Richard Joyce and Sundhya Pahuja, “International law, populism and Palestine: An interview with Nahed Samour”, London Review of International Law 13 (2025), pp. 267-284.
Richard Joyce and Sundhya Pahuja, scholars of international law at the University of Melbourne, interviewed international law scholar Nahed Samour for the London Review of International Law on 15 May 2024. The interview is a master class on how to reconcile the critique of law with a realist and positivist engagement in order to prevent genocide and to pursue justice. It is a lesson in how to bridge the national, the international and the transnational; in connecting scholasticide with the authoritarian instrumentalization of emancipatory concepts such as campus safety; on the responsibility of university teachers and the power of student movements.
A short summary can hardly do justice to the richness of the interview, which, albeit academic, is also a deeply personal and caring conversation between three relentless scholars about the status of the world and international law’s role and responsibility within it. It is an inspiration to learn what, in their view, the discipline of international law still has to offer, especially when it is informed “from below” and exercised in solidarity, in the struggle for self-determination and the right of all people not to live under the rubble of (post)colonialism, apartheid, political oppression and economic exploitation.
Care is at the heart of this interview: care for people regardless where and who they are, care for your discipline, for our (academic) freedom to protest, work and think freely and together with each other beyond any type of borders; care about this unjust world, which compels us to be critical.
Nahed Samour reminds readers and especially her colleagues in international law that the way we ask and frame questions about a situation and its evaluation under international law always has consequences in the material world. These consequences are not so much felt by those doing international law but by those who are directly affected and who mostly stand on the margins of what the German and/or Western discourse considers to be the right legal perspective from which the world and its conflicts should be examined. The law itself, while coming in a language of the universal and building on the myth of the civilized liberal nation state, reinforces, under the disguise of the legal and objective, a truly unjust and violent world (dis)order for the many.
And yet, today “referencing a legal system that is inherently bourgeois, liberal, and conventional [is being] regarded as a radical act.” Nahed Samour observes how legal terms such as genocide and apartheid are being “discredited as ideological terms, or Kampfbegriffe.” She identifies techniques of omission, e.g. by international lawyers who talk about violations of international humanitarian law by Israel but not about genocide, despite genocide cases against Israel pending before the ICJ. Other tools are the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism that allows for the instrumentalization of the latter, and the shameless devaluations of life that are responsible for persistent impunity, because the destruction of some lives does not matter as much as the destruction of others.
The interview is an appeal to international lawyers not to sit back and not to be complacent, but to recognize the duty to prevent genocide as also directed at themselves; to question their own complicity and that of their institutions; to do justice to their responsibility as teachers and educators.