International Law vs The Wretched of the Earth: A tale of big trees and small axes

Many years ago, I decided to study international law. I was impelled by a desire to find a pathway within the law to respond to the plight of those whom Frantz Fanon describes as the Wretched of the Earth (more accurately, the damned of the earth; see Switzer, 2021, for more on this point). What I found by the end of my PhD was that international law and the international community have mostly been futilely spoken of as sources of hope for the wretched. The last couple of years in particular have demonstrated how both of these institutions (if we can call them that) are significantly responsible for making the wretched of the earth rather than saving them. Those who are persecuted, in despair, abandoned, oppressed and derelict cry out in vain to international law for help. Over and over again.

What is it about the nature of international law that makes this result inevitable across space and time? From the enslaved and dispossessed, those facing genocide and ecocide in the past and present – why do they always stand alone with outstretched arm futilely before them? In Disrupting International Law’s Colonial Afterlives of Human Property, I reflect on how international law in particular creates overlapping meanings of bodies, property, and space and how those meanings are vital to underwriting and reproducing the colonial project… all the way into the present. This chapter was part of Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialized Boundaries edited by Al-Attar, Mohsen, and Claire Smith and published by OUP Open Access in 2026. We started working on our chapters around 2020, so it is inevitable that I wrote about pandemic inequalities. However, the core of the argument I make could be about any structure of racial violence from the last 500 years.

My argument is very much informed by Bhandar’s articulation of the colonial lives of property, where she explains how Lockean justifications for private property and techniques of abstraction blend legal meanings and ontologies of property, the racial, subject, and object. In essence, to understand how the law perceives the concept of being human, you have to understand how it constructs the concept of property and the concept of being racialised. The building blocks of these concepts are so closely related as to be indistinguishable. Bhandar argues that race-making practices are entangled with property-making practices and cannot be distinguished into cause and effect. In other words, it was not that the objective existence of neutral racial categories provided justification for the dispossession of life and property. Rather, the desire to dispossess for accumulation purposes gave justification for the creation of racial categories that are contingent on that desire. The result is that the legal language which produces the meanings of race is entangled within the legal language that produces our legal understanding of property. This “fuses property and race together” forever (Bhandar 2014: 205). In essence, legal knowledge relies on similar logics to produce meanings about property, race, and what it means to be properly human.

It is through this process that the dehumanisation of the category ‘human’ has resulted in grave and detrimental material effects. This includes the establishment of hierarchies and conditionalities within the category human, attendant overexploitation of human labour and the earth, and law’s inability to protect life above material gain. This final chilling effect emanates largely from the ways in which the law has been used to make property out of everything, for the benefit of very few. International law and the international community have greased the wheels of this process by providing practical and political legitimacy to the outcomes of human dispossession. Think about the minute intricacies of providing legality to racialised enslavement and extractive colonisation and what that meant to the intimate realities of people’s everyday lives.

The ongoing-ness of the colonial project is the crystallisation and laboratory for these processes. Race continues to be used to identify who gets to be legitimately allowed into the category ‘human’ – whose labour can lawfully be stolen, whose land can be lawfully taken and whose lives are lawfully forfeit. The law speaks out of both sides of its mouth. One side promises liberty, equality, justice and the brotherhood of man. On the other side, legitimate invasion and dispossession, dehumanisation and annihilation in repeat violations of the promises we believe we hear in the name of international law. Thus, Charles Mills critiques traditional “social contract” theories (expounded by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, etc.) which posit that societies are formed by equal individuals agreeing to cooperate for the common good. Rather, for Mills, global society is founded on an unwritten, exploitative agreement among White people to establish and maintain global white supremacy by dividing humanity into full “persons” and sub-human “non-persons”. According to Grear, this hierarchy is fundamental to the DNA of the law and its protection of property AND whiteness. It is the law that ensures successful invasion by demanding and providing legitimation through the introduction and imposition of the coloniser’s law alongside a simultaneous delegitimisation of the law of the colonised. A coloniser law that sees and protects property (capital) accumulation and refuses to see humans made into the wretched of the earth.

Thus, the international legal order is inevitably characterised by various forms of inequality. As Linarelli, Salomon, and Sonarajah argue, international law establishes and maintains a permanence of misery, driven by capitalist need and greed, inaugurated by a world structure advancing on classifications of humanity into hierarchies, geographies, and acceptable orders. In essence, the colonial encounter “generated a set of mechanisms… which operate to empower certain societies and exclude others” (Anghie 2014: 140). This is not a historical artefact of law but a permanent characteristic. And it manifests in much the same way in both international law and domestic law.

Consequently, for much of the world, the misery, necropolitics and coloniality inherent in international law create conditions within the state (such as violent borders) that keep racialised people immiserated irrespective of which state they find themselves in. The processes by which these world structures are produced relied on (and continue to rely on) brutal and violent destruction of life. Historically, through, for example, the massive population losses occasioned by racialised enslavement. (It should be noted that an estimated death toll cannot be figured out because the expansiveness of indigenous annihilation and colonial wars of invasion was so great.) The result has therefore been that those violent processes completely changed the nature of the world, inaugurating continuing and evolving destruction modalities of life for racialised peoples who are (seemingly) permanently dispossessed from the category “human”. Who can travel freely, which nations are impoverished, whose resources are extracted, and who can be dispossessed of land… these are still all determined by where you find yourself – above or below the line of the human (Grosfoguel 2016). None of the supposedly liberatory movements of emancipation and “decolonisation” (better known as flag independence) really reversed the dispossession from the category “human”.

One of the reasons why it has been difficult to reverse the dispossession is due to the nature and role of Euro-modern law in both creating the wretched of the earth and being presented as the only source of succour. The logics that underwrote lawful colonial brutalities continue to violently disregard the integral value of human life as they are used to retain colonial gain and refuse justice for colonial violences. How else can we be asked to consider that the violent loss of human life that enslavement and colonisation demanded has no just recompense? What nature of law is this that holds so lightly the value of human life and tightly the value of capital?

What Use Is the Law School in the Face of the Inevitability of the Capitalocene, the Market that Eats Its Own Children for Fun?

Without acknowledging how fundamental the foregoing is to not just our understanding of law but to the possibility of humanity’s survival, we do decolonisation in vain. The initial question, “What is decolonisation?” has been answered elsewhere on this blog. To put it as succinctly as possible, decolonisation is the continuous and evolving refusal of colonial conditions of life which were introduced and globalised through the capitalist-colonial-enslavement project via legal, political, social, and epistemic structures of power (Adebisi 2023: 12). In this vein, contemporary action toward decolonisation in higher education borrows this framework and cannot be restricted to curricular redesign without disrupting the logics woven deep into the DNA of the discipline. Whatever we choose to call our work, disruption is its key register and flourishing futures its main aim.

As such, we cannot just teach international law differently. Academics need to learn and unlearn the nature of the tool that we have made our area of expertise – especially its intimacy with necropolitics and colonial violence. Unlearning is a necessary first step that involves tracing the complicity of disciplinary dictates and conceptual methods through to the emergence and maintenance of colonialism. Next, we must consider how we teach and research (international) law. How do we reveal the silences within the law? Last, we must constantly ask ourselves why we do it. What world do we want to build? What does a study of law look like that is not headed toward eternal apartheids? Answers to these questions will vary and are generatively dependent on a sincere engagement with the reflections that ignite them. Anticolonial pedagogy is a collaborative and evolving practice. Nevertheless, I proffer here a few suggestions for reflection.

First, law schools should look for ways to engage deeply and continually with the foregoing themes across the curriculum and in research. Working more thematically prevents the atomisation that characterises contemporary decolonisation discourse in the legal academy. Working thematically could utilise reading groups, staff-student partnerships, and research projects. These allow schools to unsettle the discipline in the classroom and in research while continually crafting new strands of thought.

Second, I suggest that law schools make legal history a fundamental part of their entire curricula and research agendas. This would enable legal scholars to give better accounts of the legal histories of racial violence within and across the curriculum and research outputs. As such, we should be able to think through, in different contexts, the multitude of ways history plays on the present, especially the cultural amnesia surrounding racialised enslavement, exploitative colonisation, and their entangled and enduring afterlives. Hopefully, this would lend us a new framework for teaching and researching subjects such as international law.

Finally, we need to rethink the purposes of the law school as only a place for producing new legal practitioners in the stale mould of the old. I am arguing here for a law school dedicated to a fundamentally different aim. In other words, a law school dedicated to crafting legal knowledges that turn back on death-making—legal knowledges that oversee a social order that invites, allows, and equips us to live flourishing lives in relation and not possession. That is, living in harmonious relation with other humans, the earth, and diverse temporalities, and not living in instrumental, enclosed, and extractive possession of labour, land, and time. So, rather than an invitation to decolonise the law school or the law curriculum, I pose and end on a different question: What could it mean for you the reader to dream of new anticolonial life-making worlds from within the law school?

Finally, finally, I leave you with Bob Marley’s “Small Axe” as a commentary on international law and its differential use by the Global South and the Global North. Despite the foregoing argument, the small axes have always found a way to chip at the big trees. The wretched of the earth have always learnt freedom through defiance and disobedience and hope.

“If you are the big tree

We are the small axe

Sharpened to cut you down

Ready to cut you down

Eh, whosoever diggeth a pit

Shall fall in it, fall in it, eh

Whosoever diggeth a pit

Shall bury in it, shall bury in it”

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