Krever, Tor (2022) From Vietnam to Palestine : peoples’ tribunals and the juridification of resistance. In: Cuddy, Brian and Kattan, Victor, (eds.) Making Endless War : The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts and the Remaking of International Law. Michigan : University of Michigan Press.

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Abstract

In this chapter, I show how in the case of both the Vietnam and Palestine peoples' tribunals the tension between law and politics resolved itself into the question of these bodies’ relationship with international law. In both cases, international law and legality were foregrounded as the privileged frame of analysis and condemnation. Yet the two tribunals also differed in important respects, reflecting a shift over time in how the constitutive tension between law and politics was balanced. The embrace of international law by the Vietnam tribunal in the 1960s, at the height of the Third World movement and anti-colonial internationalism, can, I suggest, be understood as an instance of ‘principled opportunism’—legalism mobilised in aid of the tribunal’s broader practice of resistance against imperialism. By the time a peoples’ tribunal for Palestine was constituted in 2009, however, both Third World and workers’ movements had collapsed, the language of international law and human rights displacing other emancipatory frameworks in the political imagination of internationalism. This can be seen, I argue, in the even greater prominence awarded legalism by the Palestine tribunal, international law now not merely invoked tactically, but celebrated as the tribunal’s very raison d’être. In this way, peoples’ tribunals both reflect, and contribute to, the juridification of resistance.

Item Type:	Book Item
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D204 Modern History J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration J Political Science > JX International law J Political Science > JZ International relations K Law [LC] > K Law (General) K Law [Moys] > KC International Law K Law [LC] > KZ Law of Nations
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Place of Publication:	Michigan
Book Title:	Making Endless War : The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts and the Remaking of International Law
Editor:	Cuddy, Brian and Kattan, Victor
Official Date:	2022
Dates:	Date Event 2022 Published 15 April 2021 Accepted
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Forthcoming
Date of first compliant deposit:	5 July 2021

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