From Vietnam to Palestine : peoples’ tribunals and the juridification of resistance

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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.

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