un discours paternaliste dans lequel la population arabe est associé à un enfant turbulent qui doit être remis sur le droit chemin par un parent fort et sage. En outre, on observe que l'élite libanaise a eu l'opportunité de poursuivre ses études non seulement en français mais en France ce qui les rapprocherait le plus possible de l'idéal colonial.

En fin de compte, on constate que la France a modelé les institutions politiques et économiques du Liban ce qui lui a permis d’y exercer une influence politique et stratégique. Ceci est d’autant plus redoutable que le Liban sert de base arrière pour ses missions militaires et diplomatiques à travers tout le proche et moyen-orient. L’influence française sur les institutions libanaises s’est opérée au détriment de la représentation démocratique du peuple libanais et de la croissance économique de la nation.

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Exceeding 75 years of displacement, the Palestinian refugee crisis has tested Arab states' commitment to Palestinian refugees and resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Within this complex history, shifting state policies toward refugees invite critical investigation as to what determines said state responses to displaced Palestinians. This analysis contributes to this body of research through a comparative analysis of Jordan and Lebanon. These cases show that amid ever-shifting political dynamics, Arab state responses to Palestinian refugees vary according to the perceived impacts of marginalization, resettlement, or naturalization on state power. State power is here defined as the capacity to produce desired outcomes, of which we can include the ability to realize a political agenda, maintain a given social order, and enforce compliance upon a given population. This analysis demonstrates that Jordan instrumentalizes Palestinian refugees to enhance state power, while Lebanon marginalizes them to preserve internal stability. From the Nakba to each country’s civil war, conditions of state strength or weakness determined that King Abdullah would naturalize Palestinian refugees, while Lebanon’s executive power would integrate select wealthy Palestinian Muslims and Christians. When challenged by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), both states attacked Palestinian refugees to preserve internal stability and re-establish domestic control. In postwar contexts, Jordan’s political marginalization of Palestinians demonstrates continued attempts to subordinate Palestinian identities, while Lebanon’s continued neglect of Palestinian refugees rejects integration in the name of political stability.

The Impacts of State Formation on State Responses to the Nakba

King Abdullah of Jordan’s naturalization of Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948 reflects the instrumentalization of refugee populations to enhance state power, a decision that was enabled by the strength of the Jordanian state. In 1948, over 700, 000 Palestinians fled their homeland under threat of ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias– an experience of mass dispossession known to Palestinians as the Nakba. A region of newly independent states soon found itself coping with one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. Jordan’s trajectory of state formation ensured that it was a strong state capable of accommodating and integrating Palestinian refugees at independence (Evermon 2021), as the British protectorate of Transjordan had been strengthened by colonial rule that integrated local tribes into its political system. Governance over Transjordan’s nomadic areas, which accounted for 80% of the Emirate’s territory, was only possible through indirect rule that privileged tribal shaykhs. Where tribal life defined social organization, the moral authority that tribesmen conferred on shaykhs saw them become critical interlocutors to a mandatory power that was preoccupied with strengthening central authority and extending its reach beyond settled territories (Alon 2005). The indispensability of tribal shaykhs to mandatory governance determined that British colonial rule in Transjordan was less coercive than elsewhere in the region, enabling tribes to cultivate a central role in domestic politics. The resulting political configuration had elements of both a modern state and a tribal confederacy (Alon 2005; Evermon 2021, 34). Additionally, the Emir of Transjordan, later King Abdullah bin-Hussein, legitimized his rule in the eyes of the population by claiming Hashemite lineage to the Prophet Muhammad. Transjordan’s transition to independence was thus exceptional for its continuity and stability (Evermon 2021). Already domestically legitimate, King Abdullah coveted rule over Palestine and Palestinians, to the end of establishing and ruling Greater Syria (Plascov 1981). Within this context, Palestinian refugees were merely a tool for extending his power across the region (ibid), for legitimizing oneself as representative of displaced Palestinians was a prerequisite to capturing the prized leadership of the elusive pan-Arab bloc. Nasser’s aspiration for a united, Arab state that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf never came to pass, but Arab leaders of this era competed and  hungered for pan-Arab leadership, seeing it as the key to great power status. Power was measured by rule over people, so the decision to grant Palestinians citizenship saw the King’s subjects grow by approximately 75% (Bauer 2022, 2). The naturalization of Palestinian refugees was also seen as necessary to legitimize Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank, which symbolically unified the East and West Banks of the Jordan river in 1950. Jordan never signed onto the 1951 Refugee Convention, but more significantly, it committed itself to the Palestine question in Article 21 of its constitution (Evermon 2021, 45-46). Article 21 constitutionally affirms non-refoulement, the principle of international law that prohibits states from forcibly returning refugees to countries where they are likely to face persecution. Promulgated just three years after the Nakba, Article 21 ensured that the status of rights of Palestinians in Jordan would become a defining feature of Jordanian politics. Abdullah wanted to be seen as the sole representative of Palestinians, so he constructed Jordan as the protector of Palestinian rights and guarantor of their welfare. Under the guise of benevolence, the affirmation of Palestinian rights was purely strategic. As Plascov noted in 1981, Abdullah needed the Palestinians, but he neither liked nor trusted them. Though publicly a defender of Palestinians, he colluded with Israel to prevent the emergence of an independent Palestinian state (Plascov 1981). The extension of Jordanian citizenship to Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 thus demonstrates how King Abdullah’s great power aspirations, strategic interests, and lust for pan-Arab leadership informed his decision to integrate Palestinian refugees into the Jordanian populace.

The struggle to achieve Jordanian supremacy in the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship is the conflict that would come to define Jordan’s responses to Palestinian refugees, notably as Palestinians are a demographic majority in Jordan (Bauer 2022). King Abdullah’s ambitions were heavily criticized by other Arab leaders who saw his strategic agenda for what it was, and his preference for giving Palestinians equal citizenship rights to Jordanians was not always shared by his successors (Evermon 2021). Yet he set in motion historical forces that would make Hashemite monarchs permanently vested in the Palestinian cause and the outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict, if not in the wellbeing of Palestinian refugees themselves. Enshrining the commitment to Palestinian refugees in the Jordanian constitution fused state policy on Palestinians to questions of internal stability, governmentality, and national identity (Evermon 2021,46). Since its promulgation, Jordan’s leadership has struggled to balance the competing commitments it made to refugees, naturalized Palestinians, and Jordanians. The Hashemites have blurred the lines between Palestinian and Jordanian identities when convenient, but underscored their distinctions when it served their agenda, producing discontinuous and contradictory policies that highlight the complexities of being Palestinian in Jordan.

Lebanon’s response to Palestinian refugees in 1948 was informed by the Lebanese state’s reactionary protection of elite power in the context of state weakness. Lebanon achieved independence from the French colonial administration in 1943 and inherited a power-sharing system that divides political power according to Lebanon’s religious demography. Power-sharing in Lebanon dates to 1861, but under the French mandate, it was instrumentalized for European interests (Delatolla 2021; Farsoun and Wingerter 1981). French colonizers privileged Maronite Christians and used their position of power to ensure continued economic and political access to Lebanon. In the process, they degraded Arab, Islamic identities and fomented sectarian divisions (Farsoun and Wingerter 1981). At independence, the power-sharing system underwent little transformation, and the political elite of Christians, Western businessmen, and traditional landholders continued to hold disproportionate power and wealth in Lebanese society (Delatolla 2021; Farsoun and Wingerter 1981). This history of state formation informed the motivations of the Lebanese executive, conventionally made up of a Christian president and a Sunni Muslim prime minister, to integrate or marginalize refugees from 1948. The few refugees who were granted citizenship were wealthy Christians and Muslims (Sayigh 1997, 40), as the executive hoped to tip the balance of power in their favour. By and large, Palestinians were denied the option of naturalization and were forced to remain stateless (Evermon 2021). Integration of Palestinian refugees threatened to destabilize the religious balance of the confessional system, and because most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims, it would have reallocated power away from Lebanese Christians (Farsoun and Wingerter 1981). Lebanon therefore self-labeled as a transit country and neglected its responsibilities to displaced Palestinians. Lebanon did not sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor did they promulgate formal legislation that would address the status of Palestinian refugees. Considered ‘foreigners’ in the eyes of the state, Palestinians were denied the right to work, freedom of movement, or any civil rights (Evermon 2021). State weakness determined that Lebanon had weak absorption capacity for refugees, meaning it lacked the ability to receive, safely house, and facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to over 100, 000 refugees fleeing across their Southern border. More importantly, though, the executive power and the conservative right perceived that Palestinian integration would disrupt the fragile status quo (Farsoun and Wingerter 1981).

Palestinian Militancy, Insecurity and Repression of Refugees

The rise of the PLO challenged state authority in both Jordan and in Lebanon and pushed both countries into civil war. Such an overt threat to state power led the Jordanian regime, and constituent bodies of the Lebanese state, to violently attack refugee camps in their respective contexts. With consent from Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Arab League, the PLO was created in 1964 to centralize Palestinian leadership, but it dually served as an actor which could be manoeuvred to weaken Jordan, who was Nasser’s regional rival for pan-Arab leadership (Evermon 2021, 49). 1967 was a turning point for Palestinian-host state relations everywhere. Arab states’ stunningly poor performance in the Six-Day War betrayed Palestinians, as Arab leaders who each had strategic interests in securing Palestine and pan-Arab leadership failed to mount a united front and establish an independent Palestinian state (Farsoun and Wingerter 1981). Each was jockeying for position within the pan-Arab bloc, resulting in the losses of Gaza and the West Bank, in addition to immense casualties. The defeat made clear that only Palestinians themselves would be able to restore Palestinian statehood, causing the Palestinian Revolutionary Movement (PRM) and the power of the PLO to grow in exile (Shiblak 1997). In Jordan, refugee camps became the training and recruitment grounds for Palestinian fedayeen militants. Emboldened by Egyptian support, which went so far as to assert that the PLO should militarize along Jordan’s shared border with Israel, the PLO began to take radical actions which endangered Jordan’s national security (Evermon 2021, 49). Most boldly, in September 1970 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four planes to demand the release of Palestinian prisoners in Europe and in Israel. Their actions humiliated the Jordanian regime and showed an abuse of Jordanian territory, which by 1970, was hosting a state within a state (Barari 2008). Palestinian guerillas captured the Jordanian city of Irbid on September 15th, provoking military action from King Hussein and the Jordanian Army (Evermon 2021, 57). In what came to be known as Black September, the Jordanian regime attacked Amman-based refugee camps to eliminate the fedayeen who were stationed there (Evermon 2021). Thus, when Jordan’s internal stability and national security was threatened by the Palestinian government in exile, refugees were punished for the actions of their leaders. They were pawns in a greater landscape of civil war, not humanitarian subjects in need of protection. The regime triumphed in this conflict, and the PLO was expelled from Jordan, after which it crossed through Syria to establish bases in Lebanon.

Jordan triumphed militarily, but it lost the political fight to be seen as representing Palestinians, ultimately provoking King Hussein to disengage from the West Bank in 1988. The Rabat resolution of 1974 was the first major challenge to Jordan’s stance, as Arab states recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people (Barari 2008). Seemingly sidelined from peace negotiations, King Hussein waited for an opportunity to re-enter diplomatic talks as a legitimate player. Israeli invasion in the Lebanese Civil War provided this opportunity, as the weakened PLO made amends with Jordan in pursuit of a political solution (Susser 1990). Jordan was again rebuked in their claims to govern Palestinians, however, by the First Intifada in 1987. Such an overt and sustained display of Palestinian nationalism undermined King Abdullah’s attempts to make Palestinians into subjects of the Hashemite Kingdom. It was a totalizing rejection of occupation and cooptation of the Palestinian issue by Arab leaders for personal gain (ibid). In a political manoeuvre against the PLO, King Hussein renounced all claims to the West Bank and rescinded the citizenship of West Bank residents, rendering them stateless. King Hussein did not warn the PLO of his decision to disengage from the West Bank. As such, disengagement can be seen as Jordan challenging the PLO to live up to their mandate as the sole government of Palestinians (ibid). The rights of refugees became the central issue of disengagement. Residents of the West Bank had their Jordanian citizenship revoked and were given temporary travel documents in their place, marginalizing them to the same degree as Palestinians from Gaza and Palestinians who were displaced after the 6-day war. In an assertion of state power in the East Bank, Jordan pursued a strategy of Jordanization which removed Palestinians from government offices and scapegoated them for declining economic conditions (ibid). Shifting regional politics forced Jordan to recalculate its policy towards Palestinian refugees, but its motivations show continuity. At all stages, the Hashemite Kingdom was intent on asserting Jordanian supremacy within the Jordan-Palestine relationship, which King Abdullah had made a central facet of Jordan’s domestic politics.

The PLO in Lebanon similarly created domestic political unrest that would result in a civil war, wherein Palestinian refugees suffered violent retribution for the behaviour of their leadership. Because Palestinians in Lebanon were so marginalized, the PLO arrived to a readymade base of popular support. The PRM “created a sense of identity, national pride and confidence among Palestinians in Lebanon of all social levels” (Shiblak 1997, 264) and provided refugees with the protection and empowerment that the Lebanese state failed to provide. Ultimately, it was the Lebanese state’s failure to improve social and economic conditions for Palestinians that allowed the PLO to become as powerful as it did. Empowered by this reception and the Cairo agreement of 1969, which gave the PLO the authority to administer refugee camps, the PLO began to operate as a state within a state, as it had done in Jordan (Shiblak 1997). Their autonomy from Lebanon was so clear that the area of West Beirut where most Palestinian offices were located became known as the ‘Fakhani Republic’ (Shiblak 1997, 268). For the first time since the Nakba, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were dignified through the provision of social services and advocacy from a government that recognized their humanity. Palestinian armed presence exposed the weakness of the Lebanese state and exacerbated sectarian divisions in Lebanese society by presenting a governing alternative for Lebanese Muslims, who were also economically marginalized under the power-sharing system. The PRM was used by Lebanese progressive parties to challenge the conservative elite, and as such, it destabilized the confessional system and contributed to the emergence of civil war in 1975 (Shiblak 1997). The PLO’s presence provided for Palestinian refugees in the short term, but it harmed them in the long term. Its role in the civil war caused Lebanese public opinion to turn against Palestinians and provoked various actors to attack refugee camps. Brynen argues that Israeli retaliation to the PLO’s guerilla warfare in Southern Lebanon, compounded by the PLO’s misbehaviour and the structural threat they posed to Lebanon, caused Lebanese sympathies for Palestinians to decline (1989). Their actions triggered invasion by Israel, while arrogant fedayeen made a mockery of Lebanese law and unmasked the fragility of the Lebanese state. The threat posed by the PLO gave rise to an unusual alliance between Syria, Israel, and the Maronite Phalanges, who terrorized and massacred Palestinian refugees on numerous occasions (Shiblak 1997, 266). Syrian intervention to root out the radical PLO further weakened Lebanon and justified a siege on West Beirut camps (Shiblak 1997). Thus, the challenge that the PLO presented to the Lebanese state saw multiple actors, some of which were Arab regimes or its constituent parts, justify the violent attacks on Palestinian refugees in the context of civil war. In this context of insecurity, the legal regression on refugee protection culminated with the abrogation of the Cairo agreement, which revoked Palestinians’ right to work, reside, and move within Lebanon (Shiblak 1997, 269). As in Jordan, the PLO’s challenge to state power provoked violent responses against Palestinian refugee populations.

Post-war Stances with Continuous Motives

The rights of Palestinian refugees in Jordan vary according to when they arrived in Jordan and from where, but across all policies, the most influential factor in Jordan’s response to Palestinian refugees is its preoccupation with asserting state power. This manifests today as a pursuit of supremacy within the Jordan-Palestine relationship (Susser 1990). In present-day Jordan, refugees from 1948 and their descendants have the same rights as Jordanian citizens, a status that was conferred on them by King Abdullah. Palestinians from Gaza after 1967 and the West Bank after 1988 are stateless, holding only temporary travel documents that do not give them a right to work, own property, or be educated by the Jordanian state (Evermon 2021). Palestinians in the East Bank are politically marginalized, and the regime continues to view them as a suspect group that is capable of destabilizing Jordan’s domestic politics (Reiter 2004). Contemporary marginalization of Palestinians is an assertion of Hashemite power, as the monarchy is bent on keeping Palestinians as second-class citizens. Though state policies have metamorphosed, and Jordan may appear to have distanced itself from the Palestine question, Jordan’s stake in the final solution is as important to the regime as ever. The Hashemites will never recover their position as representatives of the Palestinian people, but Jordan has successfully carved out a role for itself as mediator between Israel and Palestine to ensure that its interests will be considered in peace negotiations. This interest holds deep implications for governmentality over Jordan’s populations and for its internal stability.

State neglect of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon’s post-war context reflects the deeply entrenched perception that Palestinian integration would destabilize Lebanon. A chronically weak state that has historically seen Palestinians as politically threatening and economically burdensome, Lebanon today believes that Palestinian resettlement will only further weaken the country. Capitalizing on the change in public opinion since the civil war, refugee camps continue to be depicted as a security threat to the state, justifying increased surveillance and securitization from Lebanese authorities (Sayigh 1995). Lebanese politicians across the political spectrum continue to view Palestinian refugees as a threat to the confessional system, and they resent Palestinians for the PLO’s involvement in the civil war (Haddad 2000). Post-war reconstruction excluded Palestinians, and politicians have even encouraged them to leave the country (Sayigh 1995). There is no plan for resettlement, integration, or accommodation, while UNRWA funding declines as part of a broader international campaign to pressure all parties for a peace settlement. In what Carpi argues is an exercise of state agency (2019), Lebanon’s conscious neglect of Palestinian refugees and explicit destruction of refugee camps communicates two messages. To Palestinians, it communicates that Lebanon is not their home and that resettlement is not an option. To the international community, it signals that their patience awaiting a final solution has dried up. Refugee camps are evermore spaces of liminality –— in between spaces where refugees can live but not thrive, indefinitely awaiting a political arrangement that will dignify them (Carpi 2019). Lebanon’s hostility to Palestinian refugees has persisted through the decades because it has not been able to overcome its condition of state weakness. From independence, through civil war and Syrian occupation until present day, Lebanon has struggled to assert state power domestically and maintain social order. As it struggles to fulfill its obligations to Lebanese citizens, politicians still believe that Palestinian integration will undermine state power, resulting in unanimous hostility from the political establishment.

Conclusion

The cases of Jordan and Lebanon demonstrate that Arab state responses to Palestinian refugees vary according to whether states perceive resettlement or naturalization to enhance or undermine state power. King Abdullah’s naturalization of Palestinians from 1948 was instrumental. He saw Palestinian refugees as prospective subjects of the Hashemite Kingdom and calculated that naturalizing them would lend greater legitimacy to his annexation of the West Bank. His actions set in motion historical forces that explain Jordan’s continued investment in Palestine and the marginalization of Palestinians in Jordan today. All can be seen as attempts to subjugate Palestinian identities to Hashemite rule in an assertion of state power. Applied to Lebanon’s context of state weakness, resettlement or naturalization of Palestinian refugees has only ever been perceived as a threat to the Lebanese confessional system. The initial hostility of the Lebanese state towards Palestinian refugees was a reactionary response driven proximately by the Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim state executive, but in post-war Lebanon, opposition to Palestinian resettlement is shared across the political spectrum. Owing to the PLO’s involvement in the civil war, politicians from all religious identities perceive integration as a security and political threat that would undermine state power.

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With the end of the Second World War came the beginning of the era of development. “What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing,” declared President Truman in a speech to Congress (Esteva 2009, 1). The Marshall Plan could arguably be considered the first official development package to exist, but it would most certainly not be the last. New subfields of social sciences would concentrate on studying and analyzing development as a historic and present solution to fight poverty.

Economics and anthropology have had their fair share of scientists from their respective fields study development but through very different lenses. In fact, although both economists and anthropologists study development, often together, they have different methods of analyzing and understanding it as an academic subfield. These distinctions will be presented by reviewing academic literature from both fields of study. Corruption, that is “the sale by government officials of government property for personal gain,” will be used as a sort of case study to understand how Anthropology and Economics are distinct in their approach to development studies (Shleifer & Visknhy 1993, 599).

Corruption and Development: Anthropology

In his article “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” Akhil Gupta creates “an ethnography of the state” to analyze corruption in India (Gupta 1995, 375). He bases his work on fieldwork he conducts in a small north Indian village he calls Alipur. Gupta begins by analyzing the encounter of the citizen with the state at the local level: “For the majority of Indian citizens, the most intermediate context for encountering the state is provided by their relationships with government bureaucracies at the local level” (Gupta 1995, 378). Interaction would be done either using the physical space of government to discuss with fellow citizens or to use the services provided in that space.

Either way, corruption was a component. On the one hand, citizens use the space as a place where “corruption was discussed and debated” while on the other hand, corruption is a complete component to local state mechanisms (Gupta 1995, 378). Gupta turns his attention to Sharmaji who is a patwari: “an official who keeps the land records of approximately fix to six villages” (Gupta 1995, 379). The author explains that transactions between villagers are done in a transparent fashion in front of the patwari though it is evident to all citizens that “these things “cost money,” [and] in most cases the “rates” were well-known and fixed” (Gupta 1995, 379). Usually the amount given, Gupta explains, is relatively small at such a local level, so the bureaucrats make their money off volume unlike public servants in higher levels of government.

The author then turns his attention to the discourse of corruption in public culture. Gupta argues that “the analysis of reports in local and national newspapers tells us a great deal about the manner in which “the state” comes to be imagined” including perceptions on corruption (Gupta 1995, 385). He goes on to explain how corruption played a huge role in national politics in the 1980s and how Rajiv Gandhi’s election in 1984 “was fought largely on the slogans of the eradication of corruption” (Gupta 1995, 386).

He continues by analyzing local and national newspapers to better understand the collective societal perception of corruption in India. Gupta finally turns to what he calls the imagined state: “The government […] is being constructed […] in the imagination and everyday practices of ordinary people” (Gupta 1995, 390). To analyze the imagined state, he interviews Ram Singh and his sons who are prosperous yet part of a lower cast from Alipur. Essentially, Akhil Gupta analyzes corruption through an often-used manner by anthropologists of case studies in the hope to find generalizations which can then serve further research in the field.

Unlike Gupta, Ravi Sundaram approaches the anthropological study of corruption in a more holistic way. He discusses how India’s urban reality is shaped by its postcolonial identity and how its urban modernity “has pushed urban discourse in new directions” (Sundaram 2021, 1). The author focuses on “the materialization of new technologies in Indian cities” and how they will affect not only governance and state, but also culture and lifestyle (Sundaram 2021, 3). There is a discussion on what the author calls ‘pirate modernity’ which depends on informal arrangements. It is a modernity that can be viewed as recycled while simultaneously commoditized.

Although the article deals mainly with how India’s colonial past affects how modern urban governance functions, there is a part allocated to transparency. Sundaram  explains how the postcolonial city after information “brings both urban space as well as documented populations in the domain of the visible” (Sundaram 2021, 6).  “Transparency has become one of the main slogans of urban and national politics for the Indian middle class, culminating in the anti-corruption campaigns in 2011-12” but that does not mean that corruption is not a component to Indian bureaucracy (Sundaram 2021, 5).

Nonetheless, improvements have been made, notably with the creation of the landmark Right to Information Law which allowed citizens to have access to documents within 30 days before civil servants would face a pay cut. As Sundaram puts it “While not all RTI requests were about corruption, they helped place transparency at the heart of public discourse, helping a liberal agenda around information culture and the modernization of urban governance” (Sundaram 2021, 6). It led to secrecy being associated to corruption and, in the desire for less secrecy, a decrease in corrupt behaviour by the State occurred. The Income Tax department also began using permanent account numbers for all taxpayers in the hope of reducing tax evasion. Essentially, what Sundaram displays in the article is how technology allows for a change in postcolonial institutions prone to corrupt behaviour.

Corruption and Development: Economics

Olken & Pande “review the evidence on corruption in developing countries […] focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level corruption?” in their article “Corruption in Developing Countries” (Olken & Pande 2012, 479). The article firstly analyzes the magnitudes and efficiency costs of corruption. Olken & Pande point out that “there are remarkably few reliable estimates of the actual magnitude of corruption, and those that exist reveal a high level of heterogeneity” (Olken & Pande 2012, 481). Corruption can either be studied through perception, surveys, estimates from direct observation, graft estimation by subtraction, and estimations from market inferences to name a few.

Another approach is by using equilibrium conditions in the labor market (Olken & Pande 2012, 486). The article then turns to the question of if corruption matters. Olken & Pande argue that “corruption could either have efficiency costs or lead to efficiency gains” (Olken & Pande 2012, 491). Continuing, the article explores what determines corruption and what would incentivize bureaucrats to take bribes. The authors present a mathematical formula to explain the situation where the bureaucrat is better off by taking the bribe (Olken & Pande 2012, 496). Transparency and punishment are viewed as ways to combat corruption. In the end, the article attempts to objectively present the economic theories which can explain issues of efficiency, regulation, and corruption.

Similar to Olken & Pande, Paolo Mauro analyzes corruption through a macroeconomic lens while focusing on data-oriented conclusions. In “Corruption and Growth,” Mauro analyzes “a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries” (Mauro 1995, 681). In the introduction, the author explains how most economists agree that corruption causes economic inefficiency but that “some authors have suggested that corruption might raise economic growth” (Mauro 1995, 681).

Mauro’s work finds “that corruption lowers private investment, thereby reducing economic growth” (Mauro 1995, 683). The rest of the article describes the data from developing countries he uses to come to that conclusion including indices such as the Business International Indices of Corruption and Institutional Efficiency, the Bureaucratic Efficiency Index, and the Index of Ethnolinguistic Factionalization. In the end, Mauro finds a negative relation between all three mentioned indices above and the rate of investment, justifying that corruption is negatively correlated to economic growth (Mauro 1995, 695).  However, the author mentions that “there is only weak support for the hypothesis that corruption reduces growth by leading to inefficient investment choices” thus hinting at a relationship perhaps stronger than a simple negative correlation between corruption and investment. In all, Mauro uses empirical data and macroeconomics to argue that corruption has a negative effect on economic growth.

Conclusion

Both anthropology and economics study development though through completely different lenses. What the literature shows is contrasting ways in approaching development studies by the two social sciences. Anthropology is case study oriented, often focusing on the individual rather than the whole of society. As was displayed in Gupta’s reading, personal interviews and individual encounters make up the content used to then further research and eventually generalize patterns in the developing world. Nonetheless, this does not mean that a global view cannot be researched through Anthropology. In fact, Sundaram’s study on India allows for generalizations and a better understanding of Indian society and its view on bureaucracy and corruption. Through analysis of past and current events, anthropologists study development with a greatly humanistic approach which must be valued. On the other hand, Anthropology lacks more of the concrete data needed to end up with scientific generalizations.

Where Anthropology lacks is where economics thrives when discussing development studies. Economic development studies are heavily concentrated on quantifiable data and macroeconomic models which can then be used to come to a scientific conclusion. In Olken & Pande’s work, attempts to quantify perception are key to understand how corruption functions in the developing world. They depend on mathematics to rationalize the observations made and to come to a conclusion which can then be generalized. In fact, Paolo Mauro simply presents his hypothesis – that corruption negatively affects economic growth – and proves it correct by running regressions and seeing if there indeed is a negative significant correlation between a certain corruption index and investment. Very little of all this is human or personal and this is probably the biggest difference between the anthropological and economic study of development.

Corruption is an issue in developing countries as it obliges people who may not have much to pay for services the State should be able to provide with tax revenue. Many social scientists – both anthropologists and economists – agree that corruption allows for an unfair and inefficient economic context in frequently already dire situations in the developing world. Though the two sciences differ much in their approach to studying development, as is shown when using corruption as an template, they simultaneously bring forth a unique perspective which allows for a more complete and just research analysis. To sum up, anthropologists can learn to be more objective and quantitative in their study while economists can adjust to add more humane and qualitative components to their subfield of economic development. Both sciences have much to share with one another, especially when both scientists and subjects of the research done in the developing worlds are to surely benefit form such cooperation.

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Sundaram, Ravi. 2021. “The Postcolonial City in India. From Planning to Information?”. InTechniques & Culture no 67, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. pp. 1-15.