In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Frédéric Mégret, Neve Gordon, and Nicola Perugini. As the devastation of Gaza is permitted to continue to unfold, and colonial violence also intensifies in the West Bank, we discuss the role and responsibility of international law in enabling and structuring mass violence, the enduring importance of colonial histories in shaping the colonial present of international law .

In the face of the refusal or failure of domestic state law regimes and governments to confront even extreme instances of violence we often turn to international law as a panacea or at least a site of salvation and hope. And yet we know that international law not only prohibits certain forms of violence, but actually enables others, including shaped in part by its own colonial histories, perhaps no longer articulated explicitly in terms of standards of civilization, the language of savages and barbarians, but encoding a colonial and racial line in maybe more subtle, and less obvious ways.

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