This paper tracks the juridical conceptual assimilation of anticolonial revolution to inter-state war by rendering both “international armed conflict.” Conventionally narrated as an episode of progress in international law, this assimilative-conceptualization was the result of the international efforts of national liberation movements during the 1970s. Not only were their revolutions now fully governed by international humanitarian law, but these revolutions were also becoming equal in status to inter-state war. Henceforth, freedom fighters would cease to be abandoned to colonial powers; instead, they would, at least in theory, receive legal protections similar to state-soldiers. National liberation struggles would no longer constitute private war or terror. But are there other consequences to this particular juridical reclassification and internationalization? What did the twentieth century discourse of international armed conflict entail? What political horizons did it enact? How did it rupture the concept of revolution, in its relationship to war? And were there practices of struggle in excess of the juridical concept of “international armed conflicts”? And what remains of these practices today?
Thinking from the past and present of Palestine, this paper argues that in its internationalization as armed conflict, anticolonial revolution was juridicalized, that is, sovereign power was codified as the central analytic. Struggle, as an anticolonial practice, faded. Instead of prefiguring postcolonial freedom, juridical internationalist discourses incited anticolonial prefiguration of postcolonial sovereign power. Or in Foucauldian terms, international juridical discourse with its focus on sovereign right, and depiction of politics through the lens of pacifying sovereigns, could only recognize struggles that claimed to be pacifying and sovereign, that is to say, struggles that mirror wars of division. All other struggles that continued to be waged underneath this sovereign war of division receded discursively. Such was the dark side of seeking equality in institutions of juridical internationalism. Nevertheless, these discourses did not eliminate all other articulations or practices of anticolonial struggle. It was still possible during the 1970s to mix discourses of armed conflict and armed struggle. This mixing was indicative of another feature of decolonization: the sovereign right to war was yet to take over all imaginaries; other freedom struggles were still articulatable and active. Revolution, or thawra in Arabic, continued to open up horizons other than state capture, or the institution of a new legal order.
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