By Gemma Hauser

Edited by Sofia Gobin and Zoe Laxton, Peer Reviewed by Alex Bagdade

1. Summary of argument

This paper argues that widespread civilian participation in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide was not solely the product of top-down elite control, external pressures, or psychosocial conformity, but was significantly enabled through weak social ties that diffused genocidal violence across communities. Drawing from Granovetter’s theory of weak ties, which conceptualizes these ties as low-frequency, low-intensity social relationships that serve as bridges between otherwise disconnected groups, I reframe genocide as a decentralized, networked event rather than a strictly hierarchical one.

While strong ties may have catalyzed initial mobilization through elite rhetoric and militia organization, it was weak ties—connections between loosely affiliated individuals—that

facilitated the rapid diffusion of violence between social clusters. The paper specifically

theorizes that community meetings, such as Umuganda, and intermediary figures, such as local

political actors and militia recruiters, operated as brokers. These actors were structurally

positioned to channel genocidal messaging from central authorities into local settings, enabling

ordinary civilians to coordinate and participate in acts of violence.

This theory is empirically tested through a network analysis of actors and violent events

using the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP-GED). The analysis focuses on

identifying whether actors with high betweenness centrality but low degree centrality—the

operational definition of weak tie brokers—are disproportionately associated with regions where

One-sided violence against civilians was more intense and widespread. This has implications for understanding how violence proliferates not simply through elite coercion, but via decentralized relational mechanisms.

1. Research design

The central causal claim is that weak ties–measured by high betweenness and low degree centrality–enabled the horizontal diffusion of violence by linking otherwise unconnected social groups. Most conventional analysis, such as Hintjens (1999), argue that “the nature of the Rwandan state must be seen as absolutely central” (Hintjens 241), with genocide taking place under the aegis of the state, where “the main organizers were a northern elite, united by senior positions in the army and the top civil service” (Hintjens 249). These accounts emphasize external influences and domestic pressures, inadvertently overlooking how to explain the scale to which participation diffused across communities. This research addresses that gap by showing how weak tie brokers facilitated the horizontal spread of violence between otherwise unconnected social groups. conventional narratives of the genocide

1. Causal Framework

Granovetter’s weak tie hypothesis posits that individuals connected by low-frequency,

low-intimacy relationships can serve as bridges across social clusters, allowing for the spread of

ideas and behaviours beyond the reach of tightly knit groups. In Rwanda, these brokers were not

national leaders, but local actors such as Interahamwe recruiters, political party organizers, or

heads of community meetings, who could influence civilians otherwise disconnected from

formal institutions. This diagram illustrates the mechanism through which weak tie brokers

facilitated the horizontal diffusion of genocidal violence, with light blue representing main flow

causal variables and light grey representing moderating factors.

1. Dependent variable

The dependent variable, civilian participation in violence, is operationalized as the

density and frequency of one-sided violent events (violence against civilians) across regions.

This measure captures both the intensity and spatial distribution of violence.

1. Independent variable

The independent variable is the presence of weak ties, operationalized as actors with high

betweenness centrality and relatively low degree centrality. They are expected to serve as

brokers, having fewer direct connections (degrees) but serving as key bridges in the network

(betweenness).

1. Control variables

• Geographic region (to account for geographic variation)
• Population density
• Proximity to elite actors (e.g., national political leaders, major military groups)
• Number of Umuganda (community meetings)

These controls help isolate the effect of weak ties from structural and demographic

factors that may also influence violence levels.

1. Justification for Network Approach

The causal question is relational: how did violence diffuse between groups? Network

analysis allows for the identification of intermediary actors who occupy structurally important

positions as brokers. My essay focuses on betweenness centrality (how often a node connects

others) and uses degree centrality descriptively to distinguish elites from weak ties.

The initial phases of my theory confused the use of centrality measures. This version

clarifies that betweenness is the theoretical centrepiece, while degree is used to refine actor classification and rule out elite dominance. A network approach is essential for revealing how

otherwise disconnected actors were bridged by community figures.

1. Proposed inferential framework

Although formal statistical inference is not conducted, this paper uses an inferential logic

based on spatial comparison. If the theory holds:

• Regions with a higher density of weak tie brokers (high betweenness/low degree) will show higher civilian violence
• Elite-dominated regions will show a weaker association with civilian participation

1. Description and visualization of the network

The empirical analysis focuses on the independent variable: the presence and structure of

weak tie brokers in the actor-event network. Using UCDP-GED data, a network was constructed

with nodes representing actors and edges representing co-involvement in recruitment,

coordination, or attacks. The dataset consists of georeferenced conflict events occurring within Rwanda between April and July 1994, corresponding to the approximately 100-day period. The graph includes actors such as the Government of Rwanda, Interahamwe, various militias, and civilian groups. Descriptive network statistics were used to calculate degree centrality (number of direct ties) and betweenness centrality (how often a node lies on the shortest path between others). Actors with high betweenness and low degree were flagged as weak tie brokers. These actors are interpreted as community-level intermediaries who played a key role in connecting otherwise disconnected actors.

Figure A1 illustrates the overall structure of actor interactions during the 1994 Rwandan

Genocide. While elite actors like the Government of Rwanda and Interahamwe occupy central

positions with multiple connections, the presence of smaller, directionally linked nodes

highlights a more distributed flow of coordination. Actors identified as weak tie brokers (i.e.,high betweenness and low degree) are labelled red, while all other nodes appear in blue. The

figure’s visual pattern aligns with my theory: violence diffused horizontally through

intermediaries embedded in community-level networks rather than exclusively directed from

Kigali’s political core.

Tutsi

It is also beneficial to compare degree and betweenness scores for each actor, illustrating

that brokers tend to fall in the low-degree, high-betweenness quadrant, consistent with

Granovetter’s theory. These actors include provincial militia organizers and local civilian

figures. Figure A2 is a scatterplot where red-labelled actors appear in the low-degree but high-

betweenness zone, confirming their structural role as intermediaries linking otherwise unconnected actors. This supports and further illustrates the horizontal diffusion of violence as

enabled by weak ties.

More specifically, actors such as Tutsi, FDLR-RUD, and M23 are located on the

periphery of the network in terms of direct connections, yet occupy crucial bridge positions

between major factions like the Interahamwe, FDLR-FOCA, and Civilians. Their location is

representative of Granovetter’s argument that weak ties serve as conduits through which

information and behaviour traverse social clusters, enabling broad behavioural diffusion without

centralized control. At the same time, the Tutsi, Hutu, and other identity-based categories fall

along the zero mark in both degree and betweenness centrality, suggesting that they were not

central in organizing violence. This spatial absence from network brokerage roles shows how intermediaries, rather than identities alone, functioned as a channel through which genocidal

participation spread.

1. Conclusion

The findings of this analysis suggest that the diffusion of genocidal violence during the

1994 Rwandan Genocide cannot be fully explained by elite command structures alone. Instead,

weak tie brokers–identified as actors with high betweenness and low degree centrality – played

a critical role in horizontally disseminating violence across communities. The network structure

revealed that decentralized relationship pathways, rather than strictly vertical hierarchies, were

essential in enabling mass civilian participation. These results reinforce the argument that weak

social ties, amplified through intermediary actors embedded in local settings, were a key

mechanism driving the widespread and decentralized nature of the genocide.

Works Cited

Bonnier, Eric, et al. “The dynamics of violence: Evidence from the Rwandan genocide.” Journal

of Development Economics, vol. 147, 2020, 102559.

Granovetter, Mark S. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, no.

6, 1973, pp. 1360–1380. Stanford University, snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-

readings/granovetter73weakties.pdf.

Hintjens, Helen M. “Explaining the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.” The Journal of Modern African

Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 1999, pp.241-286. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161847.

Lemarchand, René. “Managing Transition Anarchies: Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa in

Comparative Perspective.” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 32, no. 4, 1994,

pp. 581-604.

Moore, Barrington, Jr. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. Basic Books, 1978.

Nyseth Nzitatira, Hollie, Et al. “Analyzing Participation in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.”

Journal of Peace Research, vol. 60, no. 2, 2023, pp. 291-306. SAGE Publications,

https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221075211.

O’Loughlin, John, Micheal D. Ward, Corey L. Lofdahl, Jordin S. Cohen, David S. Brown, Kristian S. Gleditsch, and Micheal Shin. “The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994.”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 88, no. 4, 1998, pp. 545-574.

Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder,

ibs.colorado.edu/johno/pub/old_pubs/O%27Loughlin%20et%20%%20al%201998%20A

Nnals.pdf.

Palmer, Alan. “Colonial and Modern Genocide: Explanations and Categories.” Ethnic and Racial

Studies, vo. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 89-115.

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Rwanda: UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia. Uppsala

University, https://ucdp.uu.se/country/517. Accessed February 2025.

Appendix: R Script

# Load necessary libraries

library(igraph)

library(tidyverse)

library(ggrepel)

library(readr)

# Load the UCDP-GED data

data <- read_csv("~/Desktop/gedevents-2025-01-31.csv")

# Build edge list from actor columns

edges <- data %>%

select(source_actor = side_a, target_actor = side_b) %>%

filter(!is.na(source_actor), !is.na(target_actor)) %>%

distinct()

# Create a directed graph

g <- graph_from_data_frame(d = edges, directed = TRUE)

# Simplify graph (remove loops and multiple edges)

g <- igraph::simplify(g, remove.multiple = TRUE, remove.loops = TRUE)

# Calculate centrality measures

V(g)$degree <- degree(g, mode = "all")

V(g)$betweenness <- betweenness(g, directed = TRUE, normalized = TRUE)

# Identify weak tie brokers (high betweenness, low degree)

threshold_betweenness <- quantile(V(g)$betweenness, 0.75)

threshold_degree <- quantile(V(g)$degree, 0.25)

V(g)$weak_tie_broker <- ifelse(

V(g)$betweenness >= threshold_betweenness & V(g)$degree <= threshold_degree,

TRUE, FALSE

)

# Layout for network graph

layout1 <- layout_with_fr(g)

# Create data frame for centralities

centrality_df <- data.frame(

actor = V(g)$name,

degree = V(g)$degree,

betweenness = V(g)$betweenness,

weak_tie_broker = V(g)$weak_tie_broker

)

# Subgraph of weak tie brokers and their immediate neighbors

weak_nodes <- V(g)[V(g)$weak_tie_broker]

subg_nodes <- unique(c(weak_nodes, neighbors(g, weak_nodes, mode = "all")))

g_sub <- induced_subgraph(g, subg_nodes)

layout_sub <- layout_with_fr(g_sub)

Causal logic flowchart

> library(DiagrammeR)

>

> # Create causal flowchart using Times New Roman

> grViz("

+ digraph causal_flow {

+

+ graph [layout = dot, rankdir = TB]

+

+ node [shape = box, style = filled, fillcolor = lightblue, fontname = 'Times New Roman']

++ A [label = 'Weak Tie Brokers\n(Local Political Actors, Recruiters)']

+ B [label = 'Facilitation of Genocidal Messaging']

+ C1 [label = 'Exposure to Propaganda\n(Radio, Meetings)']

+ C2 [label = 'Social Peer Pressure\n(Community Norms)']

+ D [label = 'Coordination Across Isolated Groups']

+ E [label = 'Increased Civilian Participation\nin Violence']

+

+ # Moderator factors

+ M1 [label = 'Geographic Region\n(Moderator)', fillcolor = lightgrey]

+ M2 [label = 'Population Density\n(Moderator)', fillcolor = lightgrey]

+ M3 [label = 'Proximity to Elite Actors\n(Moderator)', fillcolor = lightgrey]

+

+ # Connect nodes

+ A -> B

+ B -> C1

+ B -> C2

+ C1 -> D

+ C2 -> D

+ D -> E

+

+ # Connect moderators

+ M1 -> B

+ M2 -> D

+ M3 -> B

+ }

+ ")

Figure A1: Directed Network of Actors in the Rwandan Genocide

# Plot full network

plot(

g,

layout = layout1,

vertex.label = V(g)$name,

vertex.label.cex = 0.8,

vertex.label.color = "black",

vertex.size = scale(V(g)$betweenness, center = FALSE, scale = TRUE) * 15,

vertex.color = ifelse(V(g)$weak_tie_broker, "tomato", "skyblue"),

edge.arrow.size = 0.4,

edge.color = "grey50",

main = "Figure A1: Directed Network of Actors in the Rwandan Genocide"

)

Figure A2: Scatterplot of Degree vs Betweenness Centrality

# Scatterplot with repelling labels

ggplot(centrality_df, aes(x = degree, y = betweenness)) +

geom_jitter(aes(color = weak_tie_broker), width = 0.2, height = 0.01, size = 3) +

geom_point(data = subset(centrality_df, weak_tie_broker == TRUE), shape = 21, fill = "tomato", size = 4, stroke = 1) +

geom_text_repel(

data = subset(centrality_df, weak_tie_broker == TRUE),

aes(label = actor),

size = 3.2,

point.padding = 0.25,

box.padding = 0.4,

max.overlaps = Inf,

segment.color = "grey60",

segment.size = 0.4,

min.segment.length = 0

) +

scale_color_manual(values = c("FALSE" = "skyblue", "TRUE" = "tomato")) +

labs(

title = "Figure A2: Centrality Comparison of Network Actors",

subtitle = "Weak tie brokers are highlighted in red",

x = "Degree Centrality (Connections)",y = "Betweenness Centrality (Broker Role)",

color = "Weak Tie Broker"

) +

theme_minimal(base_size = 12) +

theme(legend.position = "bottom")

By Leila Isa

Edited by Max Kabjian and Leïla Van Glabeke, Peer Reviewed by Sophie Bright and Alex Bagdade

Introduction

In 1999, a young Uyghur man called Abdullah argued with his local Imam after proclaiming “Amin” aloud at the end of the prayer, a minor offense for which he was arrested. Abdullah blamed his ordeal on this “government Imam” whom he accused of working for the “infidel Chinese” (in Smith-Finley, 2013: 252). By the nature of his position, this Imam was subject to oversight of the state-led Islamic Association of China and required to preach “patriotic and politically sound” sermons (Irwin, 2021), a tense flashpoint in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (“Uyghur region”) of the 1990s, [1] also known as East Turkistan, during which several “government Imams” were murdered by Uyghur militants for “disloyalty” (Thum, 2014: 334). This violence is contextualised by a wider struggle between the Uyghurs and the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) amid an ongoing project to securitise and selectively eradicate Uyghur religious identity (Finley, 2013; Harris, 2020; Byler, 2022). Whilst this argument between the Imam and Abdullah was underwritten by the latter’s self-determination politics, this was also a theological dispute; the Imam likely opposed Abdullah’s “Amin” because it is a prayer rite from the Hanbali school of Islam, indicating a Salafi orientation and deviating from the customary Hanafi school of the Uyghurs (Waite, 2007: 170). This dispute illustrates how, by the late twentieth century, Uyghur Islam had become the site of two interrelated struggles: an externally oriented campaign against the Chinese state and an internally oriented religious dispute over orthodoxy.

Within this paper, I evaluate the foregrounding of the overtly political over the religious and the tendency in scholarship to portray Uyghur Islam as constitutive of resistance to Chinese colonial dominion in the region (Fuller and Lipman, 2004; Rudelson and Jankowiak, 2004; Smith-Finley, 2013). I then assess whether these arguments complement or contradict how many Uyghur Muslims understand and express their religiosity. To investigate the above, this paper asks: to what extent can the emergence and internal dynamics of Uyghur Islamic movements, and their engagement with modernity, be understood in relation to the Chinese state?

I first present and evaluate what I term a functionalist framing, where Uyghur Islam is analysed in relation to political structures. Many argue that Uyghur Islam is best conceptualised as an instrument of mobilisation and an expression of “symbolic resistance” to Chinese dominion (Smith-Finley, 2013: 258). Within East Turkistan, the northwesternmost region of contemporary China, it is thought that most of the at least 12 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities ( Byler, 2022: x) see Chinese rule as illegitimate (Bellér-Hann et al, 2009: 1). The Chinese state has been intermittently present in the region since the mid-eighteenth century (Gladney, 1990; Millward, 2021), traceable despite the transitions from the Qing Empire to the Republic of China to the PRC. Since the late twentieth century, the PRC has implemented a project of mass securitisation and assimilation against the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities (Greitens, Lee, and Yazici, 2020: 24), which, since 2017, has manifested in mass detention and forced labour programmes (Tobin, 2021: 94). Partially, Uyghur Islamic movements can be understood through these extractive socioeconomic and political conditions.

However, this state-centric analysis lends to portrayals of Uyghur Islam as entirely reactive. A substantive framing, where attention is reorientated to historical scholarship and ethnographic accounts, seeks to foreground “human agency within structures of subordination” (Mahmood, 2001: 205) and emic dynamics within Uyghur Islamic movements. Applying this perspective, I argue that the two waves of Uyghur Islamic modernist movements have not been directed against this colonial structure but rather entail internal contestation over the appropriation of modernity in an Islamic context. “Modernity” is an epistemological structure carried by and constitutive of the empire (Quijano, 2007). Modernity is also not a stable category; Uyghur Muslims have been subject to late Qing civilisational paradigms, which, in the late twentieth century, transformed under an assimilative, atheistic nation-state into a standard of modernity measured by Sino-centric metrics. There have been two Uyghur Islamic movements shaped by these conditions, within which modernity has been salient: the “Jadidist” and the “Sünnätchi” movements, [2] part of the broader global wave of Islamic reformism from the end of the nineteenth century and the Islamic revival from the late 1970s.

I position the Jadidist and Sünnätchi movements within the same broad analytical frame to bridge a gap in studies of Uyghur Islam which frequently view them in isolation (Brophy, 2016; Smith-Finley, 2013). The Jadids and the Sünnätchi were both movements engaged with transnational Islamic thought in an effort to modernise Islamic societies by appropriating imperial epistemologies for distinct agendas. Within everyday non-religiously educated Uyghur communities, elite-led Islamic movements have been adopted in a piecemeal fashion, blending with “traditional” Sufi-influenced practices. A community of rural-urban migrants in Ürümchi and a female Quranic recitation group in the South suggest this synthesis amid intensifying persecution (Harris, 2020; Byler, 2022). In highlighting a wider range of Uyghur society, I illustrate a gap between the discourse of religious-educated male reformers and popular religious practice, where “modern” revivalist piety exists within a wide repertoire of Islamic paradigms used to give meaning and structure to subaltern religious communities. A substantive analysis of these examples indicates an internal diversity to Uyghur Islam beyond what can be rendered by a functionalist approach.

By illustrating the complex interaction of Uyghur Muslims with the concept of modernity, I suggest the limitations of positioning Uyghur Islam exclusively in relation to the Chinese state. I problematise the inclination in scholarship to overly instrumentalise deeply embedded religious belief in order to better represent Muslim subjectivities (Euben 1999). By extension, this paper pushes against both PRC rhetoric, which reifies Uyghur Islam into a reactive terror threat, and Western media narratives, which tend to flatten Uyghur religiosity into a response to episodic suffering. Instead, I indicate the need to consider the depth, dynamism, and multi-dimensional nature of Uyghur Islam, an approach integral for our understanding of the causes and stakes of the ongoing state violence and religious repression within East Turkistan.

Chapter One

Review of Uyghur Studies Literature: Looking Beyond the Chinese State

Whilst analysis of the Chinese state and its imperial past is essential for understanding the contemporary colonialism in the Uyghur region, rendering the internal dynamics of Uyghur Islamic movements requires looking beyond the state. However, scholarship on Uyghur Islam is largely overshadowed by state-centric political histories. The dominant historiographical debate has hinged on the depth and duration of Chinese hegemony over the indigenous Turkic population of East Turkistan. In 1759, the region was incorporated into the “Greater” Qing Empire, and by 1885, East Turkistan was governed as a periphery province (see fig. 2) (Thum, 2014: 3). In the early twentieth century, the Qing Empire splintered. After two brief periods of independence the Uyghur region was integrated into the PRC in 1949. Since then, the Uyghurs have had fluctuating but limited political autonomy (Thum, 2014: 4).

In Chinese state narratives, this history of conquest is obscured; the Uyghurs are imagined as one of China’s fifty-six interchangeable ethnic minority groups who “stick together like pomegranate seeds”, according to the popular metaphor (Embassy of the PRC in the UK, 2024). Chinese state historians, such as Zhang Dongyue, locate the roots of this relationship in the distant past; a narrative which “naturalises” the region as a “constituent” and “inseparable part of [the Chinese] motherland” (Bovingdon, 2001: 114). Gardner Bovingdon describes this perpetual minority framing as an “ideological incorporation” entangled with state power, designed to legitimise Chinese rule over East Turkistan as historically continuous (2001: 123 and 96).

Uyghur historian Turghun Almas presents a counter-history to Chinese state narratives and offers an ethno-geographic imagining of East Turkistan as a national homeland for the Uyghurs (in Bovingdon, 2001: 123); a land constituted by agricultural oasis cities rooted with transnational Islamic currents and tethered to the Turkic, Persian, and Arab worlds to the West (in Thum 2014: 4). In Uyghurlar (“the Uyghurs”), Almas points to the existence of a series of independent Uyghur polities across Central Asia (in Bovingdon, 2001: 124), such as the first East Turkistan Republic in Khotan from 1933 until 1934, and the second in Ghulja from 1944 to 1946 (Kamalov, 2021). These periods of independence complement the scholarship of the New Qing School of history, which emphasises the intermittent and persistently porous nature of Chinese rule (Fuller and Lipman, 2004: 332), discrediting claims of durable historic hegemony in its peripheral territories (Qian, 2024).

While these state-centric and imperial political histories, critical or otherwise, are essential for understanding oppressive structures, this approach is limited for conceptualising internal dynamics. Seeking to reorient Uyghur studies scholarship, Rian Thum posits a novel historical anthropological approach, focused on scriptural transmission and religious identity formation (2014). Thum accounts how, in the tenth century, Islam began to spread across the region and was syncretised with pre-existing Buddhist and Manichean practices. What we term “Uyghur Islam” evolved into a distinct religious system composed of extensive regional shrine pilgrimage routes, sustained by a popular canon of local hagiographies (Thum, 2014: 14). These practices formed an “imagined community rooted in land and devotional practice” (Thum, 2014: 15), in part constituting a religiously inflected Turkic Muslim identity autonomous from state structures. This land-embedded religious system substantiates the frame of indigeneity within Uyghur studies – a challenge to the positioning of the Uyghurs as either wayward Chinese subjects (Thum, 2014: 13) or a “borderland” people whose identity only gained shape through contact with China-based states (in Byler, 2022: 38). Thum’s work suggests a scope for a fruitful re-centring of Uyghur scholarship outside the confinement of Chinese political history.

This historical anthropological approach has opened a methodological avenue for subaltern perspectives. However, recent developments have impelled a return to state-centric analysis in efforts to conceptualise the intensifying repression in the twenty-first century. Contemporary scholarship has largely analysed Uyghur society within an ongoing “colonial system of settlement and extraction” (Millward, 2021: 106). The regional economy has been described as structured according to “ethno-racialised lines” (Byler, 2022: x), premised on economic dispossession, the exploitation of Uyghur labour, and the corresponding accumulation amongst settler communities (Ilham Tohti in Millward, 2021: 105). Scholars point to the reform and opening-up period of the 1980s and integration of the Uyghur region into the “circuits of global capitalism” (Harris, 2022: 15). In the twenty-first century, some have described the transformation of the “Uyghur homeland” into a region resembling “a classic peripheral colony” (Byler, 2022: 106).

In 2014, under the auspices of “counterterrorism” (Roberts, 2020), the PRC launched a securitisation campaign against religion in the Uyghur region as a part of a wider repressive structure shaping contemporary Uyghur Islam (Byler, 2022: xi). During the campaign, more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims were arbitrarily detained in “re-education” camps (Tobin, 2021: 16). Many Uyghur women have been subjected by the state into forced marriages to Han Chinese men and have undergone forced sterilisation (Worden et al, 2022). Between 2015 and 2018, birth rates in the two largest Uyghur prefectures fell by 85% (Zenz in Hayes and Sims, 2022: 436). Many experts have concluded that these policies demonstrate genocide through an intent to destroy the “group capacity to reproduce its cultural foundations” (Tobin, 2021: 97; London Uyghur Tribunal, 2021; UK Parliament, 2022). The 2026 “Ethnic Unity Law”, in its design to “subjugate ethnic minorities” (McDonell, 2026), may represent the latest stage in this “systemic and iterative dismantling of [Uyghur] cultural and religious heritage” (Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

Understanding this campaign as rooted in colonial logics situates the persecution of the Uyghurs within a global proliferation of securitisation campaigns against Muslim minorities in contentious territories (Hussin, 2018; Harris and Woodman, 2020). Arguably, there has been a “mirroring” of infrastructures of detainment and surveillance between “Chinese-occupied East Turkistan”, “Israel-occupied Palestine”, and “Indian-occupied Kashmir”, in parallel efforts by these states to “systematically control colonised populations” (Byler, 2022: xvi). This comparative perspective situates China alongside other occupying states, conducive to challenging established narratives in which “colonialism is seen as something through which China was victimised [such as during the Century of Humiliation] but not as something China practices” (Anand, 2019: 133). Given the extent of this project of violent transformation and minority dispossession, scholarship has tended to theorise Uyghur Islam through the impact of these policies.

In many ways, this focus on oppressive structures is essential, particularly from a human rights perspective (Clarke, 2010). This is further reflected by many young diasporic Uyghurs who centre the Chinese state when offering their own “theodicies” to make sense of their experience of suffering and “reasons” for genocide (Mahmut et al, 2021). Nonetheless, these state-centric framings should not compose Uyghur studies in its entirety, and within the discipline of politics, there have been minimal efforts to look beyond the Chinese state. Whilst Joanne Smith-Finley presents a detailed account of Uyghur Islamic revivalism in the late twentieth century (2013), her political analysis is limited to the structural condition of Chinese rule. Recent ethnographic works have taken a productive direction, documenting how Uyghur religious communities are surviving and re-adapting amid this repression (Waite, 2006; Byler, 2022). These ethnographies illustrate internal dynamics, contestation, and gendered dimensions of Uyghur Islam (Harris, 2020), missing from state-level political analysis.

I contribute to the debate by conceptualising Uyghur Islamic movements as self-constituting, shaped by Chinese state state influence but not defined by it, to recover the nuance, discursive depth, and agency obscured by state-centric approaches. The following section outlines this paper’s theoretical framework, drawn from adjacent areas of study, to interpret the emergence and form of Uyghur Islamic movements.

Theoretical Frameworks

This paper develops a theoretical framework from scholarship on Middle Eastern Islamic movements. Situating Uyghur Studies outside of Sinology is an intent to reflect the shared Sunni Islamic tradition and orientations Uyghurs have to the Middle East as the “heartland and source of correct [Islamic] practice” (Harris, 2020: 6). I distinguish functionalist and substantive conceptualisations on the emergence and form of Middle Eastern Islamic movements from the late nineteenth century. “Functionalism” holds that Islamic movements are expressions of discontent (Lapidus, 1997: 444); religion is implied to be a spiritual abstraction, transfigured into an almost mechanical instrument of political resistance under “structural pressures” (Euben, 1999: 48).

However, religion should not be taken as a gloss for political context. There should be space for the intrinsic appeal of religion and a recognition of how faith is “actually constructive of different forms of personhood, knowledge, and experience” (Mahmood, 2001: 16). To represent this depth, I adopt Talal Asad’s anthropological approach where Islam is understood as a lived and practiced “discursive tradition”, grounded in foundational scripture, sustained through ongoing reasonings, arguments, and pedagogy (1986: 20). “Modern” Islam is a historically contingent “composite structure” forged out of the encounter between Muslim intellectuals and non-Muslim empire (Said, 1997: 144). As religion is not a “reified ideological typology”, an “automatic causal link between beliefs and behaviour” cannot be assumed (Gunning and Jackson, 2011: 383). A substantive conceptualisation adopts this understanding of religion and pushes against instrumentalising angles, complementing political structural analysis with historical scholarship, ethnographic evidence, and attention to Islamic theology.

From these diverse methodologies, studies of Middle Eastern Islamic movements have indicated the substantial engagement Muslim actors have had with the concept of modernity (Lapidus, 1997; Khalid, 1998; Euben, 1999). Modernity is a hierarchical order of Enlightenment knowledge, values, and binaries where the rational is positioned against the superstitious or spiritual, originating in late eighteenth-century European expansion, print technologies, and urbanisation. To adopt the decolonial understanding, modernity is a concept embedded within coloniality (Quijano, 2007: 7), the ideational superstructure to colonial domination based upon “proprietorial control, dispossession, and difference in power” (Anand, 2019: 130). As European empires expanded, modernity became a framework for categorising and ordering the colonised; a discourse naturalising and legitimating relations of domination (Said, 1978). Modernity and coloniality are intimately interwoven into a pervasive epistemological structure, with coloniality forming the “dark side of modernity” of the contemporary world order (Mignolo, 2011).

This structure explicates the emergence of Islamic modernism in the late nineteenth century, where Muslim intellectuals sought to “rethink or adapt Muslim institutions, norms and discourse” in light of the “challenges and opportunities posed by modernity” (Muhammad Qasim Zaman in Gunasti, 2024). Modernity continues to be salient to contemporary Islam, with Islamic fundamentalism, for instance, theorised as a dialectical engagement with the phenomena, in part a reaction to the modern world, but more profoundly an “expression” of it (Ira Lapidus in Euben, 1999: 19). The fundamentalists’ hostility to “non-modern” Islamic traditions, such as mystic Sufism, suggests this engagement (Euben, 1999: 17). These disputations within the broad discursive tradition of Islam demonstrate the possibility of multiple and contested iterations of Islamic modernity.

Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the late twentieth-century Islamic movements in the post-colonial Middle East and in occupied East Turkistan, where colonialism is ongoing and intensifying into the twenty-first century. Within Uyghur society, modernity has been a complex, shifting phenomenon imposed from two directions: horizontally, from European incursions in Eurasia and the carrying of Orientalist paradigms of Muslim backwardness (Said, 1978), and vertically, from Chinese rule and the translation of modernity into sinicised civilisational discourse (Tobin, 2021: 94). Thus, Uyghur Islamic modernist movements have emerged in distinct conditions, shaped by layered epistemological impositions, intellectual currents, and shifting political structures.

Despite such differing contexts, an understanding of the structures of coloniality and modernity drawn from Middle Eastern studies is conducive to giving theoretical shape to Uyghur Islamic movements. Hence, I present modernity not as a paradigm which Muslims have uniformly or mechanically appealed to in colonial conditions, but rather as a discourse adopted by specific movements and salient to “internal textual struggles” within Muslim societies, which are “discrete and differing” in various community settings (Pick, in Euben, 1999: 72).

Chapter Two

Functionalist Interpretations of Islamic Movements

This section critically engages with the dominant functionalist conception of Uyghur Islam,  in which religion is positioned as a “reactive phenomenon” to colonial governance and processes of dispossession and repression in the region (Smith-Finley, 2013: 263).  As Islam should not be reduced to political expression, this section concludes by illustrating dimensions of religious belief that are neither constituted or bordered by the state.

In the functionalist interpretation, Uyghur Islamic movements are interpreted in relation to oppressive political structures and are presented as a medium of resistance. The contentious relationship between Uyghur Muslims and the Chinese state, in shifting form, extends back  to the late eighteenth century. Islam has since developed into a critical site of contention; a politicised signifier of difference for the Uyghurs amid the consolidation of assimilative and extractive colonial governance in the twentieth century (Gladney, 1990; Millward, 2021). To an extent, this persecution is part of a wider targeting of Muslims across China; both the Hui and the Uyghurs are considered suspect due to their a priori loyalty to a divine power (Qian, 2024: 104) – by nature contrary to the totalising claims of the “Mandate of Heaven” of Imperial China or the state atheism of the CCP (Harris and Isa, 2019: 79). However, the Hui are adjacent to the Han-majority with a shared language and cultural repertoire. By contrast, an ethnonational Uyghur identity layers this religious difference. The “marginal position” of the Uyghurs to Chinese culture has further made Uyghur religion “prone to be viewed as deviant” by the state (Harris, 2020: 8).

During the twentieth century, this “suspect” identity was further politicised as the relatively pluralistic Qing empire was replaced by a nation-state increasingly influenced by Chinese ethnonationalism. Since 2012, Xi Jinping’s PRC has increasingly expressed the “cartographic desire” of a Han Chinese characterised state stretching up to the Tian Shan mountains, an imaginary that contrasts the Uyghur majority in the territory (Anand, 2019: 132). A 2017 statement by a Chinese government religious affairs official, Mehsumjan Mamer, indicates the ramifications of these imaginings:

“Break [the Uyghur’s] lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of “two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end” (in Human Rights Watch, 2021).

Mehsumjan’s description of the Uyghurs as “two-faced” demonstrates this disconnect; the Uyghurs are politically Chinese as “citizens”, whilst their Turco-Muslim “roots” are not. This “historical-cultural reality” of religious, linguistic, and cultural difference has thus positioned the Uyghurs in a suspect insider-outsider geography (Anand, 2019: 132).

This assimilative rhetoric is embedded in a structure of state violence across the Uyghur region, spanning the extensive religious persecution of Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 to the “counter-terror” crackdown of the 1990s (Waite, 2006: 167), during which over 200 people were executed for “state security crimes” (Clarke, 2010: 52). Such violence is in part a consequence of the PRC’s intent to subject religion to party policy. In the 1990s, the party implemented the “Strike Hard” campaign in the 1990s (Dillon, 2011) and issued Document No. 7 which sought to securitize “illegal religious activity” and “separatism” as existential threats to the “stability of the nation’s body politics” (Anand, 2019: 132). The prevention of Uyghur children from entering mosques, for example, indicates an intent to “reduce the distinct (and oppositional) identities of Uyghurs” by targeting community reproduction (see fig. 4) (Bovingdon, 2001: 34). Such policies suggest, as early as the 1990s, a region-wide interlocking process of the criminalisation of Islamic practice, methods of securitisation, and state violence.

To an extent, this campaign has politicised religion within the region; religious persecution and Islamic discourse have increasingly been the cause and expression of resistance, the wider violent context and ideational backdrop to the murder of the “government imams” discussed. In 1988, for instance, students at Xinjiang University mobilised based on a “lack of respect” for their “culture and religion” (Bovingdon, 2001: 8). In 1997, Uyghurs in Ghulja demonstrated against the penalisation of mäshräp, a traditional community gathering of Uyghur men where Islamic conduct is subtly enforced. Protestors marched behind a banner of the shahadah—a proclamation of Islamic faith through the oneness of Allah—and a minority chanted for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate of East Turkistan (Bovingdon, 2001: 8). The largely young demonstrators were faced with a violent police response, a massacre which further alienated Uyghur society from state authorities (Smith-Finley, 2013: 260).

The Ürümchi Violence of July 2009 continued this escalatory pattern, where interethnic clashes were met with widespread police violence and mass arrests targeting the Uyghur neighbourhoods of the city (Clarke, 2010). During the decade preceding this incident, researchers observed a “striking Islamization” of the city: more women adopted Arab-style hijab, men grew longer beards, Uyghur shops stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes, and larger crowds of men prayed outside the city’s mosques (Harris and Isa, 2019: 69). Despite the long-term nature of this “Islamization”, the Chinese state identified Islam as the “cause” of the 2009 unrest, obscuring the outrage at the government handling of the racialised attacks by a Han-Chinese mob on Uyghur workers in Guangdong and broader mobilisation for greater self-determination (Uyghur Transnational Justice Database, 2024). By 2014, the PRC launched the “People’s War on Terror”, a crackdown against the “Uyghur” security threat of “National Separatism, Religious Extremism, and Violent Terrorism” (see fig. 5) (Human Rights Watch, 2021). Consequently, religious materials were banned, beards and veils were prohibited from public spaces, and a system of mass digital surveillance was introduced (Xinjiang Documentation Project, 2014).

Through these measures, the Chinese state further embedded itself as an intrusive “monolithic entity” in Uyghurs lives (Harris, 2020: 4), which, contrary to intent, contributed to a consolidated Islam as a “natural counter-ideology” (Ayubi in Smith-Finley, 2013: 38). For most Uyghurs, religious revival can be characterised as “peaceful” and “cathartic” (Smith-Finley, 2013: 236). Nonetheless, for some, resistance was violent and framed in ostensibly religious terms. In 2014, five Uyghurs attacked crowds in Kunming train station, killing thirty-one people (Kaiman and Branigan, 2014). The presence of more organised groups based abroad, such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and the Turkistan Islamic Party, has been noted since the early 2000s, but their stated aim to launch a “jihad” against the Chinese state has not materialised (Greitens, Lee, and Yazici, 2020: 28). Situating this violence within its colonial structure, Uyghur Islam can be partially explained as a “vehicle” opposition to repression, structured dispossession, and frustrated ethno-political aspirations (Smith-Finley, 2013: 260). As such, what might not be understood as resistance, such as wearing an Arab-style hijab or growing a beard, is often seen as a political symbol  – by the state and non-state alike – and is categorised alongside other forms of resistance, such as violent mobilisation.

Whilst understanding structure is essential for rendering these contentious dynamics, conceptualisations which consider Islam tantamount to resistance give insufficient space to the agency of Uyghur Muslims, reducing their worldviews and theologies to the political. Describing Uyghur religiosity as “symbolic” implies religion purely matters in terms of what it represents, such as desires for greater self-determination (Smith-Finley, 2013: 263). One Uyghur intellectual, interviewed in the early 2000s, expressed this view:

“For many people going to the mosque now, it is a superficial manifestation… it’s not a deep commitment or understanding. But it is a kind of resistance insofar as it’s an expression of discontent with government policy and with the Hans.” (in Smith-Finley, 2013: 259)

By arguing that the faith of many Uyghurs is “superficial,” this intellectual offers a functionalist interpretation. His argument is underwritten by class dynamics: religiosity is presented as a byproduct of deeper political conditions that the educated (and implied secular) can comprehend, but that the religious (and implied less educated) cannot. Islam therefore “expresses” yet “obscures the real source of the problem”, identified as a sociopolitical and economic structure (Euben, 1999: 21). Whilst an Uyghur man, this intellectual mirrors a tendency in Western scholarship to “fit” religion into chains of linear political causality – a rendering of Muslim modes of organisation, culture, and knowledge into a Western epistemological framework, often entailing reductive stereotyping of Muslim populations (Said, 1978).

To avoid this flattening, theorising resistance should weigh analyses of structural conditions against agency and intent (Johnson, 2003). Saba Mahmood problematises an “agency” that only “locates the political and moral autonomy of the subject in the face of power” (2001: 203), and through a study of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo in the 1990s, she criticises portrayals of these women-led movements as “really” being about Western feminism. Instead, Mahmood finds an Islam which “first and foremost” consists of the embodied practices of pious living (2001: 204). Patriarchal state power forms the backdrop of these women’s lives, yet it is not the structure through which their religion is directed against or mediated through. Therefore, my criticism of portrayals of Uyghur Islam as “really” about self-determination or anti-colonial politics is not to negate the latter’s relevance, but to challenge tendencies within structural analysis to overly simplify diverse modalities of Islamic practice.

A pivot to ethnographic approaches facilitates a “thicker” understanding of the personal and spiritual dimensions of Islam (Euben, 1999: 154), positioning religion as more than a reactive vessel. Given the scarcity of primary accounts, I draw from a set of interviews with young Uyghur women recently settled in Istanbul[3]. Whilst for some Uyghurs, particularly for organised militant groups, Islam is an overt symbol of resistance and anti-state mobilisation, these women account how they engaged with criminalised religious acts not as a political statement, but because they believed it was what they ought to do, divinely sanctioned. One woman, Subinur, recalled attending secret Qur’anic classes in southern East Turkistan (Yasin, 2026: 51). She hid her Qur’an under her clothes when passing police checkpoints and remembered how “it would stab into my sides, causing me to bleed.” Through this clandestine education, Subinur memorised the Qur’an. A second young Uyghur woman, Nefise, recalled how her aunt wrapped the Qur’an and other sacred texts in plastic and threw them into the Ili River. She sought to avoid confiscation of her texts by the Chinese state police with the hope that they would be retrieved by other Uyghurs across the border in downstream Kazakhstan (in Yasin, 2026: 52). Preserving religious texts – whether the Qur’an or ancestral hagiographies – were seen as eschatologically oriented acts, sanctioned by an authoritative moral order they saw as larger than the Chinese state. In the terms of these women, self-education, the cultivation of religious knowledge, and the preservation of sacred texts were primary religious duties.

Suggestive of the salience of such religious obligation to these women within the diaspora, Islamic scripture was broadly the transcendental framework through which these women narrated their experience of exile. Nefise described herself as “in a state of Hijrah”, referring to the transformative migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina (Yasin, 2026: 74). An Uyghur poet, Abdushukur Muhammet, also makes this comparison, describing his flight from China as being “chased from [his] country like the Prophet” (translated by Munawwar Abdulla in Elkun, 2023). Hijrah thus operates as a “key interpretative logic” for understanding exile as a Qur’anic imperative (Yasin, 2026: 61), illustrating how scriptural references have given shape to the lives of Uyghur refugees outside the immediate reach of the Chinese state. Islam is thus illustrated to encompass a comprehensive and resilient worldview, beyond simply a medium of discontent or resistance.

This section has situated Uyghur Islam in a long history of religious repression, processes of dispossession, and persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities within East Turkistan. I have assessed the view that Uyghur Islam has primarily served as an instrument for resistance against such structures. However, I have critiqued this functionalist interpretation for providing a shallow account of Muslim agency, inattentive to the terms through which Islam is understood and lived by many Uyghur Muslims. My approach below aims to counter this flattening tendency, continuing my shift towards ethnographic and historical materials to provide a substantive account of Uyghur Islamic movements over the past century and a half.

Chapter Three

Substantive Interpretations of Islamic Movements

Movements of Uyghur Islamic modernism have been significant over the last century and a half, entailing efforts to redefine Uyghur religious society and Islamic practice “in accordance with the perceived requirements of modernity” (Waite, 2007: 167). Significant have been the Jadid movement of the late nineteenth century and the Sünnätchi movement of the late twentieth century.[4] The Jadid movement was led by intellectuals – an elite-oriented push to transform Uyghur religious practice into an “Islam” compatible with the swirl of pan-Turkic and pan-Muslim intellectual currents of Islamic reformism from Central and Western Asia. The Jadids were modernisers in a direct sense, seeking to adopt and appropriate Western discourses, nationalist thought, and technologies to their own advantage.

The Sünnätchi movement was similarly integrated into the global Islamic revival of the late 1970s and 1980s that emerged from the Middle East (Harris, 2020: 3). The Sünnätchi, meaning “followers of the Sunnah” (the body composed of the life and teachings of the Prophet), existed in parallel with other local Salafi movements calling for a return to the fundamentals of Islam. Unlike the Jadidist movement, Sünnätchi Islam was popularised in a heterogeneous and piecemeal manner, often blending with traditional Sufi-influenced practices.

While in many dimensions hostile to influences – Western or Chinese – deemed un-Islamic, I argue that the Sünnätchi were nonetheless Islamic modernists, lying within a longer history of reformist movements, following the Jadids in appropriating standards of modernity to reform Uyghur religious society. Both the Jadids and Sünnätchi translated modernity to an Islamic register, entailing ideas of scriptural orthodoxy and rationalised practice in efforts to define and border Uyghur Islam. For communities facing intensifying repressive conditions, this multifaceted engagement with modernity underlines dimensions of these movements that cannot be explained exclusively in relation to colonial structures.Whilst occurring within a structure of Chinese colonialism, here I argue that Uyghur Islamic movements have been more than a reactive phenomenon, constituting internally-orientated struggles over orthodoxy, practice, and Islamic modernity.

The Jadids: Islamic Modernism and the Struggle for Religious Orthodoxy

The late nineteenth century Jadidist movement can be understood as the first effort by Uyghur reformers to “modernise” Uyghur Islam. The Jadids were part of a global movement of “Islamic modernism,” spurred by the “breakdown of Muslim empires” and European “colonial intrusion” (Lapidus, 1997: 444). Islamic reformism was first discernible in the Middle East through Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani who sought to articulate an Islam compatible with “standards of reason and progress” (Aydin, 2017: 7). Modernising pressures were layered in East Turkistan: imposed from the Qing to the East, and from the Europeans, the Russians and the British, from the West caught in the geostrategic “Great Game” for Central Asia (Brophy, 2016: 70). Whilst the latter conceived of most Muslim societies according to Orientalist paradigms (Said, 1978), what separated the Uyghur Jadids from their Middle Eastern counterparts was the vertical pressures from the Qing of the civilisational “backwardness” of its Turkic Muslim periphery (Brophy, 2016: 72). Out of this layered encounter with non-Muslim empires, Muslim elites in East Turkistan were subject to the imposition of various epistemologies of empire – a dynamic through which modernity was globalised “by way of colonialist extension” (Falk in Euben, 1999: 22).

The Jadids became pioneers of this Islamic modernising movement; they sought to scrutinise Uyghur society according to global standards of “modern practice” (Waite, 2006: 251) and thus to “rationalise” Uyghur Islam into a “systematic and self-contained set of beliefs” (Eickelman in Khalid, 1998: 11). Orthodoxy became the theological terminology for rationalisation, wherein Islam is anchored to scripture – the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sunnah – seeking the revelations of Allah and the life and words of the Prophet and the early generation of Muslims, “purified” from the following generations of legal interpretation or the localised Sufi mysticism. This emphasis on written scripture relocated Islam from its embedded place within community structures, representing an epistemological shift towards a religion reconstituted as a “universal and uniform religious tradition” (Aydin, 2017: 3) capable of sustaining a “de-territorialised global imagined community” of Muslims (Casanova, 2012).

These modernisation efforts were measured against religious “traditionality” – worship premised on a “transmission that is characterised by repetition in an eternal sense” (Feuchtwang, in Waite, 2007: 256). Prior to Jadidist modernisation efforts, Uyghur Islam was “distinct” from the “constellation of technological, cultural, intellectual phenomena we call modernity” (Thum, 2014: 152). Uyghur Islam has been described as a religio-cultural identity and an “autonomous sacred tradition” (Brophy, 2016: 27), sustained by land-based worship, Sufi shrine networks, hagiographic culture (Thum, 2014: 152), and calendric life-cycle rituals (see fig. 6) (Ildikó Bellé-Hann in Harris, 2020: 6). The Jadids saw these traditions as regional and unorthodox. The Tatar reformist Nushirvan Yashev (1885-1918), for instance, offered a “scathing” critique of a revered Uyghur shrine and its “superstitious” pilgrims (Brophy, 2016: 87). An Ottoman reformist, Ahmet Kemal, criticised locals at the shrine of Afaq Khoja for what he saw as the “irrational” practice of “rubbing faces on sheep horn and on cow tails” (in Thum, 2014: 223). The denigration pilgrimages as “traditionalisms” was part of the wider reformist movement to change the nature of Uyghur Islam (Brophy, 2016: 87), conceived as necessary for their wider programme of rationalising Islam into a form compatible with the contemporary trans-imperial Muslim thought.

Essential to this vilification of traditional practices were “modern” innovations; printed periodicals were an example, facilitated a “redefinition of the nature of cultural production” and challenged the “ascendency of religious transmission through ritualised, face-to-face interaction” (Waite, 2006: 251). Circulating polemical texts were the Jadids’ mechanisms for disseminating reformist religious knowledge and rendering scripture through print (Waite, 2006: 116). These technologies initiated a democratisation of written religious knowledge, integral to the challenge Islamic reformers posed to traditional patterns of transmission based on oral Qur’anic recitation and the authority of local mullahs and sheikhs (Thum, 2014: 113).

Schools were further points of struggle and conceived of as a means to “cure the ills” of unorthodox society (Khalid, 1998: 4). Usūl-i-jadıd (‘New Method Schooling’) became the “modern” alternative to the Maktab which taught Qur’an recitals, catechisms, and Sufi poetry as the established “carrier of Islam” in Uyghur society (Thum, 2014: 172). In its place, Usūl-i-jadıd schools taught a reformist curriculum and separated “secular” subjects from “religion” (Thum, 2014: 5), constitutive of a “desacralisation” of understandings of religion as “embedded in everyday social practice” (Eichelman in Khalid, 1998: 11). In efforts to “cleanse” of both local Islamic peculiarities (Brophy, 2016: 96), usūl-i-jadıd schools sought a re-orientation towards the wider Islamic world, with one Kashgar school named in honour of the Ottoman Sultan, teaching Ottoman military marches (Brophy, 2016: 128). Given the adjacent linguistic and cultural spheres, the Ottoman empire to the Western was attractive to many of the Jadids. Modernity was therefore transcribed geographically as well as temporally with Istanbul as a paragon of progressive Muslim society, imbued with the religious authority of the Ottoman Caliph and the intellectual authority of the burgeoning Ottoman public sphere (Brophy, 2016: 97).

This orientation of the Jadids towards alternate “Islamic modernities” cannot be thought of as entirely autonomous or distinct from colonial epistemologies (Khalid, 1998; Aydin, 2017). As demonstrated, the category of modernity is itself imbued with coloniality. The Jadidist journal Sīrat-I Müstakim (‘The Straight Path’), for example, advocated to “reform” the “backwardness” of Uyghur society and adapt to the “exigencies of modern life” (Brophy, 2016: 109). In utilising these normative binaries, the Jadids reproduced Qing civilisational discourse on the need to remedy the parochialism of rural Uyghur society (Thum, 2014: 113). To an extent, both Uyghur intellectuals and the Qing officials were operating within shared colonial epistemologies, carried through imperial incursions into both Eurasia and indirectly through European influence over the semi-colonised Qing during the “century of humiliation” (Brophy, 2016: 7).

Despite drawing heavily from the imperial epistemologies prolific in the late nineteenth century, the Jadids were not simply reproducing modalities of Qing or European governance; it would be simplistic to categorise Muslim intellectual thought as either an external reaction to the empire or a complete capitulation to it. In a world prolific with, and even constituted by, such colonial epistemologies, it would be “futile” for scholars to look for movements outside of the framework of colonial knowledge (Khalid, 1998: 9). Reformist Muslims were in large an indigenous response to the colonial encounter; they utilised and propagated colonial epistemologies but were doing so with distinct aims and agendas. The Jadids were in line with Islamic reformers globally, co-opting discourse of modernity from hostile non-Muslim empires to “fashion […] their own version of modernity” (Aydin, 2017: 43) and challenge sedimented notions of the “orient” (Asad, 1993). Reformers sought to critique hierarchies upholding structures of Muslim subjection (Said, 1997: 9; Aydin, 2017: 40). Middle Eastern Islamic reformists, for instance, did not blindly “Europeanise” (Khalid, 1998: 43) but presented Islam as enlightened and rational (Casanova, 2012), capable of constituting an autonomous “force in international politics” (Aydin, 2017: 3).

Thus, for the Uyghur Jadids under Qing rule, the adoption of imperial epistemologies was motivated by an agenda to “advance” their own societies through integrating colonial knowledge into “native cultural production” (Khalid, 1998: 14). By appropriating the category of modernity, the Jadids sought to reform Uyghur religious society; the Jadidist movement was not an effort directed against colonial structures, but constituted an internally oriented struggle to align Uyghur Islam with adopted notions of orthodoxy.

The Islamic Revival: Sünnätchi Scripturalism and Sufi Syncretism

Even within the increasingly repressive circumstances of East Turkistan in the twenty-first century, I argue that the Sünnätchi movement was similarly internally orientated and cannot be interpreted entirely in relation to state structures. Illustrative of the limits of the structure–reaction account of Uyghur Islam, the contemporary revival of Uyghur Islam first emerged in the decades after the Cultural Revolution, a period when there was greater religious tolerance and state-sanctioned mosques were reopened (Harris 2020: 8). The Islamic revival was spurred by imports of Islamic materials, an increase in Uyghurs undertaking the state-sanctioned hajj, and the education of many Uyghur students in Islamic theology and Arabic in the Middle East (Smith-Finley, 2013: 240). Further to this orthodox orientation, the movement was characterised by a novel form of ethical self-cultivation and a revitalisation of family structures (Lapidus, 1997; Harris, 2020).

Despite their broad similarities, the Uyghur Jadids and Sünnätchi engaged with and adopted different standards of modernity. By the late twentieth century, the Chinese state carried more aggressively sinicised civilisational paradigms—to be “modern” was to be integrated with Chinese language and culture. To an extent, this constituted an “internal Orientalism”, an imagined hierarchy of modernity between the ethnic minorities of China (Schein in Anand, 2019: 133). This hierarchy has been widely reproduced in state discourses depicting the Uyghurs as an overly religious population in need of modernisation by a superior “civilisation” and corrective, for example, of the “backward” dress habits of minority women (see fig. 7) (Tobin, 2021: 94). The Sünnätchi, like the Jadids, did not necessarily contest these epistemologies but selectively appropriated elements in attempts to reform what they deemed the “unorthodox” elements of Uyghur religious society.

Ablimät Damolla, after studying in the Middle East in the 1970s, became a pioneer of the Uyghur Sünnätchi movement (Waite, 2007: 169) and sought to align Uyghur Islam with Saudi-Hanbali practice, which he viewed as emanating from “orthodox” practice (Waite, 2007: 170). Ablimät’s reformist program demanded that Islam be “purified” of the accretion of localised religious customs such as näzir prayers (held for the deceased at cemeteries) (Harris, 2020: 8) or payments to mollas (religiously-learned men) for reciting the Qur’an (Waite, 2006: 169). Furthermore, Ablimät criticised the age-based hierarchy of Uyghur society as contrary to Islamic egalitarianism; instead, Muslims should be committed to a more “abstract concept of community and moral authority” (Lapidus, 1997: 448).

Whilst the Sünnätchi revivalists had a similar modernising instinct to cleanse Islam of traditionality, their discourse of was less progressive than the Jadids; the Sünnätchi were scripturalist and sought to “return” Uyghur society to a “commitment to the basic principles” (Lapidus, 1997: 444). The Sünnätchi shared the fundamentalist tenet that Muslims’ lives should be ordered around the prescriptions of the Qur’an and the sunnah (Harris, 2020: 11), as suggested by the dawa missionaries who preached a life closely modelled on the Prophet Muhammad across the rural south of East Turkistan (Harris, 2020: 9). This strict scripturalism suggests a shared discourse and proscriptive program with Islamic “fundamentalist” political theorists such as Sayyid Qutb (Euben, 1999: 154), who was not a “critic per se”, but opposed a modernity rooted in bourgeois European Enlightenment (Euben, 1999: 155). The Sünnätchi were thus positioned within this Salafi fundamentalist tradition, tethered to the eighteenth-century anti-idolatry movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Robinson, 2010: 17).

The fundamentalist instinct to look “back” to scripture does not negate that the Sünnätchi programme was modernising in a broader sense; the Qur’an and the Sunnah were transcendental frameworks through which accretions of local and syncretic religious customs were critiqued and reformist programmes articulated. Scriptural was the frame through which Ablimät Damolla offered his discernibly modern program of individual commitment, egalitarian social organisation, and articulations of a “new way of imagining the world” (Waite, 2006: 251; Khalid, 1998: 4). A central intention was to democratise religious knowledge, reflected by Ablimät’s 1988 school to teach young Uyghurs to Arabic and thus the ability to directly engage with scripture (Waite, 2006: 259). By 1990, the Sünnätchi had helped establish more than 938 Qur’anic schools, educating tens of thousands of Uyghur students (Irwin, 2021). Abdurähim, a father in north Kashgar, suggests that this movement was successful for his village:

“When you first came here, I didn’t know much about religion­­­—I just recited a few verses from the Qur’an. Now I have started to read these books and know much more. Mollas and other religious leaders could recite the Qur’an, but they couldn’t really understand it. Now there are many more knowledgeable people in Kashgar” (in Waite, 2007: 261)

Therefore, the Sünnätchi fundamentalist-influenced emphasis on scripture was in fact the means through which they critiqued local practices. Similar to the Jadidist movement, the Sünnätchi movement sought to decentralise religious knowledge, in part to undermine the traditional  ulema and the predominance of orally transmitted Islamic theology in Uyghur society. In an interview, a Uyghur lecturer in Kashgar also made the comparison:

[The Sünnätchi] are like the Jadids. People like Ablimät Damolla are called Wahhabi, but they are just good Muslims who believe in reform and progress (in Waite 2007: 172).

This lecturer alludes to the striking similarity between the Jadids and Ablimät’s stress on the “compatibility of Islam with learning and modern development in general” (Waite, 2007: 259), a parallel reflected in Ablimät’s 1997 sermon:

“In the past, oppressive rulers deprived the Uyghur people of education and science, economic and technical progress, and kept the people in ignorance and superstition. The only way out for the Uyghurs from the present grim situation is education, and everyone should do his best to promote it” (in Waite, 2007: 170).

Here, Ablimät only alludes to the structure of Chinese rule (their “grim situation”). Ablimät positions himself explicitly as a modernist by promoting education through the terms of “science” and “technical” knowledge, reflecting an intent to modernise Uyghur religious society through rationalised, scripture-based education.

Despite the efforts of religious leaders like Ablimät, Sünnätchi Islamic modernism was not popularised in a linear fashion; ethnographic work amongst marginalised local Uyghur communities indicates how the rise of these “pious practices” was not a “coherent trend in Uyghur society” or an “organised movement” (Harris, 2020: 10). For a group of pious rural-urban Uyghur migrants in an informal shantytown on the outskirts of Ürümchi, revivalist Islamic practices structured their underground religious community. These men were marginalised in a rapidly modernising city; their homes were in the shadow of rapidly built high-rises, at constant risk of demolition following the scheduling of an “urban cleansing” of their neighbourhood following the 2009 uprising (see fig. 8) (Byler, 2022: 191). Subject to both imminent dispossession and “uncertain and often punitive state policies to religion” (Harris, 2020: 20), many of these men engaged with a “covert circulation” of online Islamic revivalist content (Byler, 2022: 115). They regularly gathered in semi-underground mosques “to discuss unauthorised religious teachings [of] pious Islam” (Byler, 2022: 192), sometimes led by unofficial “wild Imams” (Byler, 2022: 210). By the late 2010s, this community had become “comingled with reformist Islamic practices”, their lives shaped by an Islamic ethos extending, for instance, to a widespread abstinence from alcohol and tobacco (Byler, 2022: 193).

Whilst social precarity contextualises the revival of community-based faith, a structural lens cannot render the complex manner in which revivalist practices often blended with traditional, Sufi-influenced, Islamic paradigms. Many within this community identified as both a Sünnätchi Muslim and as a musapir, the latter term for a wandering Islamic mystic rooted in “encultured” Sufi traditions for understanding migration and a sense of “psychic and material displacement” (Byler, 2022: 192). The musapir is envisaged as in atemporal transit towards the destination of his soul, rooted in unique understandings amongst Uyghur Muslims of belonging lying as much in “deathplace” as birthplace (Thum, 2014: 16). Within communities with often an “uncertain grasp of basic religious education”, these debates were often "enthusiastic" and “decontextualised” (Waite, 2006: 63); the salience of Sufi references to this community did not seem to weaken their revivalist orientation. One Uyghur man, for instance, conflated the two and “actively used his musapir identification to validate his religious persona as a reformist [Sünnachī] Muslim” (Byler, 2022: 193). Identifying as a musapir sat alongside Sünnachī piety as means to conceive and structure experiences of dispossession (Byler, 2022: 199) – complementary, not contradictory, frameworks for conceiving of dispossession. Thus, in practice, many less-educated pious communities adopted reformist paradigms but continued to operate somewhere between modern and non-modern epistemologies.

For a deeply pious group of women in the rural south of East Turkistan in the 2010s, there was a similar duality to their Islam; they structured their religious practice around Sünnätchi-influenced piety yet continued to reproduce embodied Sufi-influenced practices (Harris, 2020). These women traditionally practised through zikr – a recitation and repetition of prayer – held together by the Sufi concept of ishq (divine love). Their strictly female-only gatherings constituted an autonomous “women’s sociality” structured by a hierarchy of female Islamic knowledge (Harris, 2020: 27) – in some ways, a mirroring of the Cairo Women’s Mosque Movement’s implicit challenge to the “historically male-centred character” of “instituted standards of Islamic pedagogy” (Mahmood, 2001: 203 and 209). Instead of an intent to educate the subject in rationalised scripture, these women engaged in an Islam which sought to cultivate the spirit to “sound out” a way for the untethered soul to feel itself towards God (Harris, 2020: 32). In a sense, these women sought to “transcend” modernity through “countercultural” paradigms of self-definition (Euben, 1999: 55 and 167).

Under the influence of prolific Sünnätchi preaching during the height of the Islamic revival, these women began to incorporate revivalist piety with their community-orientated, Sufi influenced, forms of Islam. Many of their group began to engage with global circulations of Islamic revivalist thought, by, for example, learning the Quranic recitation style of Saudi preachers (Harris, 2020: 2). In part, this turn to “modern” Islamic practice can be explained as a response to state discourse of their practices as “superstitious” and “backwards” – not a reactive religious “backlash” but a response to social change that demonstrates the “considerable social and political agency of these women” (Harris, 2020: 28). Yet they did not abide by the strict scriptural orthodoxy of Sünnätchi like Ablimät Damolla – they incorporated revivalism into traditional practices such as zikr, blurring stringent definitions of Islamic modernism (Harris, 2020: 32). The Islamic revival was one of many paradigms these women drew from, often in a piecemeal fashion, to give structure and shape to their recitation community.

To conclude, the nuance in the manner that Sünnätchi revivalism was adopted across a wide cross-section of Uyghur society suggests a depth that cannot be rendered through state-level analysis. This substantive analysis has illustrated how, within alienating secular and colonial structures, these reformist and revivalist movements were not directed against the state but entailed dynamic internal engagement with modernity through a definitively Islamic register. Under colonial conditions, modernity was one of many grounds upon which Muslims have struggled and reinterpreted their faith. The heterogeneous and syncretic engagement with modernity across Uyghur society demonstrates the many novel ways in which religion has given shape to precarious lives.

Conclusion

Whilst shaped by the Chinese state, Uyghur Islamic movements have largely been self-constituting, defined by localised struggles over ideas of correct practice and religious authority waged within the Uyghur religious community and over the spiritual subject. I first outlined a functionalist conceptualisation, explicating religiosity amongst Uyghurs as a reaction to oppressive structures, rooted in a longer politicisation of Uyghur Islam into a marker of “deviant” ethnonational difference. Second, I offered a substantive interpretation, demonstrating how Uyghur Islamic movements have operated relatively autonomously, with a depth irreducible to structural analysis. Under colonial pressures, reformers sought to transpose global discourses of Islamic modernism onto Uyghur Islam. Sünnätchi Islamic piety, often blended with resilient Sufi-influenced traditional practices, held together marginalised religious communities amid the persecution of the early twenty-first century.

Beyond Uyghur studies, this more substantive approach could contribute to critical analyses on contentious state policies and counter-terror campaigns towards Muslim communities globally (Hussin, 2018), such as the complex relationship between repression, religion, and resistance amongst Palestinian Muslims (Khalidi, 1997). A substantive analysis should thus attend to the “inherent power” of religion as an “ethical-political vision of the modern world” (Euben, 1999: 154) – not analytically distinct from more overtly “political” questions of nationalist politics or anti-colonial mobilisation. An approach centring the agency of religious community within the structures of the modern states is salient – particularly considering recent efforts by the PRC to export its model of violent securitisation and mass detention, depicting “Xinjiang” as a “successful” “experience [which] can be introduced to countries” with other “problematic” Muslim minorities (Chinese diplomat Jiang Duan in Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

This substantive interpretation could further ongoing debates over how to conceptualise the ongoing persecution in East Turkistan. If religion is within a cycle of repression–religiosity, understood functionally, then state policies towards religion could be envisioned as largely futile since, contrary to the intent, repression is likely to spark a reactive religious resurgence. However, my substantive interpretation approaches Uyghur Islam as an embedded system of meaning shaped by a multifaceted engagement with modernist epistemologies. Arguably, contemporary Uyghur identity – as a delimited ethnonational group based upon a shared territory and history – was forged by Islamic reformers out of the “raw materials” or “traditions” of regional religious identity maintenance (Thum, 2014: 12).

Given the significance of a shared religious community to contemporary Uyghur identity, the targeting of religious transmission becomes an existential question for Uyghur social reproduction. This is likely the PRC’s precise rationale; the closure of mosques, the banning of religious education, and the separation of Uyghur children from “religious” parents (UN News, 2023) form a systematic assault upon the foundations of Uyghur collective identity and national claims. Hence, Western scholarship and media, which present the ongoing campaign as delimited “religious” persecution, separable from political, misrepresent this existential dimension (Human Rights Watch, 2005). A more substantive interpretation, attentive to the depth and diverse dimensions of Uyghur Islam, is necessary to comprehend the assimilative or even genocidal intent behind the religious repression. Future scholarship could consider the recent 2026 “Ethnic Unity Law” and the legal institutionalisation of such policies in the Uyghur region nationwide, further eroding minority and linguistic rights (Criner and Szadziewski, 2026).

Turning to methodology, my substantive analysis has drawn on a diverse range of sources, including ethnographies and secondary historical materials, to look “outside” the state. However, since 2017, regional securitisation, the banning of researchers, and harassment of academics overseas (Wang and Ahmed, 2025) mean that knowledge of contemporary Uyghur society within East Turkistan has been limited to propagandistic state portrayals and the testimonies of Uyghur refugees abroad (Steenberg and Seher, 2023). How to render the political thoughts, religious beliefs, and experiences of a people under occupation is likely to become a more prominent methodological challenge, where the PRC is one of many states increasingly empowered by technological advances to securitise and surveil minority communities. The work of the Xinjiang Remote Ethnography Project provides one such space to think through the constraints of on-the-ground research, arguing for a “methodological medley” through digital discourse or diaspora networks (Remote XUAR, 2023). Thus, attempts to continue this paper’s effort to better present the subjectivities of Uyghur Muslims will likely continue to turn towards diaspora communities and more diverse methodological approaches (see Yasin, 2026).

This paper has illustrated the dynamism of Uyghur Islamic modernising movements, at times coexisting and contesting unique traditions of pilgrimage practices and Sufi worship, with a depth beyond what a structural approach can render. An implicit intention has been to better represent Uyghur life under colonisation and to “restore some of their authorship” to these religious communities (Byler, 2022: 219). By nature, this is limited: the contemporary Islamic movements which I have centred in this paper have been violently targeted, surveilled and enclosed, and their leaders arbitrarily detained (Byler, 2022: 218). In efforts to look beyond the PRC’s extractive reach, archival documentation efforts and human memory may make possible future scholarship on Uyghur Islam under conditions of such extensive persecution. For Uyghur society itself, the question weighs heavily in terms of whether the distinctive religious traditions and multifaceted modern dimensions of Uyghur Islam can be recovered from this project of suppression and possible eradication.

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[1] To reflect the vocabulary of many Uyghurs, I use “Uyghur region” interchangeably with “East Turkistan”. Xinjiang is a Chinese toponym translating to “new frontier” which the “majority” of Uyghurs see as a carrier of colonial violence (Bellér-Hann et al, 2009: 1). Avoiding “Xinjiang” – or “Xizang” for Tibet – is a commitment to decolonial methodologies.

[2] The Sünnät is the Uyghur pronunciation of the Sunnah, the way of life understood as prescribed for Muslims based upon the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and interpretations of the Qur’an. Sünnätchi means “followers of the Sunnah”.

[3] These interviews are drawn from an undergraduate thesis at Harvard University for which the author conducted nearly fifty oral history interviews in the Uyghur language (Yasin 2026: 5), valuable given the scarcity of first-hand testimonies.

[4] I use “Uyghur” when discussing the late nineteenth century to acknowledge the existence of a discernible religiously inflected “imagined community”, prior to the widespread use of the ethnonym by the early twentieth century (Thum, 2014: 15). This refers to cultural and religious identities, rather than to retroactively indicate a homogenous or pan-historical national group (Anderson, 2006).

By Naa Yarley

Edited by Alex Bagdade, David Barsemian & Ghayas Osseiran

Introduction

In Gaza, war does not end when bombs stop falling. Long after the airstrikes subside, environmental collapse continues to exact a slow, often invisible toll. Water turns toxic, soil retains chemical residue, and the air carries carcinogens. Violence is sedimented into the material fabric of life. Written amid the ongoing war following the October 7, 2023 attacks, this paper turns to Operation Protective Edge (2014), launched in response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, as a critical antecedent to understand how ecological destruction functions as a central modality of settler-colonial governance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks: ‘how does Israel’s environmental governance function as a necropolitical project, targeting both human and ecological life for attritional elimination?’

To address this, the paper draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, defined as the sovereign power exercised through the power to dictate “who may live and who must die”. In the Palestinian context, necropolitics operates not only through spectacle but through the infrastructural, control and destruction of water networks, electricity supplies, sanitation systems, roads, border crossings and healthcare facilities.. This paper extends Mbembe’s framework by, situating necropolitics within environmental governance and the long-term degradation of ecosystems essential to Palestinian survival. Rob Nixon’s theory of ‘slow violence’ is used to further frame the temporally dispersed, generational harm embedded in settler practices.

Situated within political ecology, settler-colonial studies, and necropolitics, this paper contributes to emerging scholarship on ecocide in Palestine by extending necropolitical theory to ecological destruction in Gaza. Whereas Mbembe uses the term “ecocide” to describe a condition of human degradation, this paper uses it primarily to name the destruction of the more-than-human conditions of life—water, soil, air, farmland, biodiversity, built environments, and the territorial infrastructures that sustain them—through which human degradation is also produced. It argues that settler-colonial domination operates through a multi-scalar assault on ecology, understood not simply as “the environment” but as the interdependent biological, spatial, infrastructural, and geopolitical relations that make life possible. It further examines how this violence rebounds onto Israeli society through what Derrida terms “autoimmunity". Namely,  ecological harms that ultimately undermine the settler state’s own project of securitisation. or, ecological harm that undermines the settler state's own securitisation efforts.

The first section traces the ecocidal violence of Operation Protective Edge, left effectively unregulated by international humanitarian law and accountability mechanisms, drawing on soldier testimonies and humanitarian reports to show how “organised chaos” enabled the targeting of both human and more-than-human life. The second section focuses on Gaza’s water infrastructure, theorising Israeli control over water systems as a necropolitical (“make die”) modality that engineers ecological dependency and collapse. The third section explores the environmental aftermath, and outlines how environmental toxicity infiltrates the body through air, water, and soil. The final section examines the transboundary effects of environmental collapse, arguing that toxic spillover destabilises settler-colonial rule over Palestine by undermining its biopolitical logic of containment.

In tracing the Israeli state’s settler-colonial exercise of sovereignty over Palestinian land, life, and ecological systems in Gaza and the West Bank, the paper argues that the deliberate destabilisation of these ecologies also produces consequences that exceed its intended territorial and securitising objectives, exemplifying what Derrida terms “autoimmunity.”

Literature review

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower provides a foundational understanding of how modern states exercise control over life. Developed in his analysis of evolving power structures from the 18th century onwards, Foucault argues that sovereignty transitioned from a classical right “to take life or let live” to a modern form of power focused on managing, ordering, and fostering life through institutions, practices and knowledge. In this framework, states shifted from demonstrating power primarily through deduction - extracting resources, labour or blood - to regulating populations by promoting health, productivity, and social order. While biopower is concerned with the administration and optimisation of life, Foucault argues that this project is inseparable from a sovereign right to expose certain populations to violence and death. On Mbembe’s reading, modern regimes secure the life of privileged groups precisely by relegating racialised and marginalised communities to conditions in which they may be killed, abandoned, or allowed to die; their disposability is not incidental to biopolitics, but helps sustain the policies and protections through which other lives are made to live.

In pre-modern societies, threats to political authority were largely understood as direct challenges to the sovereign, with violence (such as executions or defensive wars) primarily serving to protect the ruler and their position of power. Acts of killing were thus centred on preserving the sovereign’s dominion over subjects (and vice versa). However, Foucault observes, the logic of state violence transformed with the emergence of modern power structures. In modernity, “wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone” (though this “everyone” has never extended equally to racialised and marginalised populations). Entire populations become mobilised, and violence is justified out of a necessity to protect and preserve life. Entire populations are mobilised, and violence is justified as necessary to protect and preserve the life of the privileged social body. Massacres and large-scale death, Foucault argues, are thereby reframed as vital acts through which dominant societies are made to live by exposing racialised and non-privileged populations to death.

In his 2019 book Necropolitics, the historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe advanced a critical intervention into Foucault’s concept of biopower by exposing its limitations in addressing the violent realities of colonialism, slavery, and modern statehood. Mbembe challenged the assumption that sovereign power operated through consensual frameworks such as the social contract, arguing instead for a racial contract wherein modern sovereignty was fundamentally rooted in the capacity to dictate death of marginalised populations. While biopower emphasised the regulation and fostering of life (allowing some to die as a byproduct), Mbembe posited that in many contexts, especially under colonial and capitalist systems,  power, was explicitly organised around the management and production of death. Importantly for this work, he specifies that, apartheid is “a fantasy of extermination” As he asserted, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is allowed to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. According to Mbembe, sovereignty is defined by the deliberate exposure of targeted populations to death, abandonment, or conditions of existence that blur the boundary between life and death.

Furthering his critique, Mbembe found that biopower was insufficient for understanding these contemporary forms of subjugation, writing, “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death”. To illustrate this, he identified systems such as slavery, apartheid, colonial occupation, and modern warfare as foundational examples where sovereignty was enacted through the normalisation of violence, dispossession, and the systemic reduction of human beings to expendable bodies. Mbembe linked these necropolitical practices to the foundation of modern democracies, arguing that Western political orders were built upon a dual structure: outwardly promoting ideals of liberty and governance (the “solar body”), while simultaneously relying on the violent mechanisms of empire, slavery and repression (the “nocturnal body”). He wrote, “the history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies - the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state - and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony”. This duality highlights how modern states obscure their violent foundations, presenting themselves as adherents of a rules-based order while perpetuating structures of dominion and death, often beyond their own borders.

Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics also addresses the limitations of Foucault’s biopower by incorporating and expanding upon Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the homo sacer, as introduced in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). The homo sacer refers to a figure in Roman law who could be killed without legal repercussion yet was deemed unworthy of ritual sacrifice, an individual excluded from political community and reduced to what Agamben terms “bare life”: existence stripped of rights, protection, and political value. According to Agamben, the homo sacer exemplified the sovereign’s capacity to suspend legal norms and create a class of people who exist outside of the law, exposed to arbitrary violence without consequence. Mbembe builds on this notion, arguing that bare life is no longer an exception but a pervasive condition in modernity, particularly within colonial, racialised, and militarised contexts. He asserts that such individuals inhibit death-in-life, where their existence is marked by continuous exposure to violence and disposability. To illustrate this, Mbembe identifies populations subjected to concentration camps, systemic state violence, and notably, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. These groups inhabit what Mbembe defines as “death worlds” - spaces where life is governed through abandonment, degradation, and the ever-present risk of death

While Foucault’s biopower emphasises the regulation of life through institutional mechanisms such as schools, hospitals, and prisons (spaces designed to discipline and optimise populations), necropolitics shifts focus to those spaces where the state exercises power through the active production of death and decay. In these death-worlds, inhabitants endure conditions akin to what Mbembe terms “living death”, wherein law becomes a mode of violence, not geared at protecting these populations, but subjugating them. Crucially, they remain perpetually vulnerable to direct or structural violence, where death can be inflicted arbitrarily and with impunity. Within this framework, Palestinians in the OPT represent a contemporary manifestation of the homo sacer - a population systematically excluded from sovereignty’s protections, subjected to environmental deprivation, spatial confinement, and state-sanctioned violence. Cnucially, this article draws on Mbembe’s engagement with Fanon, and uses the term ‘spatial’ to refer to the spatialisation of settler occupation.   Mbembe’s engagement with Agamben thus reinforces his critique of modern sovereignty, highlighting how necropolitical governance creates entire populations whose existence is managed through exposure to death.

Though Foucault’s theory of biopower acknowledges the role of race in determining which segments of a population are afforded protection and whose lives are rendered expendable, Mbembe places the racialised dimension at the very centre of his theory of necropolitics. According to Mbembe, contemporary regimes of sovereignty cannot be understood apart from the colonial histories and racial hierarchies that continue to shape global political life. Necropolitics, in his formulation, is the power to expose particular populations (often racialised others) to conditions of death and erasure, frequently through spatial and juridical exclusion . This marks a departure from biopolitical power, which Foucault theorised as the management of life, towards a politics centred on the administration of death and the capacity to render life unlivable.

With an understanding of necropolitics, it is essential to further unpack its settler-colonial dimension. Patrick Wolfe’s seminal work, Settler Colonialism states that “invasion is a structure not an event”. Ron Smith builds on Wolfe, conceptualising occupation not as a singular historical event but as an evolving, continuous process. In his analysis of Israeli governance over the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Smith traces the shifting dynamics of the occupation across different periods, noting how it has become progressively embedded within the state’s political and military apparatus. He argues that Israeli policies (particularly those regulating Palestinian movement and access to Israeli settlements) fluctuate in severity in response to changing domestic priorities. These shifts, he suggests, reflect broader socio-political calculations, including Israel’s fluctuating demand for Palestinian labour and its strategic interests in controlling vital resources such as land and water. Through his analysis of the evolving nature of Israel’s occupation, Smith notes that, “While the occupation changes along dimensions of time based on the priorities of the occupier, it also varies from place to place, creating an array of microgeographies based on strategic concerns”. Smith’s reading of Israeli occupation is relevant for this paper in three key ways: it frames settler colonialism as the central analytic, identifies land and water as core to the settler project, and highlights the role of “microgeographies”—the small-scale, everyday spatial arrangements through which power is experienced and enforced—in revealing how occupation is enacted on the ground. Building on this, the paper explores ecologies across different sites to examine how necropolitical strategies shape both humans and nature under occupation.

In positioning settler colonialism as a key analytic, it is worth clarifying the concept. Wolfe’s work in its application to Palestine has spurred a growing body of literature that has demonstrated both its utility and its limitations. Scholars such as Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi link Israeli settler-colonisation to broader European currents of nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism. Wolfe’s thesis has been widely recognised as a powerful tool for exposing structural injustice, while also critiqued for certain conceptual limitations because its argument raises tensions around the possibility of decolonisation, given that the settler state can “never… be fully extinguished until the native is”. This is a paradox that risks foreclosing political horizons.Wolfe was himself attuned to settler colonialism’s structural incompleteness, arguing that its eliminationist project can never be fully realised because Indigenous peoples, political claims, and relations to land persist despite ongoing attempts at dispossession and erasure. As he writes, “The quest to replace Native society only maintains the refractory imprint of the Native counterclaim.” In the context of Israel, Wolfe highlights the contradiction of a settler regime that seeks the elimination of Palestinians while remaining dependent on their continued presence as a source of labour, as a demographic and territorial threat through which Israeli sovereignty is defined, and as the population over which the occupation’s coercive apparatus is exercised. This tension is encapsulated in his claim that Israel “cannot live with Palestinians and it cannot live without them.” Complete elimination would constitute failure because it would undermine the settler state’s capacity to define and consolidate Israeli sovereignty through the ongoing management, displacement, and containment of a Palestinian population; it would expose the contradiction that settler colonial power requires the very Indigenous presence it seeks to erase.

Comparative scholarship has reinforced the relevance of this framework for understanding the Israeli occupation. Eyal Weizman, for example, begins his analysis of “frontier geography” by drawing parallels with other settler colonies before demonstrating how Israel’s frontier space constitutes a flexible, militarised geography shaped by the perpetual reproduction of violence.

The notion of a frontier geography introduces a conceptual space of contradictory relations between land, sovereignty, and population that, as Omar Jabary Salamanca and colleagues argue, generate a structural “instability” within Israeli settler-colonial rule. In response to this instability, the Israeli state deploys various strategies, including aerial and naval bombardments, massacres, invasions, home demolitions, land confiscation, identity revocation, racist dual legal systems (one for settlers and one for Palestinians), loyalty oaths, the separation wall, the destruction of Gaza, and the instrumentalisation of coerced Palestinian collaboration. Within this context, Rana Barakat observes that Israel is compelled to activate a particularly broad spectrum of settler colonial tactics, which operate simultaneously and often contradictorily in an effort to maintain control.

This paper seeks to identify and theorise specific settler colonial modalities that are biopolitically and necropolitically directed toward ecology within the context of Israeli occupation. These modalities unfold across its permanent frontier and within its microgeographies, constituting distinct components of the broader array of practices sustaining the occupation’s violence. As Jad Isaac and Jane Hilal have emphasised, the “Palestinian environment has been the first casualty” of Israel’s occupation.” This isn’t to imply that one form of suffering is more significant than another, but to highlight the foundational interdependence between human life and the environmental systems that sustain it. The destruction of the environment inevitably reverberates through all forms of life (human and otherwise) because ecologies are simultaneously biological and territorial (in the geographical sense). No life can endure without access to a viable material habitat. In this sense, it responds to Alatout’s call for a renewed focus on both territorial and biological elements of power, or the entwined processes through which settler-colonial regimes exercise control by reshaping space and regulating life itself, often to the point of its eradication.

Within this context, the paper argues that the destruction of Palestinian ecologies is not an incidental consequence of occupation, but a means of advancing land seizure and territorial expansion; it is through this necropolitical remaking of the environment that settler-colonial territorial ambitions are pursued. This is captured in Wolfe’s assertion that “land is life… or, at least, is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be - indeed, often are - contests for life.” The removal of Indigenous populations from their land is frequently enacted through ecocidal strategies, revealing how environmental degradation serves as both a tactic and consequence of settler colonialism. Kyle Powys Whyte highlights what is at stake in such processes. Settlers inscribe their origin stories, religious and cultural systems, and political economies into the land itself (into the waters, air, and soil), effectively overwriting Indigenous ecologies. Settler colonialism, Whyte argues, enacts environmental injustice that disrupts the sociocultural and ecological relationships essential for Indigenous life-worlds. Glen Coulthard adds that anticolonial struggle is not only about reclaiming land in its material sense, but about restoring systems of reciprocal, ethical relations with the natural world. Together, Whyte and Coulthard demonstrate the key concerns of this paper: the intrinsic link between decolonisation and the necropolitical entanglement of settler-colonialism, ecocide, and the erasure of ethical obligations to humans and nature.

Recently, more scholarship has explored the links between settler-colonialism and environmental destruction in the context of occupied Palestine. Damien Short and Haifa Rashed, for example, examine the ecocidal outcomes of Israeli settler acts, while Seif Da’Na analyses how Israel’s water policies have devastated Palestine’s environment. Da’Na emphasises that the ecological degradation is not incidental but rooted in the structural nature of the Israeli settler project, including its agricultural, industrial, and lifestyle imperatives, which entangle national and ecological objectives. Similarly, D.A. Jaber, in Settler Colonialism and Ecocide, argues that Israel’s drive to eliminate Palestinian indigeneity necessarily produces environmental destruction. He claims that settler space should be understood as intentionally ecocidal because, “it implicates not only the indigenous population but also the local and regional ecologies. Jaber’s case study of Al-Khader illustrates how land expropriation, settler violence, militarised devastation, and discriminatory policy converge to produce ecocide. This demonstrates the extent to which settler colonial domination in Palestine operates simultaneously through the targeting of human and environmental life.

In his historical analysis of the term’s roots, David Zierler identifies 1970 as the moment when “ecocide” was first articulated by botanist Arthur W. Galston and a cohort of scientists. They coined the term to denounce the severe environmental harm and human health impacts resulting from the US military’s use of herbicidal agents during the Vietnam War. Franz Broswimmer, in his examination of ecocide within the context of contemporary warfare, outlines a range of practices associated with ecocidal violence, including the use of defoliants, explosives that degrade soil quality, military bulldozing of forests and agricultural land, and the forced displacement of human or animal populations for strategic purposes. In this paper, these very techniques of defoliation, land degradation, forced displacement, and ecological transformation have all been employed, to varying degrees, by the Israeli state within the occupied Palestinian territories.

While these ecocidal methods function as distinct categories, they also reveal interlocking site-specific sites of necropower that collectively intensify necropolitical outcomes, manifesting, in effect, as war through alternative tactics. For example, Israel’s seizure of Palestinian water resources amplifies its destruction of Palestinian plant life, such as the uprooting of olive groves. In deploying these differentiated strategies of necropower, this paper aims to disaggregate the otherwise monolithic category of biopolitics; challenge its anthropocentric assumptions, which often obscure the targeting of nature in militarised contexts; and recast necropolitics through an ecological lens by foregrounding its ecocidal dimensions.

Section One: Operation Protective Edge and the Necropolitics of Wanton Destruction

Before discussing the various ecological, necropolitical modes of destruction Israel has wrought upon the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it is first important to establish how the IDF cultivated the environment of wanton destruction that enabled it. During Operation Protective Edge, multiple IDF soldiers testified that the Israeli military’s modus operandi was effectively one of unrestrained violence in line with the logic of the Dahiyah doctrine, which necessitates “massive, disproportionate force”.

First, it is important to establish that the term ‘wanton’ here, is used in the same way  in the same manner as outlined by International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in the Trial Chamber judgment of Kordic and Cerkez, (February 26, 2001) held that “[T]he elements for the crime of wanton destruction not justified by military necessity charged under Article 3(b) of the Statute are satisfied where: (i) the destruction of property occurs on a large scale; (ii) the destruction is not justified by military necessity; and (iii) the perpetrator acted with the intent to destroy the property in question or in reckless disregard of the likelihood of its destruction.

One soldier noted that the standing order was to “shoot to kill anything that moves”, while the broader objective was to “leave the area razed”. This scorched-earth approach not only targeted human populations but also resulted in the large-scale destruction of nature caught in the crossfire. The UN report on Operation Protective Edge confirmed, based on satellite imagery and video analysis provided by UNITAR-UNOSAT, that vast swathes of Gaza were effectively obliterated, with the IDF killing 2,251 Palestinians (551 of whom were children), destroying over 18,000 housing units, and  damaging 73 medical facilities. The commission's findings, corroborated by photographic evidence and testimonies from IDF soldiers affiliated with anti-war Israeli activist group Breaking the Silence, suggest that the scale of environmental devastation “may have been adopted as tactics of war”. These actions amount to what international humanitarian law defines as ‘wanton destruction’ or the excessive or unjustified use of force, often carried out in violation of the rules of engagement. However, multiple testimonies suggest that such rules were absent altogether. One soldier stationed in northern Gaza stated that, “there were no rules of engagement… just blasting things away”. Authorisation procedures, which were meant to regulate military engagement, were regularly ignored: “There was no such thing as requesting authorisation. Just fire”. An IDF captain confirmed this procedural void, stating that “Rules of engagement are part of the combat procedure… and there were none”. Finally, one soldier discussed the consequences of the operation on the environment, describing how soldiers would “shoot at bushes, trees, at all sorts of houses you suddenly run into, at more trees”.

The lack of rules of engagement in Operation Protective Edge enabled violence that was systematic. While the overarching mission to raze everything was strategic and programmatic, the question of who or what was killed was often determined by the logic of the Dahiya doctrine. chance. Manuel DeLanda encapsulates this paradox in his concept of ‘obligatory contingency’, which he defines as a situation in which connections “are not logically necessary but contingently obligatory”. In this context, the Israeli military’s unregulated practices meant the mere presence of any entity (whether human or ecological) within a soldier’s field of vision could constitute a sufficient condition for lethal action. For example, there would not have been an operational necessity to shoot a horse encountered in the field. Yet, in the absence of informal directives, the encounter itself triggered a contingent obligation to kill.

The IDF’s actions in areas such as Shuja'iya, Rafah, and Khuza’a during Operation Protective Edge illustrate how settler-colonial, militarised, and religio-nationalist imperatives intersect with random, nonlinear variables to produce landscapes of destruction. This violence should not be dismissed as mere chaos; rather, it reveals a deeper operational pattern consistent with the logic of ‘chaos theory’. What appears to be arbitrary acts of bombing, bulldozing, and shooting are, in fact, expressions of “organised chaos” whereby seemingly spontaneous practices replicate discernible patterns at multiple scales. These fractal repetitions are evident in the recurrent destruction of living beings and material environments: the destruction of an orchard, the bulldozing of a tree, the shooting of a man, a sheep, a dog. Though governed by randomness at the level of the individual encounter, these acts are inscribed with structural coherence. They constitute self-similar units of militarised violence that scale outward, forming an overarching pattern of ecocidal and necropolitical practice.

Palestinian farmer, Ali Alommor’s testimony gives voice to the structural violence that defines ecologies in warzones. Having escaped death, leaving behind dead camels, donkeys, and other animals he reounts, “The tank hit the trees, the stones, and even the animals”. Animals that initially survived missile strikes or bulldozers later died of starvation, as the family had fled and access to food and water was severed. Alommor explained how “Israeli troops shoot at anything that moves, even when they can see it’s only a camel, donkey, or chicken kept outdoors in summer”. An IDF soldier discussed “the killing of animals,” recalling a company sergeant major who opened fire from an APC, indiscriminately spraying bullets at horses, sheep, and donkeys. Such accounts indicate a systematic disregard for nonhuman life, where more-than-human beings become collateral or even intentional casualties of unregulated military conduct.

The affective dimensions of this violence are deeply etched in the memories of survivors. On returning home, Alommor discovered all 30 of his sheep dead, some riddled with bullet holes, one with its head severed, others swarmed by flies and worms. Some animals bore no visible wounds, likely having died from trauma, hunger, thirst, or environmental collapse. Their deaths were situated within a landscape of ruin: polluted water, razed fields, and crumbling infrastructure. As Alommor reflects, “I wish I knew they hadn’t suffered”, a wish belied by the evidence of violent and drawn-out death.

The prohibition against ‘wanton destruction’ during armed conflict is enshrined in both the 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Certain operations conducted by the IDF could potentially be classified as war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In particular, Articles 8(2)(a)(iv) and 8(2)(b)(ii) forbid the “extensive destruction or appropriation of property” when such acts lack military necessity and are executed unlawfully and deliberately, and the deliberate targeting of “civilian objects”, defined as entities not serving military purposes. While these provisions extend certain protections to animals, vegetation, and other more-than-human entities, such protections are contingent on their classification as civilian property rather than on any recognition of intrinsic ecological value. Israel, however, is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not accept the jurisdiction of the ICC. Following the Palestinian Authority’s accession to the Rome Statute and its call for an investigation into alleged war crimes during Operation Protective Edge, Israel denounced the Court, vowing to undermine its legitimacy and accusing it of hypocrisy and of emboldening terrorism.

The following section will examine how the permissive environment of wanton destruction cultivated during Operation Protective Edge enabled the systematic, necropolitical targeting of Palestinian nature.

Section Two: Water, Necropolitics, and Settler-Colonial Rule

Across the extensive documentation of Gaza’s devastation during Operation Protective Edge, significant attention has been paid to Israel’s systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, including water systems, electricity grids, sewage facilities, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and farmland. Stephen Graham characterises this strategy as “urbicide”, which he defines as the deliberate destruction of the urban fabric as a form of spatial and social warfare. So, where urbicide names the deliberate destruction of the urban fabric, including the homes, services, and built infrastructures that sustain collective urban life, ecocide extends this analysis to the destruction of wider ecological conditions of life, including water, soil, air, farmland, biodiversity, and more-than-human life. In Gaza, the two forms of destruction are inseparable. Crucially, urbicide differs  In Shell-Shocked: On the Ground under Israel’s Gaza Assault, journalist Mohammed Omer offers a granular, day-by-day account of life under bombardment. The phrase “on the ground” in his title foregrounds the testimonial nature of his perspective and also highlights the materiality of place, bearing witness not only through narrative but also from the traumatised terrain of Gaza itself.

In his introduction, Omer argues that the destruction of infrastructure cannot be explained solely through religious or historical claims to the land. Rather, he frames the occupation as a struggle over resource control, writing,  “This occupation is not about religion, biblical history or any other excuse used to justify it. It is about water: headwaters, rivers and aquifers. It is about who controls and prospers from natural resources ranging from arable land to natural gas reservoirs under the West Bank and beneath Gaza’s coastal waters.” Omer situated this within what has been described as “Israel’s water warfare”, a deliberate strategy aimed at rendering Palestinian life unlivable by systematically denying access to essential ecological resources. As he writes, “Amongst the casualties of Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip has been the coastal enclave’s water infrastructure, which has not been spared deliberate targeting by Israeli missiles.” Omer argues that these attacks are part of a sustained campaign designed to render life intolerable. Depriving Palestinians access to water is weaponised as a form of warfare. The broader consequences of this include long-term ecological degradation, severe and ongoing threats to public health, and the effective exclusion of a substantial civilian population from access to clean drinking water.

Within the framework of Israel’s necropolitical “water warfare,” the strategic control and distribution of water resources emerge as a central instrument for structuring differential conditions of life. Water governance in this context serves to secure the flourishing of Israeli settler life while simultaneously relegating Palestinians to conditions of near-bare survival. The ecocidal ramifications of this system extend beyond human deprivation, affecting vegetal and animal life through interlinked environmental degradation. One illustrative example is the illegal settlement of Ariel, whose wastewater runoff contaminates lands under the jurisdiction of the Salfit Council.

This pollution has not only destroyed seasonal Palestinian crops but has also led to the disappearance of native fauna, including deer, rabbits, and foxes. The cascading ecological impacts of settler water governance have been documented in multiple reports, which reveal how untreated sewage from illegal Israeli settlements (spanning industrial, agricultural, and residential sources) frequently spills onto Palestinian territory. This contamination compromises public health, disrupts agricultural livelihoods, and forces many farmers to abandon crop production and livestock grazing due to the unknown toxic compounds present in the wastewater. One report detailing the impact of the settlement’s water pollution on Palestinian life claimed:

“This poisoning and waste dumping takes place alongside numerous other abusive acts against the farmers at the hands of Israeli settlers and military, including their homes and livestock shelters being repeatedly torched, livestock intentionally run over, fodder crops torched, waste thrown in their rainwater collection tanks, prevention of access to water for themselves and livestock, and other abuses.”

In his case study of Al-Khader, D.A. Jaber detailed how the discharge of settler sewage on Palestinian farmlands has resulted in acidic soil conditions that burn crops, poison fruit yields, and pose long-term threats of toxicity to both the land and those who depend on it. These entangled harms demonstrate the necropolitical logic at work. Through water control, wastewater contamination, and the destruction of wells and sanitation systems, environmental harm is converted into slow violence, exposing Palestinian communities to pathogenic conditions, toxic water and food sources, skin infections, and longer-term threats to health and livelihoods.

Israel’s necropolitical water governance extends beyond the appropriation of Palestinian rivers and aquifers to include the deliberate targeting and destruction of critical water infrastructure, including wells and sewage systems. During Operation Protective Edge, the IDF reportedly damaged approximately 778 underground wells, a devastating blow to Gaza’s already fragile water system. The harm inflicted by such attacks is compounded by the structural control Israel exerts over the reconstruction and development of Palestinian water projects, particularly in the West Bank. All Palestinian water and sanitation initiatives must receive approval from the Joint Water Committee (JWC), where Israel exercises de facto veto power. According to available data, only 56 percent of Palestinian water proposals submitted to the JWC have been approved, compared to nearly 100 percent approval for Israeli proposals. Of those approved Palestinian projects, just one-third have been implemented. Beyond the JWC, Palestinian projects also require separate permits from the Israeli Civil Administration, which are extremely difficult to obtain. Denied formal routes to securing essential infrastructure, Palestinians are often forced to build without permits, actions that then provide Israel with justification to demolish the very projects Palestinians depend on for basic survival. In this way, Israel’s necropolitical water governance functions along two intersecting axes: the literal deprivation of water resources, contributing to the slow, enforced desiccation of Palestinian life, and the concurrent creation of pathogenic ecologies, conditions of pollution and infrastructural collapse that endanger public health and undermine ecological stability. As Erin McKenna explains, these practices are underpinned by a discriminatory legal regime that facilitates settler expansion while violating international principles such as the 1962 UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources. Israel maintains control over West Bank water resources, diverting them to meet its own needs while systematically denying Palestinians permission to drill new wells or develop irrigation systems. This policy not only entrenches inequality but enforces dependence, producing a West Bank not formally annexed, yet effectively absorbed into the Israeli water grid by the coercive logic of infrastructural necessity.

As Palestinian farmers are increasingly unable to irrigate their land due to the restricted and unreliable supply of water, Israel often designates these uncultivated areas as “dry” or “barren.” This bureaucratic classification then becomes a legal mechanism for expropriation: once deemed unproductive, the land may be claimed as state property or sold, rendering it unusable and economically worthless to its original Palestinian stewards. In this way, water governance actively facilitates the broader settler-colonial project of territorial expansion by engineering the conditions under which Palestinian dispossession appears administratively justified. Scholars Gasteyer, Isaac, Hilal, and Walsh have demonstrated the historical linkages of land and water seizure in the occupied territories, arguing that “land grabbing has been linked to water grabbing” and both have been instrumental in advancing Israel’s colonial objectives. Muna Dajani’s analysis of Israel’s “systemic water war,” further elaborates on how this strategic deprivation erodes the foundational relationship between Palestinians and their land. “By depriving farmers of water,” she writes, “they drive them off their land.”

The consequences of this strategy are far-reaching. Not only are Palestinians forced to abandon agricultural activity, but municipal authorities (such as those in Gaza) are compelled to purchase approximately five million additional cubic meters of water annually from Israel, deepening economic dependency. This manufactured scarcity has created an analogue to the restricted caloric regime, whereby Palestinians are allocated water in quantities barely sufficient for survival. The disparity is stark. Palestinians in the West Bank consume an average of just 79 liters of water per person per day, falling below the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum of 100 liters. In contrast, Israeli consumption averages around 287 liters per person per day, more than four times the Palestinian average. This structural inequality in access to water demonstrates the necropolitical dimensions of Israeli aquapolitics, in which infrastructural control enforces not only dispossession but also a slow, systematic erosion of life’s material conditions.

The measurable disparity and unequal distribution of water reveal the mutually constitutive “solar” and “nocturnal” bodies of settler-colonial rule, in which the secure and well-provisioned life of Israeli settlers is sustained through the managed deprivation and exposure to death of Palestinians. On one side, a Palestinian water politics of enforced deprivation and bare life; on the other, an Israeli water politics of excess and flourishing. This dual structure lays bare the calculated inequality that governs access to vital ecological resources. The consequences of this regime are starkly evident in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, during which the IDF’s destruction of Gaza’s sewage infrastructure led to widespread contamination of the water supply. The resulting public health crisis triggered outbreaks of various illnesses, including gastrointestinal infections, scabies, and lice. Abu Rida, a resident of Khan Younis who lost both his son and brother to Israeli airstrikes, captures the epidemiological dimension of Israeli water governance: “We escaped almost certain death from Israeli gunfire, but now it seems instead of sending missiles to kill us, Israel wants to kill us with disease.” His testimony shows how necropolitical control over water infrastructure operates not only as a tool of immediate destruction but also as a slow, attritional mechanism of harm. This deliberate exposure of the population to preventable disease (what might be termed epidemiological warfare) is emblematic of a broader necropolitical logic underpinning the settler state’s governance of Palestinian life. As explored in more depth below, the weaponisation of public health crises serves not simply as a byproduct of infrastructural collapse but as a targeted strategy of subjugation, displacement, and elimination, an extension of settler colonial power into the biological and ecological domains of existence.

The necropolitical dimensions of Israel’s water governance are deeply entangled with its toxic environmental impacts. One of the most acute examples is the destruction of Gaza’s sewage treatment infrastructure, which has resulted in millions of litres of untreated waste spilling into the Mediterranean Sea. This ecological collapse has produced toxic marine conditions, including widespread algal blooms that contaminate the local fish population—an essential food source for many Gazans. It notes that the environmental fallout from Operation Protective Edge led to an increase in polluted seawater that has caused a noticeable rise in dermatological conditions, with more residents suffering from skin rashes and infections after swimming in the sea compared to before the war. Within this necropolitical framework, Palestinian land and seascapes are rendered pollutable and transformable into ecological sacrifice zones. The territories are not merely neglected but actively reconfigured as sites for waste disposal. Solid waste from Israeli settlements and military outposts is routinely dumped without regulation onto Palestinian fields, roadsides, and agricultural land. Additionally, Israeli industries have relocated operations to the West Bank to exploit cheaper labour, lax environmental oversight, and the ability to dispose of hazardous byproducts, including aluminium, textile dyes, tanning chemicals, batteries, and plastics, into Palestinian ecosystems. These practices do not represent isolated environmental infractions but are part of a wider settler-colonial logic that instrumentalises land and ecology in the service of domination and disposability.

Eleven Israeli chemical factories have been established in the “seam zone” on confiscated Palestinian land (areas where industrial activity is effectively shielded from legal accountability). These factories operate under dubious jurisdictional frameworks controlled by the Israeli military, allowing them to pollute with impunity. Even Israel’s own State Comptroller has acknowledged the lawlessness of such conditions, noting they “place the well-being, health, and lives of the workers in the industrial zones in real danger.” A 2014 environmental report on unregulated toxic waste disposal by Israeli industries in the West Bank documents the dumping of solid waste, transported across the Green Line, containing dangerously high levels of lead. In one Palestinian village, authorities investigated the unexplained deaths of 25 cows, suspected to have perished due to elevated ammonium levels in the water linked to sewage discharges from nearby settlements. These environmental practices are emblematic of what Traci Voyles terms settler colonial wastelanding, or the racialised and spatial process through which land and the populations inhabiting it are rendered pollutable, disposable, and ecologically degraded. Within this framework, Palestinian lands are not only occupied but systematically transformed into environmental sacrifice zones.

Taken together, the evidence presented in this section suggests that water operates as a necropolitical technology of rule in both Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, military damage to wells, sewage systems, and water networks exposes communities to contaminated supplies and the epidemiological consequences of infrastructural collapse. In the West Bank, the restriction of drilling rights, the delayed approval of Palestinian water projects, and the diversion of water towards settlements constrain the capacity of Palestinian communities to reproduce everyday life through cultivation, sanitation, and public health. These practices do not merely distribute water unequally. They make access to a life-sustaining resource dependent on an occupying power that also controls, restricts, or destroys the infrastructure through which that resource can be secured.

Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics clarifies what is at stake in this arrangement. The issue is not that water deprivation produces immediate death in every instance, but that it establishes durable conditions in which illness, ecological degradation, displacement, and premature death become normalised features of Palestinian life. In this sense, the water regime contributes to the production of what Mbembe terms a death-world, where communities are compelled to endure life under conditions that steadily diminish its viability. This necropolitical exposure is inseparable from the biopolitical provision of water, sanitation, and agricultural security to Israeli settlements. The distinction between these conditions reflects the relationship Mbembe describes between the solar and nocturnal bodies of power. The visible provision of security and flourishing for settlers is sustained through a less visible system that renders Palestinian land, bodies, and ecologies vulnerable to contamination, scarcity, and slow attrition. Water control therefore functions not only as an instrument of resource management, but as a material means through which settler-colonial sovereignty differentiates between lives that are secured and lives made increasingly difficult to sustain.

The following chapter turns to the wastelanding of Gaza’s ecologies in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, with a specific focus on the military campaign’s ecocidal impacts on soil, air, and water systems.

Section Three: The aftermath of Operation Protective Edge

In the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, understanding the necropolitical and ecocidal dimensions of state violence in Gaza requires a multiperspectival approach, one that accounts for the combined environmental, military, and public health consequences of the assault. What follows draws on Ahamad Saleh Safi’s participatory environmental impact assessment of the 2014 Gaza War. The report condenses insights from both local informants and professionals in environmental science and public health, offering a composite view of the war’s ecological and epidemiological impacts on both human and more-than-human life. It identifies specific localities affected by environmental degradation and, through the integration of community testimony with expert medical analysis, traces patterns of disease and ecological disruption back to the pollutants generated during the military campaign. This collaborative methodology provides a crucial framework for assessing the long-term consequences of environmental warfare within necropolitical regimes.

The report disaggregates the geography of the Gaza Strip into various microgeographies, mapped according to the neighbourhoods most severely impacted by the military campaign, such as in Rafah. Within this territorial fragmentation lies nested microecologies that unfold in fractal complexity, including housing and agricultural fields, beaches, human bodies, vegetation, and the microbial life of soil and water. This multiperspectival vision enables a more nuanced understanding of how violence is distributed across space and scale. In this context, a necropolitics of nature emerges, demonstrating how state violence directed at a racialised and colonised population (in this case, Palestinians) also extends to the ecologies that sustain them. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of biopolitics as a mode of power concerned with regulating “multiplicities” and managing the life of a “global mass,” the report reveals how this logic is applied not only to human populations but to entire ecosystems entangled in the necropolitical machinery of occupation and war.

In their reading of Israel’s strategy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza through recurrent military operations, Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir contend that Israel is engaged in a prolonged, asymmetrical conflict with hostile non-state actors qualitatively distinct from conventional inter-state warfare. They argue that the primary aim of these military interventions is not to achieve unattainable political objectives, but to systematically degrade the adversary’s capacity to inflict harm. This could be interpreted as the Israeli state’s deployment of various necropolitical methods targeting nature, as part of this broader logic of debilitation, which aligns with Jasbir Puar’s conception of debility as a deliberate outcome of necropolitical governance.

Within the postwar ecologies of Gaza, these strategies converge to form an assemblage of slow violence: a lingering, attritional form of harm that incrementally erodes the material, ecological, and corporeal conditions of Palestinian life. When viewed within a comparative settler colonial frame, Israel’s use of attritional environmental violence mirrors broader patterns deployed by other colonial regimes, strategies that weaken Indigenous populations not through decisive confrontation, but through extended, systemic erosion of life-supporting ecologies.

This section will extend the framework of Israel’s attritional warfare beyond the temporal limits of formal military engagement to examine the postbellum ecologies of Gaza. In these war-scarred landscapes, a distinct form of attritional conflict persists long after the end of direct hostilities. As Nixon discusses, this is a war of slow violence (a form of harm that operates according to the principle of cumulative erosion over time). Within the context of Palestine, such attritional warfare is expansive, distributed differently across Gaza’s fragmented geographies, and temporally diffuse, with effects that unfold across delayed timelines and transgenerational bodies. By viewing the living body, whether human or ecological, as a microecological space embedded within intersecting biopolitical systems of attrition, we can better understand how physiological processes like ingestion (of contaminated food and water), inhalation (of polluted air), and percutaneous absorption (of heavy metals like lead) become affected by both pathogenic and necropolitical power. This constitutes a form of power that “slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it, and weakens it.” When life is exposed to toxic saturation and infrastructural decay, “killing” no longer requires direct violence; it occurs instead through the systematic exposure of populations to death over time. In this sense, Gaza’s post-conflict ecologies of aftermath exemplify the necropolitical logic of settler-colonial violence, operating not only through spectacular destruction but through the prolonged, embodied consequences of environmental collapse.

At this juncture, the concept of an atomised biopolitics becomes analytically useful in capturing the diffused yet deeply penetrating modalities of violence that persist in Gaza following Operation Protective Edge. In the absence of an immediate postbellum, visible agent, such as the Israeli military or an active battlefield, the legacy of environmental devastation continues to shape the conditions of life. What remains is not the spectacle of violence but its residue: polluted water, contaminated soil, and toxic air. In this context, necropolitical power manifests through overt acts of aggression as well as  the everyday, involuntary physiological processes such as breathing, drinking, and eating that now expose Palestinisan bodies to pathologies implanted within their ecologies.

This atomised form of necropolitics operates below the threshold of perception, internalised through cellular and metabolic interactions with environmental toxins. It is here that physiology and pathology converge to produce what might be termed pathophysiologies of slow violence. Without the detonation of a missile or the visible presence of a soldier, violence persists at a molecular level. As Foucault observed, modern power circulates in “capillary” fashion. Here, it infiltrates the bloodstream through heavy metals in drinking water or permeates the lungs through carcinogenic particles suspended in the air. This is necropolitics at its most insidious, dispersed, internalised, and rendered nearly indistinguishable from the basic conditions of existence.

A notable dimension of the report involves its mapping of the gendered disparities in exposure to toxic necropolitical regimes. It consistently identifies Palestinian women as disproportionately vulnerable to disease and illness induced by the environmental consequences of military action. This gendered differentiation is attributed to prevailing divisions of labour, which increase women’s exposure to environmental pollutants in domestic settings. In the case of contaminated water, for instance, the report explains that “women are the ones who use such water every day, multiple times to wash clothes and dishes, cook, clean children, etc. Thus, women’s extended exposure makes them more vulnerable to any changes in water quality.” These findings align with broader research that illustrates how Palestinian women have borne the brunt of environmental degradation under occupation. Elise Young, in her reading of Palestinian women’s pathologies within the colonial context, emphasises that the notion of health is not only historically contingent and gendered but also inextricably linked to processes of colonisation and the foundation of the Israeli nation-state. The differential impact of toxic exposure on women thus reflects a broader convergence between settler-colonial governance, environmental violence, and gendered necropolitics, where domestic labour becomes the site through which slow violence is both enacted and endured.

In his systematic documentation of the environmental consequences of Operation Protective Edge, Ahamad Saleh Safi devotes particular attention to what he categorises under “Environmentally Related Diseases.” He notes a striking consensus across affected areas: “In almost all localities (100%) people complained of increases in the spread of many diseases that may stem from environmental pollution.” The data collected in the report highlights a wide spectrum of health conditions attributed to wartime environmental contamination. Among the most frequently cited are skin diseases, including rashes and cancers (reported in 72% of localities), premature births resulting in death (48%), and respiratory illnesses (44%). Safi details the multiple vectors through which such conditions emerge, attributing them to air pollution, exposure to chemically contaminated seawater, and direct contact with pollutants and war remnants such as exploded shells and rockets. The health risks associated with these exposures include, but are not limited to, hepatitis, gastrointestinal disorders, eye and ear infections, skin contusions, and respiratory trouble. Significantly, Safi also acknowledges the possibility of undiagnosed or unclassified diseases emerging from toxic exposure, underscoring the full extent of harm as both measurable and incalculable within the necropolitical landscape of post-war Gaza.

The report proceeds to identify specific Gazan microgeographies most acutely affected by the war, dedicating several pages to tabulated data on what it terms “war-induced environmental pollution–induced diseases” across these localities. For example, one entry reads: “Locality: Al Nuseirat; Impacts: Skin disease, Cancer, Infant deaths, Congenital anomalies, Respiratory diseases; Gender: Women; Vulnerable Groups: Children.” The report’s tabular structure constructs a relational matrix that links geographic location, medical pathology, gendered patterns of vulnerability as perceived by participants, and the demographics most at risk. This configuration facilitates a shift from experiential testimony to clinical diagnosis, enabling a translation of lived experience into the evidentiary domain of medical science. However, while the report asserts that “these increases in incidences of disease are supported by the literature as a result of air pollution, seawater contamination, soil pollution, and use of unlawful weapons during war,” the cautious phrasing embedded in such claims highlights the epistemological complexity of tracing necropolitical harm in post-conflict ecologies. The ambiguity of causal attribution reflects the diffuse, atomised nature of necropolitical modalities operating in the wake of war, modalities that manifest not through spectacular violence, but through incremental, often imperceptible damage embedded in air, water, and soil. Though hard to verify individually, these atomised forms of harm have cumulative effects (mapped across spatial, gendered, and generational lines) that constitute a powerful archive of slow, environmental violence.

Atomised necropolitics operates by infiltrating the body of the exposed subject, embedding itself through the molecular agents of environmental toxicity. As a paradigmatic expression of slow violence, it enacts what Rob Nixon describes as the “persistence of unofficial hostilities in the cellular domain - the untidy, attritional lethality that moves through the tissue, blood, and bones.” This method of power collapses the boundary between the external environment and the body's internal physiology, as environmental contaminants become coextensive with the life-sustaining processes of the body. These processes, including breathing, ingestion, and metabolic function, are not only routes of survival but also pathways of harm, transformed into vectors of disease and degradation. From acute conditions such as eye inflammation caused by exposure to debris, and long-latency illnesses like cancer linked to genotoxic agents, the body becomes a site where toxicity and vitality converge.

In the occupied ecologies of Gaza, this toxic entanglement generates a necropolitical chiasma, an interlacing of organism and environment in which the body is no longer separable from the polluted microecologies it inhabits. The physiological becomes pathological. At the level of nucleic inscription, atomised necropolitics produces a condition where life’s genetic infrastructure is braided with particles of destruction. In this way, the very cellular fabric of Palestinian life is marked by a violence that is slow, intimate, and enduring, a necropolitical inheritance sedimented in the body through air, water, and earth.

Section Four: Toxic Entanglements: How Necropolitical Warfare Breeds Ecological Return

As proxies of the necropolitical state, harmful pollutants function in ways that fundamentally destabilise clear lines of causality, intention, and responsibility. By virtue of their proxy status, they introduce a conceptual and temporal gap between the material act of pollution and the originary actor responsible for its release. In Safi’s report, this distance necessitates both a recognition of symptom-diagnosis correlations and a series of qualifications that reflect the epistemic uncertainty embedded in postbellum toxic ecologies. These pollutants do not operate according to linear timelines or straightforward trajectories. Instead, they unfold within assemblages of pathogenic agents that interweave with the physiological processes of individuals and communities, giving rise to autoimmune pathophysiologies that resist definitive medico-legal attribution. Framed in Derridean biopolitical terms, this condition reflects the logic of autoimmunity: a process whereby systems of self-protection paradoxically turn against themselves, undermining their own integrity. In such contexts, violence is no longer exclusively external or easily attributable; it is internalised, recursive, and temporally dispersed. Atomised biopolitics thus functions by diffusing responsibility and obscuring the link between agent and effect. It generates a torsional logic that destabilises the binary of aggressor and victim, rendering the Palestinian body both the site of injury and, paradoxically, the perceived locus of threat. Within this autoimmune schema, the body becomes entangled in a regime of necropolitical harm that reproduces its own vulnerability under the guise of pathology.

The biopolitical consequences of autoimmune logic extend well beyond Palestinian bodies and their more-than-human ecologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By its very structure, necropolitical autoimmunity is inherently recursive. The very apparatus designed to insulate and protect the self ultimately loops back upon its originator. In this context, the Israeli state's destruction of Gaza’s sanitary infrastructure and its wastelanding of West Bank ecologies have produced epidemiological feedback loops that now affect the health and environments of Israeli civilians. The spiralling trajectory of autoimmune necropolitics undermines the imagined impermeability of borders, revealing instead the permeability and shared vulnerability of entangled ecologies.

A report titled Health Risks Assessment for the Israeli Population Following the Sanitary Crisis in Gaza highlights this transboundary exposure. It details how the collapse of Gaza’s sanitation systems and environmental degradation have had “multidimensional impacts” on the Israeli population. These include aquatic contamination—pollution of seawater, rivers, and drinking water reservoirs in Israel, as evidenced by the closure of the Ashkelon desalination plant, the Zikim bathing beach, and the Shikma groundwater facility. It also notes significant aerial fallout, with “severe air pollution” crossing into Israeli airspace. Most notably, the report highlights the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens among Gazans, some of whom were treated in Israeli hospitals, inadvertently transmitting these pathogens to dozens of Israeli patients.

In effect, this reveals a disbursement of necropolitical agency across a network of non-human actors, including bacteria, wastewater, and airborne particulates, whose movements disregard political borders. What emerges is a scene of unintended ecological and pathogenic consequence, where settler-colonial violence directed outward rebounds inward, illustrating the ecological entanglement and mutual fragility masked by the logic of security. Autoimmune necropolitics thus not only erodes the bodies it targets but also destabilises Israeli governance.

In their analysis of Israel's deliberate destruction of infrastructure and livelihoods in the West Bank and Gaza, Erika Weinthal and Jeannie Sowers provide a comprehensive account of how the occupation has disrupted all major environmental sectors. They determined that: “In both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, we have found that Israeli control over land infrastructure, construction, land use and movement undermines civilian welfare even as the effects are ‘walled off’—literally and in public discourse—from the Israeli public and, increasingly, from the international community.” Their findings demonstrate how the deliberate targeting of water, energy, and agricultural systems forms a core component of the occupation regime—one that directly impairs Palestinians’ ability to remain on their land.

The Health Risks Assessment for the Israeli Population report highlights an example of the most acute consequences of Gaza’s deteriorating sanitary, environmental, and health conditions: a scenario in which individuals may experience an acute “unwillingness to continue living in the environment, perceived as being dangerous.” In contemporary public health and environmental literature, this is framed as the emergence of “environmental refugees.” In this context, Gaza’s prospective environmental refugees are not viewed through a humanitarian lens but as a biopolitical threat to Israeli national security, tethered to anxieties over the health of the Israeli population. The emergence of yet another form of Palestinian refugeedom (this time under the sign of environmental collapse) highlights Israel’s various strategies of displacement. It also signals the inscription of Palestinian bodies into the broader catastrophe narrative of planetary ecological breakdown. Crucially, the autoimmune entanglement whereby Israeli citizens are now enmeshed in the pathogenic feedback loops of Gaza’s environmental collapse reveals that no protective border can fully contain the consequences of ecological violence. As Bruno Latour observes, in the Anthropocene, “there are no more spectators” because “there is no shore that has not been mobilised in the drama of geohistory.” In the Palestinian context, this “generalised state of war” is not only locally embedded in practices of ecocidal destruction but also globally dispensed through the transboundary flows of pollutants, pathogens, and atmospheric effects, offering a stark reminder that the ecological stakes of necropolitical governance extend far beyond the immediate zone of occupation.

The necropolitical question of population health is, at its core, an autoimmune one, an inquiry rooted in the constitutive tensions between life and death. As Derrida asserts, “If autoimmunity is physiological, biological, or zoological, it precedes and anticipates all these oppositions.” Positioned within the Israeli-Palestinian context, the categories of the physiological, biological, and ecological help to shape the necropolitical intelligibility of “the Palestinian,” as constructed and governed within Israeli state discourse. Autoimmunity precedes these categories precisely because it forms the ontological condition through which the Israeli/Palestinian binary, and its violent asymmetries, are rendered intelligible. In necropolitical terms, each subject position is caught within the following entanglement: the existence of one is constitutively dependent on the differential subjugation of the other.

Within this aporetic fold, political autoimmunity emerges as a crucial analytic. As Derrida suggests, the notion of political autoimmunity is fundamentally bound to the interrelation among political subjectivity, nature, and bare life. Once situated within this conceptual framework, political autoimmunity is necessarily necropolitical. What is crystallised in this formulation is the inseparability of politics from bios, ,a foundational entwinement of governance and life itself, and the inherent politicisation of bare life, particularly as it pertains to the entangled dyad of Palestine and Israel.

The reports cited above reveal the autoimmune failure of Israel’s attempt to “wall off” Palestinian “pathogens”, a failure captured succinctly by Gideon Bromberg’s observation that “no fence or Iron Dome can thwart them.” In this context, the very logic of the Wall (whether physical, political, or epistemological) is breached, and its function as a necropolitical apparatus of policing, exclusion, and containment is rendered inoperative. Within the logic of autoimmune necropolitics, the binary oppositions of inside/outside and Palestinian/Israeli collapse into a topological entanglement. Autoimmune regimes of governance, by definition, rely on transgressions: they are animated by the very crossings they seek to prevent. These crossings occur across increasingly fractalised registers of state borders, ecologies, microbial terrains, human and non-human bodies, destabilising the supposed fixity of territorial, biological, and political boundaries.

The dual operations of atomised and transboundary necropolitics provoke a critical interrogation of the internal logics and structural coherence of Israel. These twinned methods expose what might be termed the co-constitutive astructurality of the settler structure: that is, the state’s very apparatuses of governance (those necropolitical mechanisms ostensibly designed to secure and consolidate settler power) are themselves marked by fissures, blind spots, and points of irreflection. Rather than functioning as a seamless and teleologically coherent system, Israel’s strategies for self-preservation and securitisation generate unintended consequences and ungovernable effects that undermine its structural integrity from within.

The transboundary movement of toxic agents produced by atomised necropolitics resists containment and unsettles the settler state’s “calculus of biopower”. These flows not only circumvent its infrastructures but also reverse the directionality of power, returning its effects to the settler body politic in the form of autoimmune fallout. In this way, the seemingly unidirectional exertion of settler violence is interrupted and rerouted, revealing the limits of Israel’s control over the necropolitical death world it has engineered.

In this light, Patrick Wolfe’s notion of “structure” risks over-totalisation, a reading that presumes a seamless, hegemonic logic of elimination. Yet, as this section has shown, the settler-colonial structure is constantly destabilised by the unanticipated consequences of its own actions. The hubris that inheres in the apparatus through its incapacity to anticipate or contain the full reach of its violence introduces a constitutive instability into the settler project. It is this astructurality within structure that guarantees, however marginally, the possibility of disruption, leakage, and undoing.

Conclusion

This paper has traced the necropolitical dimensions of both human and more-than-human life in occupied Palestine, examining how settler-colonialism and ecological destruction are intimately entwined in the Israeli occupation. By expanding the necropolitical aperture, it has shown the differential, often overlapping modalities through which violence (military, structural, and environmental) is enacted on both human and nonhuman life. It has foregrounded how such violence generates landscapes saturated with the traces of destruction, where shattered bodies, broken homes, and mutilated ecologies coalesce into sites of testimony. In such spaces, acts of dispossession leave behind a material archive of pain that is not solely anthropocentric but is shared across human and ecological forms.

Central to this project has been a commitment to decentering the anthropocentric logic of necropolitical theory. Drawing on Mbembe, Barakat, and Whyte, this paper has worked to articulate a necropolitics of environment that accounts not just for how sovereignty governs human death, but also for how it does so by entangling humans, animals, plants, soil, and water in webs of systemic obliteration. In Gaza and the West Bank, this manifests in water governance, arboreal uprooting, pollution, and land mutilation. These are acts animated by a necro-environmental regime, in which ecological destruction is both a mechanism of rule and a spatial expression of elimination.

Looking forward, further study on this should seek to offer a theoretical reconfiguration of justice. If necropolitics is to remain a meaningful analytic in an age of climate catastrophe and settler-violence, it must extend to a critique of anthropocentric legal frameworks. If the argument of this paper has been that Israel has been perpetrating an ecocidal, necropolitical regime over the occupied territories, the next intervention should be to consider what environmental justice in response to such a regime might look like While the ICJ, UN Charter and Vienna Conventions remain deeply state-centric, other branches of international law, including IHRL, ICL, IHL, refugee law and the ECHR, remain largely human-centric; true ecological justice therefore requires a more radical rethinking of geopolitics that takes the Earth itself as a political subject.

Furthermore, this work is not without its limitations. First, while the paper has foregrounded Gaza and the West Bank, the unevenness of field-specific data (particularly in ecologically focused policy reports) has at times required a level of abstraction due to the practical and political constraints on producing comparable ecological data under occupation. . Second, the conceptual scope of necropolitics and settler-colonialism is vast; this project has necessarily focused on particular instances, leaving others unexplored. Further research might fruitfully examine comparative settler contexts to trace ecocidal logic. Additionally, future work could incorporate Indigenous epistemologies more directly into methodological frameworks to deepen understandings of land, memory, and survival from non-Western ontologies.

Despite these limits, the hope is that this paper has contributed meaningfully to emergent scholarly and activist efforts that seek to politicise the ecological as a site of both violence and resistance. In a world convulsed by the intersecting crises of climate, colonialism, and war, it is important to listen more closely to the entangled crises of humans, trees, aquifers, and soil, and to build futures where their survival is not incidental, but central.

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By Gabrielle Bridi

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

Introduction

Abu Ghraib prison (Abu Ghraib) was a large complex under Saddam Hussein’s rule that was reopened by U.S.-led forces following their 2003 invasion of Iraq (Volle, 2025). In 2004, leaked photographs and investigations, including the Taguba Report revealed systematic abuse and torture of detainees (Taguba, 2004; Volle, 2025). Documented practices included: forced nudity and sexual humiliation; forced imitation of sexual acts with other detainees; torture and assault; photographing and videotaping (Taguba, 2004, pp. 16-18). Seymour Hersh’s (2004) New Yorker article brought these abuses to public attention, marking a critical moment when the hidden violence of the War on Terror (WOT) became visible to global audiences. These spaces are known as black sites which are extraterritorial, clandestine detention centres in legal grey zones used to detain suspected criminals, often associated with their secrecy and use of violence (“black site,” n.d.). The suspension of law in black sites like Abu Ghraib existed within a context of Othering, colonial conquest, and Empire building that ensured access to strategic resources and reorganised markets through militarised governance in the name of security.

This essay examines how racialised and sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib reproduced colonial domination, and how these practices functioned within the broader political economy of U.S. Empire. I argue that sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib prison, an exceptional space in which law operated through its suspension and violence was spectacularised, reproduced colonial logics of domination by staging detainee bodies as sites through which imperial power was asserted and justified. This demonstrates how the WOT merged cultural superiority with the political economy of U.S. hegemony, advancing a moral and economic project that helped secure strategic global resources while reaffirming Orientalist distinctions. Using a combination of discourse and visual analysis, I draw on primary sources, (photographs and an official report) and secondary sources (journal articles and book chapters) to examine the racial and sexual violence at Abu Ghraib and its connection to political economy and U.S. Empire. While photographs and official reports about Abu Ghraib have been analysed, existing accounts often isolate them from political economy and U.S. Empire, and political-economic analyses likewise overlook the visual, territorial, and racialised and sexualised modalities of rule. Alternatively, I treat them as mutually constitutive, showing how territorial legal exception, racialised and sexualised spectacle, and political economy have worked in tandem to sustain capitalism and U.S. imperial rule.

This essay develops a theoretical framework grounded in the state of exception, necropolitics, biopolitics, Orientalism, and political economy to analyse the role of sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib. It situates these practices within a capitalist and imperial context, arguing that sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib asserted Orientalist hierarchies to justify the WOT as a moral, economic, and imperial project extending U.S. hegemony by securing control over global resources and capital.

Theoretical Frameworks

To analyse the power and legality in Abu Ghraib, Agamben’s (2005) the state of exception appears as a judicially produced fictitious lacuna or gap where the application of law is suspended in the name of necessity (war, terrorism, public order). Paradoxically, the law preserves itself by invoking necessity to suspend its own operation in exceptional circumstances, where certain lives or spaces are excluded from legal protection so that legality can continue to function elsewhere as “normal.” Mbembe (2019) extends this through necropolitics, a theory which centres sovereignty’s power to decide life and death and to place certain populations outside ordinary legal protections. Necropolitics then builds on Foucault’s (2003) notion of biopower (the regulation of biological life) by showing how sovereignty —the right to kill—structures contemporary domination by subordinating life to the power of death (Mbembe, 2019, p. 92). The dynamic between the aforementioned concepts stems from colonialism, where sovereignty manifests as the right to kill within territories placed outside ordinary legal protection, or the state of exception (Agamben, 2005).

Building on the conceptualisations offered by Agamben (2005) and Mbembe (2019), Puar (2021) examines how power and death-making operate through sexuality. Her notion of sexual exceptionalism describes how national claims to sexual freedoms and gender equality become markers of cultural superiority, which are then mobilised to promote nationalism or legitimate political violence. Operating bio-politically, sexual exceptionalism reframes incidents of torture and violence against populations targeted for death as a necessary or even redemptive gesture in defence of so-called liberal values.

Grounding social practices in systemic forces, political economy is understood as “the relationship between “capitalist” and “territorialist” “modes of rule or logics of power,” the interconnections between the control and accumulation of capital and the control and expansion of territory” (Arrighi, as cited in Spencer, 2018, p. 192). Accordingly, colonialism, Empire, and capitalism are inherently intertwined (Spencer, 2018; Bhambra, 2020). The political economic perspective frames Abu Ghraib: rather than treating American exceptionalism and imperialism as merely moral claims, it situates them within an economic project. The use of Orientalist imaginaries, and the production of ‘necessary’ legal grey zones and the violence they enable, were legitimising strategies that mobilised nationalism, difference, and fear, as mechanisms for maintaining wartime policies which extended U.S. hegemony by securing control over strategic resources and capital.

Ultimately, these theoretical frameworks depict Abu Ghraib as an exceptional space (Agamben, 2005), wherein sovereign power decided life and death (Mbembe, 2019), and violence was justified as a necessary protective mission so that legality could appear to normally function elsewhere (Agamben, 2005). The use of sexual violence in this space worked dually: to create the exceptional space, and consequently, to maintain claims to cultural superiority and promote nationalism through the (re)production of Orientalist imaginaries (Puar, 2021). Orientalism (Said, 1978, 2004) describes the discourse that provides the moral and cultural justification for U.S. imperial violence as a civilising/liberating project. These ideological formations disciplined noncompliant states, protected extraction infrastructure, and opened markets through privatisation and financialisation (Spencer, 2018; Zabcı, 2010). Accordingly, resource access and capital flows were reordered in the name of security, bringing imperial violence to capitalist accumulation. Thus, the use of sexualised and racialised torture at Abu Ghraib was a means of subjugation and domination.

Sexualised and Racialised Tortue at Abu Ghraib

The colonial logics of sexualised torture as a means of domination is revealed in C. L. R. James’ (1989) discussion of its use by colonisers against enslaved peoples in Haiti. Torture methods included: whipping; iron collars to prevent movement and eating; hitting the buttocks with hot wood; pouring substances onto bleeding wounds; mutilation of limbs, ears, and genitalia; pouring burning wax or boiling sugar on slaves; packing slaves with gun powder and detonating them; and tying their hands and arms to four posts on the ground to force them on all fours (James, 1989, pp. 12-13). James characterises the use of torture as paradoxical: “To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety” (James, 1989, p. 12). James’ analysis explains the logics of torture; although it may physically weaken persons treated as property, it is deployed as a necessary means of maintaining power and ensuring the master’s safety. Many of the torture methods he describes resemble those at Abu Ghraib, particularly physical assault, pouring chemicals and liquids on individuals, attention to genitalia, and forcing prisoners on all fours. The continuity of torture methods serves as reminder that the means by which domination and control are achieved, while appearing to have changed, remain eerily similar to those used in the past. This genealogy reveals that sexualised violence has long been integral to the logics of racial capitalism and Empire. Recognising past and present violence is crucial for understanding capitalism and colonialism as ongoing processes that mutually reinforce one another (Allina-Pisano, 2012; Bhambra, 2020). While in Haiti, violence was a means of dominating subjugated bodies for their labour and thus capital accumulation, sexualised torture in Abu Ghraib reproduced colonial logics of domination by making subjugated bodies unworthy of respect. Their subjugation was rendered necessary to safeguard the security and authority of the capitalist imperial project, including the protection of extraction infrastructures and integration into private markets.

The use of torture extended beyond maintaining domination. Torture was enabled by the discursive production of subjects who endured violence and dehumanisation as “enemies of the state” (Banwell, 2020, p. 116; p. 124). Torture was consequently cast as a necessary and legitimate means of securing safety (James, 1989) for the “West” and its values. The suspension of law (Agamben, 2005) and sovereign power over life and death (Mbembe, 2019) were framed as a redemptive means of defending and spreading liberal values against a putative threat (Banwell, 2020; Bhattacharyya, 2008; Richter-Montpetit, 2007). Torture also functioned to (re)assert the U.S. as Self in response to “emasculating” and power-challenging events, notably 9/11 and Iraqi resistance (Richter-Montpetit, 2007). This rests on Orientalist dichotomies: “Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values — the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma — there would have been no war” (Said, 2004, p. 872). Further, it reproduced Orientalist dichotomies, perpetuating the “East” as dangerous and threatening and the “West” as safe and liberatory, thereby legitimising violence and civilising missions (Banwell, 2020; Khalid, 2017). Sexualised, gendered, and racialised torture (Richter-Montpetit, 2007) extended these imaginaries, operating through pre-existing and continually reproduced hierarchies (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The Muslim body was produced as a legitimate object of torture situated outside the law’s protection and mobilised to affirm a U.S. self-image as sexually liberated and morally advanced. Orientalist dichotomies constructed the “East” as sexually constrained, modest, and backward against a rational, progressive, and sexually liberated “West.” Ultimately, Orientalist dichotomies produced dual claims to exceptionalism: national and sexual (Puar, 2021). Puar (2021) states:

[T]he violence of the United States is an exceptional event, antithetical to Americanness, and thus by extension, U.S. subjects emerge as morally, culturally, and politically exceptional through the production of the victims as repressed, barbaric, closed, uncouth, even homophobic, grounding claims of sexual exceptionalism that hinge on the normativization of certain U.S. feminist and homosexual subjects. (p. 113).

Thus, the production of the subject as an inferior Other and a threat to civilisation enabled and legitimised the use of torture in private aginst detainees.

Domination was enacted not only through physical coercion but also through the eroticisation and spectacularisation of subjugated bodies. Violence and its rationale became a spectacle through photographs, testimonies, and media coverage. By 2004, disturbing images depicting the violent abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib became accessible to global audiences (see Appendix). Despite these images being unintentionally leaked and the controversy that followed, their visible notoriety has played a role in the production of detainees as dehumanised Others, who existed outside the law's protection, and inferior to the liberatory West. Figure 1, depicting two naked men detainees forced to imitate sexual positions, has illustrated the U.S. soldiers’ authority and the production of Muslim bodies as legitimate objects of violence and dehumanisation. The sexualised violence sustained sexual exceptionalism and Orientalist binaries by casting the Muslim body as sexually deviant, and the “East” as a site of suppressed sexuality in contrast to a sexually liberated “West” (Puar, 2021, pp. 87-88). Figure 2, showing naked men detainees piled on top of one another with soldiers posing in the background, has extended this dehumanisation. A visual contrast has emerged between the detainees on top of one another, creating an unstable structure, and the soldiers standing tall and proud, over them. The photograph has thus served as a visual representation of physical domination and imperial assertion, while reproducing Orientalist binaries. According to Banwell (2020), this type of photograph challenges gender hierarchies under American exceptionalism: women soldiers seem to transcend the presumed authority of men by subjugating Iraqi men, who are cast to the lowest stratum of the hierarchy (pp. 124-126). Figure 3 has extended this, depicting a woman soldier holding a naked man detainee on a leash as he lays on the floor. This has converted the more passive domination occurring in Figure 2 into overt instrumental control, placing the detainee at the soldier’s will. Through this act, the soldiers (re)established themselves as white Self while (re)producing the detainees as Other, thereby (re)producing U.S. Empire (Richter-Montpetit, 2007, p. 51).

According to Puar (2021) there is a distinct link between photography and its relationship to dehumanisation: “These photos not only depict the techniques of the torture; they also depict how both process (the photographing) and product (the pictures) are shaming technologies and function as a vital part of the humiliating, de-humanizing violence itself” (p. 107). In other words, the violence is insufficient on its own; rather, the immortalisation of the violence through photographs serves its own necessary purpose in the dehumanising process. Building on this, Richter-Montpetit (2007) sees the distribution of these photographs as evidence of the presumed moral righteousness of the colonial and civilising mission (p. 53). This relates to Said’s (2004), argument that media images capture public attention, exploiting fear and insecurity (p. 876), ultimately securing public support. The photographs, however, do not disappear; they are immortalised – trophies (Richter-Montpetit, 2007, p. 50) – archived and recirculated beyond the control of their victims (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The photographs are akin to the material immortalisation of hunting experiences, through photography and taxidermy, meant to perpetually regenerate and reaffirm the hunter’s masculinity long after the conquest (Jones, 2024, pp. 274-275). Thus, their ability to reaffirm the white Self and (re)produce the Oriental Other has extend long after the torture took place.

The photographs also established a relationship with external viewers who became participants in the violence (Bhattacharyya, 2008). The spectacularisation of violence thus normalised torture for global audiences while reinforcing a “with us or against us” division. Representations of violence not only served to globalise U.S. imperial culture, but also reminded viewers where power resides and the retaliation that resistance risks. The spectacle of torture has thus functioned as both a medium of domination and a warning, helping to sustain the moral and geopolitical order of Empire (Bhattacharyya, 2008).  

Thus, the sexualised and racialised torture at Abu Ghraib asserted and justified imperial power. Sexual torture employed colonial logics of domination, as documented in Haiti (James, 1989). These practices maintained power and (re)produced Self/Other hierarchies, demonstrating how domination continues to operate bodily. The violence occurred in exceptional spaces (Agamben, 2005) where the law was suspended and all actions were framed as necessary to protect liberal values against threats and to advance civilisation. The torture also reinforced Orientalist imaginaries, justifying the methods employed and upholding U.S. exceptionalism and claims to moral superiority. The spectacularisation of violence, immortalised in photographs and media coverage, has extended dehumanisation and Orientalist dichotomies indefinitely. Widespread dissemination guaranteed international audiences, normalising torture and signaling where power resides, thereby sustaining Empire. Violent practices can be situated further within political economy, showing how racial and sexualised violence intersects with capitalism and Empire.

Political Economy of Abu Ghraib

While Orientalist imaginaries are key to legitimising imperial violence (Banwell, 2020; Khalid, 2017; Said, 2004), an ideological framing alone is insufficient to understand the WOT and sexualised torture at Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib must be situated not only within the ideological terrain of Orientalism and imperial violence, but also within the material conditions of occupation. This requires distinguishing between the prison’s function within the occupation and the later public disclosure of the photographs. The leak of the images may indeed have damaged U.S. claims to moral legitimacy; however, this does not negate Abu Ghraib’s role within the imperial apparatus before and during the occupation. As a detention, interrogation, and intimidation site, Abu Ghraib helped produce the conditions through which occupation could be administered. Its violence contributed to the pacification of Iraqi society, the disciplining of resistance, and the consolidation of a security order within which privatisation, resource control, and market recapturing could proceed. In this sense, Abu Ghraib served capitalism as part of the coercive infrastructure required to secure the broader neoliberal and imperial reorganisation of Iraq.

Following Arrighi (qtd. In Spencer, 2018), Spencer (2018) interprets the WOT not merely as an ideological project, but as a strategic response to managing the U.S.’ post-1970s crisis of hegemony. Arrighi (qtd. in Spencer, 2018) traces this crisis to the late 1960s when profitability declined due to new labour militancy, intensifying global competition from Europe and Japan, and post-war capitalist restructuring that eroded manufacturing. Following the Vietnam war, the U.S. moved into a trade deficit and transitioned from one of the world economy’s net creditors to a net debtor. The U.S. sustained global dominance by absorbing capital from the surplus economies of Japan, West Germany, South Korea, the Gulf States, and later China. Capital inflow then bought U.S. Treasury bonds and financed corporate borrowing that funneled into Wall Street where it turned into new financial instruments and consumer loans (Spencer, 2018, p. 199).

The 1970s to 2008 saw an effort by U.S. policymakers to counteract long-term stagnation and prolong hegemony through three strategies: first, redirecting capital flows toward the U.S. market; second, pursuing a global effort to free capital from the constraints of working-class gains; third, suppressing nationalist and communist regimes in the Global South that aimed to regain control of their domestic resources. Thus, imperialism functions as a necessary instrument of U.S. hegemony. (Spencer, 2018, p. 200). Following this logic, the WOT functioned to secure political and military authority, control the supply and price of oil, and discipline noncompliant regimes (Spencer, 2018, pp. 191, 201). Spencer (2018) states, “[t]he war in Iraq was, quite simply, a strategic decision by policy makers to extend US control of the world economy” (p. 202).

This political-economic history established the conditions in which the WOT, and thus Abu Ghraib, operated, linking militarised domination to the management of global capital. The war’s racial and sexual violence must be understood through Orientalist imaginaries, the production of Iraqi subjects as “enemies of the state” (Banwell, 2020, pp. 116, 124), and the spectacularisation of violence to global audiences, legitimising the war efforts abroad. These violent campaigns are cast, not as unjust harms against people, but as essential actions against perceived threats to safety and liberalism that legitimise political claims to aggregated power. For example, Bush’s post-9/11 referral to himself as the Commander in Chief of the Army which, Agamben (2005) says,

must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible. (p. 22)

The blurring of peace and war also appears in the normalisation of “pre-emptive war strategies,” whereby the military can act without any overt threat against states that have been constructed as “evil” or “threatening.” Thus, conflict becomes everlasting, with no hope for respite, ultimately maintaining the conditions of control over global resources and capital flows, and paving the way for the expansion of neoliberalism (Zabcı, 2010, pp. 93-95). In the case of Iraq, this was done by integrating their economy into global markets through private revitalisation and restructuring. This includes: the privatisation of Iraqi state industries, particularly oil; moves towards financialisation, such as modernising stock exchanges, giving the central bank independence in pursuing monetary policy, and issuing credit; establishing new currency; creating legal frameworks compatible with privatisation, production, and distribution; and altering tax and tariff systems (USID/US Treasury document titled “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth”, as cited in Zabcı, 2010, p. 95). Fisk (2007) notes that oil was often left out of discussions about Iraq, despite being “the all-important and dominating factor in this illegitimate conflict” (p. 958). Further, the protection of southern Iraqi oilfields was a top concern (Fisk, 2007, p. 958). In line with this, keeping Iraqi oil accessible to international companies, and achieving private control over profitable oil fields, ultimately allowed more control over oil prices (Zabcı, 2010, p. 97). This, coupled with free market ideology, are forms of capital accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004), reflecting extractivism (Chagnon et al., 2022). The subjugation of racialised bodies for the geopolitical management of capital thus illustrates how race and finance are intertwined and essential to the development and persistence of capitalism and Empire (Kish and Leroy, 2015; Robinson, 2021).

Sexualised torture thus (re)produced the ideological foundations necessary to legitimise practices motivated by political-economic interests. It spectacularised imperial violence, portraying the U.S. as a victim engaging in morally righteous endeavours by defending liberal values and pursuing a civilising mission. This mission was legitimised by mobilising Orientalist dichotomies, but also served to reinforce them through U.S. exceptionalism and the dissemination of photographs which immortalised imaginaries of the “East” as backward, conservative, and sexually suppressed, the ideological opposite of the so-called liberatory, civilised, and sexually foreward “West.” Their global dissemination also played a role in desensitising audiences to violence, normalising punitive domination, and signalling where power resides and what resistance risks. Thus, spectacle turns coercion into common sense, legitimising action driven by political-economic interests, and connecting racialised hierarchy to market rule.

Conclusion

Situated within the post-1970s capitalist crises of accumulation and the extension of U.S. hegemony through control of global resources and capital, Abu Ghraib was not incidental, nor the mistreatment inflicted by a few individual actors; rather, it was an exceptional space in which sovereignty suspended law in the name of security, allowing sexualised and racialised violence. Through Orientalist imaginaries and the spectacle of violence, Abu Ghraib’s abuses were framed as necessary to protect liberal values and spread civilisation. Such justificatory frameworkers legitimised the wider imperial project, disciplining noncompliant states, protecting extraction infrastructures, and reopening markets via privatisation and financialisation. Abu Ghraib thus represents a convergence of colonial logics of domination, American exceptionalism, subjugation over Oriental Others, the spectacularisation of violence, and the management of capitalist crises, revealing the inherent connection between imperialism and capitalism.

Such analysis exposes the intentionality of persistent war and exceptional spaces, and the violence they inflict for the benefit of capitalism and Empire. Ongoing attempts to neglect this aspect of Abu Ghraib serve to uphold the legitimising tones of Orientalist imaginaries, relying on stereotypes and spectacle to justify past and current forms of domination over people and the extraction of resources. Acknowledging Abu Ghraib as an instrument of a moral narrative about security and liberation to justify economic strategy aligns coercive power with market objectives. This recentres attention from the existence of individual misconduct towards racial governance and accumulation, situating Abu Ghraib within the function of U.S. hegemony. Accordingly, Abu Ghraib was not an outlier, but a manifestation of a system where security logics reallocate access to resources and markets. These outcomes warrant rethinking the structural systems that uphold such sites and what it takes to dismantle them.

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Appendix

Figure 1

Naked men detainees imitating sexual positions (originally published in The New Yorker).

From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).

https://www.theguardian.com/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html.

Figure 2

Naked men detainees piled on top of each other (originally published in The New Yorker).

From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).

https://www.theguardian.com/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html.

Figure 3

Naked man detainee attached to a leash that is held by a soldier (originally published in The Washington Post).

From The images that shamed America (The Guardian, 2004).

https://www.theguardian.com/gall/0,8542,1211872,00.html.

By Amelie Pelletier

Edited by Amina Emes & Miranda Blell, Peer Reviewed by Alex Bagdade

Memory work following large-scale international conflicts is often inseparable from physical spaces that carry symbolic meaning. This is particularly evident in the design, establishment, and maintenance of soldiers’ final resting places. Following the American Civil War (1861-1865), which shaped modern traditions of war dead burial, cemeteries, burial grounds, and memorials proliferated as sites to honor those who sacrificed their lives. Across countries directly involved in conflicts or on whose territory battles were fought, expansive cemeteries marked by long rows of white crosses, orderly tombstones, and commemorative art stand as austere reminders of the human cost of war. In the case of World War II, Allied cemeteries specifically commemorate those who contributed to defeating the Third Reich, whose atrocities remain seared into collective memory. These memorial landscapes, visited by both residents and tourists, provide spaces not only for remembrance but also for reflection on the price of peace and the enduring imperative to prevent future conflict.

Yet the burial of enemy soldiers posed a far more complicated challenge. In postwar Europe, Germany faced the unprecedented task of managing the bodies of soldiers who had fought for a regime responsible for genocide and large-scale disaster. Citizens confronted mass casualties in urban ruins, lacking resources, authority, or guidance under Allied occupation to dispose of the dead. Furthermore, families of the deceased sought comfort concerning the treatment of the bodies of their loved ones abroad. Unlike the Allies, Germany could not publicly mourn or honor its dead without risking glorification of perpetrators. These conditions created a moral and political dilemma: how could the dead be treated with dignity without producing sites of martyrdom or heroification? How could international law, occupation policies, and local sensitivities shape the burial of German soldiers, both at home and abroad?

The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission, hereafter referred to as Volksbund), emerged to address this dilemma. Tasked with overseeing the burial of German soldiers in Germany and abroad, the Volksbund had to navigate both practical and moral ambiguities. In doing so, it developed practices that emphasized the shared suffering of all war dead, creating a depoliticized language of universal victimhood. This approach, while facilitating the organization of burial and commemoration, also illustrates the delicate risk inherent in postwar memorialization: without clear guidance, commemorative practices can flatten power dynamics, blur distinctions between perpetrators and victims, and shape collective memory in subtle but significant ways.

The Volksbund thus serves as a case study for understanding the broader stakes of postwar burial politics. This paper examines the moral, political, and spatial frameworks governing the burial of German soldiers, both in Germany and abroad. It analyzes which entities held authority over these spaces and the principles guiding their creation, explores the ethical and practical challenges these decisions generated, and considers how burial practices contributed, if unevenly, to reconciliation or collective memory. Ultimately, it argues that although the Volksbund was a necessary entity which facilitated the disposal of remains as well as early forms of postwar reconciliation, some of its approaches risked and continue to risk moral equivalence between the victims and the perpetrators of the conflict.

Postwar chaos and the origins of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge

When the Red Army entered Berlin in May 1945, the devastation of the city was immediate and overwhelming. Streets, buildings, and infrastructure lay in ruins, and the human toll was staggering: countless bodies were left unburied amid the rubble, victims of battle, starvation, and disease. In a society that had long constructed meaning around death through heroification and selective commemoration during the war, Germans were suddenly confronted with mass mortality without guidance or infrastructure. Makeshift cemeteries, coffins, tombstones, mass graves, and other emergency means of disposal left them “trying to salvage graves that amounted to personal memorials or were linked to the recent past and the individual memories of the war experience.” In Berlin especially but throughout Germany, individuals were left in great proximity with their unburied dead. This was a distressing position: lack of resources, war shock, and political vulnerability left Germans under the authority of the Allied armies, with little to no agency over the burial of their dead.

The origins of organized German war burial trace back to the aftermath of World War I. Prior to that conflict, war burials were often undertaken by the armies themselves or by local villagers, and German soldiers who died abroad were most likely buried on site. However, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles included a clause that “recognised any Commission appointed by an Allied or Associated Government for the purpose of identifying, registering, caring for or erecting suitable memorials over the graves and to facilitate the discharge of its duties.” This provision led to the creation of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, or German War Graves Commission. The Volksbund became the leading entity in charge of repatriating and overseeing the burial of German soldiers. The Treaty also foreshadowed the need to provide an adequate burial to any dead of the war regardless of nationality or country of death, as stipulated in Article 225: “the graves of prisoners of war and interned civilians who are nationals of the different belligerent States and have died in captivity shall be properly maintained.”

During World War II, burial of the German dead was managed by a dedicated department within the Nazi regime. Yet, as the Third Reich collapsed, the phenomena seen in Berlin (bodies accumulating with little infrastructure, guidance, or resources) spread across Germany. Although the German Red Cross, the leading mass medical emergency institution controlled by the Nazis, was disbanded by the Allies upon their arrival, the pressing need for such an organization led to its reestablishment under Allied supervision. A West and Unified Germany Red Cross and an East Germany Red Cross became primarily responsible for overseeing burials within Germany.

In the following months, the immediate crisis receded and responsibility was re-assigned to the Volksbund in 1946. The organization undertook the enormous task of burying German soldiers both domestically and abroad, guided by both moral and legal imperatives. Its mission was reinforced by the 1949 renewal of the Geneva Convention, which stipulated that “signatories in Europe were obliged to take care of the graves on their territory, including the enemy’s graves. Countries of the former German occupation concluded a special agreement with Germany concerning the preservation and protection of the German graves abroad.” Today, the Volksbund oversees 832 military cemeteries in 46 countries, accounting for approximately 2.75 million dead, from Egypt to Ireland to Canada. It claims responsibility for the burial of military personnel as well as civilians and victims of genocide, positioning the organization as the central custodian of German wartime memory across national and ideological boundaries.

Parameters for burial of the German war dead in Western Europe

Within Germany, war cemeteries were constructed according to broader principles governing post-World War II memory work. In Western Germany in particular, the Allied presence imposed a denazification and reeducation process aimed at stripping the country of lingering National Socialist ideology and reintroducing democracy, freedom, equality, and human rights according to Allied principles. Much of this process involved the removal or transformation of Germany’s monuments and physical spaces of Nazism, including statues, parks, and cemeteries. Central to this effort was ensuring that German citizens were confronted with their responsibility and guilt in the conflict. American soldiers in Germany carried out “forced confrontations,” in which German citizens, including children as young as five years old, were tasked with exhuming, observing, and reinterring victims of death camps in their own cemeteries whilst Americans looked on, as a grim reminder of what their government had done. This focused responsibility set the tone for the way Germany would be allowed to bury its own dead: as perpetrators of tragedy rather than as national heroes.

Written regulations for the burial of German war dead were sparse, yet certain patterns emerge across cemeteries created for this purpose. In Germany itself, a special law for war graves was passed in 1952 to protect the burial places of “Nazi victims, meaning Jewish concentration camp prisoners, political opponents, forced laborers, and soldiers.” The creation and design of these cemeteries, however, was far from a straightforward process. It was not easy for Germans to “remember their dead because they brought about terrible atrocities with two world wars [...] (which) is why German war cemeteries are minimalistic. For the Germans there can be no hero tributes.” Consequently, cemeteries are sober, with markers bearing only names and dates and lacking the grand monuments to heroism that characterize Allied cemeteries. This applied to low-level soldiers and officers, while the Allied forces decreed that prominent Nazis should be buried in unmarked graves to prevent Nazi sympathizers from turning them into shrines. The ranks and affiliations of the dead could also provoke debate. While most cemeteries accepted name and death markers only for low-level enlisted soldiers, some German war cemeteries feature markers for groups such as the Schutzstaffel (or SS, as it is more commonly known). Whether these SS burials were oversights, exceptions permitted by the cemetery, or discovered posthumously, these instances remain controversial.

Regulations governing the burial of German war dead in non-German Western Europe were largely determined by the host countries. Cemetery design often depended on bilateral agreements with Germany and frequently followed the precedent of World War I burial sites. Several factors influenced these designs, including host nation requirements and budgetary allocations. Belgium, for example, “imposed very strict sanctions on German memorials.” Headstones were prohibited from standing upright like those of Allied soldiers, instead lying flat, and some cemeteries forbade crosses altogether. France and the Netherlands explicitly banned nationalist and military symbols in German cemeteries, though Christian symbols and crosses were permitted. In Norway, the government funded granite grave markers for all soldiers, including Germans, while the Volksbund remained responsible for crosses, tool sheds, visitor centers, and related infrastructure.

While bilateral agreements dictated finances and general design, the Volksbund retained considerable flexibility in caring for its dead. This latitude arose for two reasons: first, the relative consistency and variability of World War II German burials in Western Europe reflected trust developed through postwar international relations, particularly due to the extensive Allied role in rebuilding and reeducating Germany. Once it was understood that Germany would refrain from glorification and heroification, memorialization could proceed, generally structured by host-country agreements. Secondly, the chaos of the immediate postwar period which was marked by inconsistencies in denazification and East-West political distractions left the Volksbund with limited supervision, granting it leeway in designing cemeteries abroad. This autonomy, however, sometimes produced controversies related to administrative decisions and the ideological backgrounds of Volksbund members.

The Volksbund in Eastern Europe

While the burial of German war dead developed into a relatively structured process in Western Europe, the same cannot be said for the involvement of the Volksbund in Eastern Europe. The Volksbund was a West German organization and its presence in territories devastated by the German invasion carried significant political and moral implications.

Approximately 30 million soldiers and civilians died in the then-Soviet Union, more than in any other nation involved in the conflict. Eastern Europe was also particularly victimized by Nazi genocide, as it was the location of the majority of concentration camps and the site of many mass killings associated with the regime’s racial policies. The Eastern Front was therefore an exceptionally brutal war space whose legacy left profound trauma across the region. These deep scars, compounded by the famines and political conflicts that followed the war and continue to shape the region today, created a complex and sensitive terrain for the Volksbund to navigate.

The descent of the Iron Curtain in 1945 effectively cut the Volksbund off from accessing the territory where a large portion of German war deaths had occurred. This situation persisted until the end of the Cold War and the gradual process of reconciliation between East and West. In 1990, Germany signed an agreement with the Gorbachev government ensuring the “legal protection of Soviet memorials in Germany.” This step toward reciprocity laid the groundwork for further cooperation. The Volksbund was eventually allowed to begin work on former Soviet territory following the signing of the War Grave Agreement in 1992, which officially came into effect in 1994. The agreement was framed around the principle that “the maintenance of the graves of the war dead on German and Russian soil constitutes a concrete expression of the understanding and reconciliation between the German people and the peoples of the Russian Federation.” Although “reconciliation over the graves” had been adopted as the official motto of the Volksbund in 1953, the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided the first opportunity for this principle to be implemented across Eastern Europe. Prior to 1989, Soviet officials had maintained that there would never be a German grave on Soviet soil. The eventual agreement allowing such burials therefore represented a significant moment in postwar international relations, symbolizing a fragile but meaningful step toward reconciliation between former enemies.

Despite official permission to operate within the Russian Federation, the Volksbund’s work was far from uncontested. One notable example is the German war cemetery in the village of Sologubovka in Russia, inaugurated in 2000. The design and construction of the cemetery began five years earlier as a collaborative effort between Russian architects and Volksbund personnel. Gaining approval from the local community, the veterans’ association of St. Petersburg, and the local Orthodox Church proved to be an arduous process marked by prolonged negotiations and disagreements.

The first point of conflict emerged over the memorial plaque at the cemetery’s entrance, as German and Russian representatives struggled to agree on the start and end dates of the Second World War. The language used to describe the soldiers buried there also proved difficult to settle. The most significant controversy, however, arose over the Volksbund’s intention to install a sculpture at the center of the cemetery. Donated by a German artist, the sculpture was titled The Mourning Mother of Nagasaki. The Volksbund defended its choice by drawing parallels with American-Japanese reconciliation, hoping to echo that dynamic in a German-Russian context. Russian partners, however, objected to the sculpture on the grounds that it risked presenting the buried German soldiers as innocent victims and potentially heroifying them. The proposal sparked considerable controversy within the local community. Ultimately, a compromise was reached: rather than being installed in the cemetery itself, the sculpture was relocated to the adjacent Peace Park, where it still stands today.

Controversies such as those surrounding Sologubovka are far from unusual in Eastern Europe. Volksbund representatives and local Russian observers alike have noted that Soviet commemorative practices traditionally emphasized collective sacrifice rather than individual graves. Mass graves and monumental memorials dedicated to victory were common, reflecting a different cultural approach to mourning the war dead. When German cemeteries began appearing in the region, featuring individual graves for family visits, carefully maintained greenery, and significant attention to landscape design, some Russians expressed disappointment that their own soldiers had not received similar treatment. This sentiment was particularly striking given that the Soviet Union had both defeated and suffered immensely at the hands of the Nazi regime.

The Sologubovka project therefore illustrates two intertwined realities. First, it demonstrates the willingness of former enemies to cooperate in commemorating their dead. Second, it highlights the profound complexity of undertaking such efforts in regions where the memory of German violence remains deeply embedded in collective consciousness. This tension functions as a leitmotif throughout many of the Volksbund’s activities in Eastern Europe. The controversies surrounding these projects reflect the difficulties faced by a nation attempting to commemorate its dead in territories that experienced immense suffering under its occupation. Despite these challenges, the scale of the effort remains considerable: today, the Volksbund manages over 400 German cemeteries across Eastern Europe. The most recent Russian cemetery was inaugurated in 2013, and the organization continues to explore the possibility of further projects in the region.

Controversies surrounding the Volksbund

It is difficult to ignore the historical controversies associated with the Volksbund. The organization originated after the First World War, and its activities during the interwar years were closely tied to right-wing ideology and the heroification of German war dead in service of nationalist narratives. According to historian Susanne Brandt, “During the interwar years, some sites (e.g. Langemark cemetery in Belgium) were purposefully exploited in order to idealize the greatness of the victims and their readiness to sacrifice themselves, to prepare a new war, and to deny military defeat.” The ideological orientation of the organization was further reflected in its membership. Many participants in the Volksbund during this period were described as “disenchanted soldiers and right-wing radical groups, who espoused the stab-in-the-back myth.” The origins of the Volksbund are therefore intertwined with nationalist radicalism and revisionist memory politics, a legacy that complicates its later role in managing the burial of German war dead after the Second World War.

In 1952, the Volksbund officially received approval from the Allied authorities to install World War II memorials within Germany itself. The individuals responsible for carrying out this work were often veterans of the conflict, including former soldiers and, in some cases, members of the SS. Some historians, including David Livingstone, argue that while the Volksbund played an important role in closing wounds for German families by repatriating and burying their relatives, the organization’s connections to right-wing patriotic networks simultaneously risked reopening wounds for victims of the Nazi regime. Although the Volksbund underwent a process of denazification after the war, these efforts were often inconsistent. The urgency surrounding the burial of the dead created conditions in which screening was limited, and some members of the organization had previously been fervent Nazi supporters. Wilhelm Lübotter, for example, served as a Volksbund architect and was commissioned by the British occupation authorities in 1945 to design a victims’ monument at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Yet Lübotter had earlier been a Nazi supporter who designed Heinrich Himmler’s Saxon’s Grove, an SS gathering site located only a few miles from Bergen. Such cases reveal the conflicts of interest that permeated the early postwar activities of the Volksbund and suggest that the organization’s humanitarian work was not entirely detached from its ideological past.

The Volksbund has also faced criticism for its tendency to frame all war dead within a single moral category. As previously noted, the 1952 special law for war graves groups together “Nazi victims, meaning Jewish concentration camp prisoners, political opponents, forced laborers, and soldiers.” In practice, the Volksbund has taken responsibility for maintaining the graves of civilians, German soldiers, and victims of genocide alike. This arrangement raises important ethical questions, as the same institution that buries the perpetrators of wartime violence also claims responsibility for commemorating their victims. The organization frequently operates within a narrative of collective “war victims,” employing a vocabulary centered on “peace” and “remembrance” as universal concepts. While such language may facilitate reconciliation for some parties, it can also obscure the profound asymmetries that defined the wartime relationship between perpetrators and victims.

Over time, the Volksbund has repositioned itself as a semi-private charitable organization dedicated to education, reconciliation, and peace. Nevertheless, the tensions embedded in its history illustrate how difficult it is to separate humanitarian burial practices from the political and moral questions surrounding the legacy of the Third Reich. The Volksbund’s activities demonstrate how unresolved historical issues can sometimes be subsumed within broader narratives of reconciliation rather than fully confronted. In this sense, the controversies surrounding the organization reveal the broader challenge at the heart of burying the enemy: the burial site itself can become a space where questions of responsibility, memory, and moral hierarchy remain unsettled.

The Volksbund and memory

The work of memorialization and commemoration is intrinsically linked to popular understandings of the past. As the leading entity responsible for caring for the German war dead, as well as for organizing youth exchanges and commemorative events, the Volksbund occupies an influential position in shaping the public memory of World War II in Germany. This responsibility is significant given that German memory of the war remains a deeply contested field. Much of the philosophy guiding the Volksbund’s activities stems from the idea that death functions as a universal equalizer. Within this framework, the fact of death itself becomes the central element of commemoration, rather than the political or moral context in which that death occurred.

This perspective has contributed to a broader trend in German collective memory in which private mourning for the war dead acquires a public dimension. In this context, German soldiers are sometimes framed as victims of the war, occasionally in ways that place them symbolically alongside displaced, disenfranchised, abused and murdered victims of the conflict. Visitors to German war cemeteries outside Germany, for example, are often encouraged to view the soldiers buried there as “brothers, fathers, and sons.” Such language emphasizes the human loss experienced by families and communities while largely setting aside the ideological commitments or actions of those who served the Nazi regime. In this sense, the Volksbund’s commemorative practices focus on the fact of death itself rather than on the historical circumstances surrounding that death, suggesting that the soldiers, through dying, become victims in their own right.

Some cemeteries have attempted to address this tension by including contextual information about the genocidal regime for which these soldiers fought, thereby resisting interpretations that might neutralize or absolve their actions. Notably, such contextualization is often introduced by external actors, such as Jewish organizations, rather than by the Volksbund itself. As a result, critics have argued that the organization risks “blurring the lines” between victims and perpetrators through its commemorative language and spatial practices.

These discourses can contribute to broader narratives in which German civilians are framed as “victims of global circumstances,” implicitly placing their suffering on a level comparable to that of those persecuted by the Third Reich. Such interpretations carry important ideological implications. In extreme cases, they echo elements of the “stab-in-the-back” mythology that emerged after the First World War, which claimed that Germany’s defeat resulted not from military failure but from internal betrayal. Narratives that minimize or diffuse responsibility risk reinforcing these historical patterns of deflection. This concern is particularly relevant in the present context, as Nazi-sympathizing tendencies have been observed in several groups in recent years, including within Germany itself.

The term “Nazi” continues to evoke a powerful and deeply negative memory of the regime’s crimes. The vast body of museums, literature, films, and other forms of public memory dedicated to the atrocities of the Third Reich demonstrates that educational and commemorative efforts have largely succeeded in foregrounding the experiences of the regime’s victims. Yet tensions remain when the focus shifts to the physical landscapes of burial for German soldiers. Cemeteries are inherently spaces of mourning and respect, and the line between commemoration and reverence can become difficult to maintain when the dead include both perpetrators and victims of the same conflict. The activities of the Volksbund illustrate how burial sites themselves can become arenas in which these tensions are negotiated, highlighting the persistent challenge of commemorating the German war dead without obscuring the moral asymmetries of the war they fought.

Conclusion

The vast number of bodies left across Europe at the end of the Second World War required systematic organization, both to prevent disease and to ensure proper burial. The Volksbund emerged in response to this problem, taking on the task of locating, exhuming, and reburying German war dead abroad. Yet in postwar Germany, mourning could not occur collectively or nationally. Because of Germany’s responsibility for Nazi crimes, grief remained largely private. The desire of families to know the fate of their relatives, however, created a powerful demand for institutions capable of managing the dead. Operating within the tensions of denazification, reeducation, and collective guilt, the Volksbund became an intermediary between personal mourning and international diplomacy. Its work required cooperation with former enemy states and therefore contributed, often pragmatically, to postwar reconstruction and the normalization of international relations.

At the same time, the organization’s activities reveal the political complexities of commemorating the defeated. Efforts to honor the German war dead inevitably intersected with questions of responsibility, victimhood, and historical memory. The history of the Volksbund therefore demonstrates that burial and commemoration are never purely humanitarian acts; they are also shaped by the power structures and moral consequences of the conflict that produced the dead.

Examining these tensions is essential for understanding how societies manage the aftermath of mass violence. As future conflicts inevitably produce similar challenges, the experience of the Volksbund illustrates both the necessity of recovering and burying the dead and the importance of approaching such efforts with careful attention to historical responsibility and the protection of victims.

Although this paper was originally written in 2023, debates surrounding the burial and commemoration of German war dead have continued to evolve in the years since. Recent reporting in 2025 and early 2026 has highlighted renewed controversies surrounding the discovery, exhumation, and reburial of Nazi-era remains in Germany and across Europe, as well as public debates over the role of institutions such as the Volksbund in managing these sites. Furthermore, the exhumation and reburial of remains in several areas of Eastern Europe has come to a halt in the recent intensification of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. These discussions underscore that the questions explored in this paper, about commemoration, responsibility, and the ethical framing of burial practices, are not confined to the immediate postwar period but remain part of an ongoing negotiation of historical memory in the present.

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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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