Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013

Vol. 26, No. 1, 111–132, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.762899

Civilizing interventions? Race, war and international law

Robert Knox
London School of Economics

Abstract Over the past decade there has been an explosion in literature on imperialism
and international law. This scholarship has focused on the use of force, especially
humanitarian intervention and the war on terror. These accounts foreground the issue of
race, arguing that these legal arguments reproduce the dynamic of the civilising mission.
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This article argues that such analyses miss some key elements. Contemporary
interventions must be counterposed to the First Iraq War, which was enabled through
the uncontroversial authorization of the Security Council. Humanitarian intervention and
the war on terror emerged in reaction to the fear that other states would veto Security
Council resolutions. Consequently, the ‘racial’ discourse around intervention cannot
simply be read as ‘othering’ the peripheries, but was also a response to inter-imperialist
rivalry. The article then advances a conception of the arguments as an attempt to articulate
hegemonic coalitions against emerging rivalries, and reads racialization in this light.

Introduction
The 2011 ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya reignited a series of debates that
seemed to have been settled in the aftermath of the invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan. Both had been taken to demonstrate the limits of military power for
guaranteeing a transition to liberal (or even stable) states. Equally, they cast doubt
upon the ability of military interventions to combat and prevent ‘international
terrorism’.
The reignited debates have cut across the political spectrum. On the left, the
obvious question has been about the relationship between these interventions and
imperialism: whether we can characterize such interventions as imperial and
what such characterization means in terms of lending or withholding support for
them (Achcar 2011; Ovenden 2011). On the right, the debates have focused on

The foundations of this paper were laid at several of the ‘Glasgow Conversations in
International Law’, so my thanks to Akbar Rasulov for organizing them and for his scathing
but pertinent criticisms. My thanks also go to Alex Anievas for inviting me to present a
version of this paper as part of the ‘Historical Materialism and International Relations’
seminar series at Oxford, as well as to the audience. I have presented versions of this paper
at the ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ conference at the University of
Oregon and the Eighth Historical Materialism conference: my thanks go to the co-panellists,
organizers and audiences of these events. Finally, I owe a great deal of thanks to Owen
Taylor and the three anonymous reviewers of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs
for their useful and astute comments on this article. As ever, all errors and omissions of
style and substance remain mine alone.

q 2013 Centre of International Studies

 112 Robert Knox

whether or not such interventions further the ‘national interest’ of those

intervening, or whether they undermine regional allies (Delingpole 2011; Hannan
2011). The centrist debates, which have been the predominant character of public
discussions, have focused more generally on the possibility and desirability of
spreading democracy and human rights through intervention (Horton 2011 and
Freedland 2011).
As evidenced by the term ‘reignited’, these debates are not new. However, the
debates took on greater salience in the wake of the end of the Cold War. With the
‘end of history’ and the rise of liberal democracy and human rights to their
unparalleled dominance, claims of intervention couched in these terms could
more plausibly be presented as ‘disinterested’. Accordingly, a number of post-
Cold-War interventions involved a significant component of state-building and
humanitarian justifications.
All of these developments have found their reflection in the intellectual and
academic field, with the questions of imperialism and war becoming central to a
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number of political and theoretical works. This perhaps began with Hardt and
Negri’s book Empire (2000) and the various works contesting their arguments,1
and spiralled to include a number of works characterizing the contemporary scene
as ‘imperial’ or disagreeing with such a characterization.2 The question of empire
and imperialism has also brought the racialized nature of these interventions to the
fore, since the various justifications for the use of military force all imply and rely
upon a stark distinction between various regions of the world.
This is a familiar story to any student of international relations. However, what
is perhaps less well known is the role of international law in these debates. For
whilst military interventions obviously involve questions of force, power and
political economy they also involve questions of law. Apart from a few
exceptions,3 military interventions are always accompanied by some attempt to
justify them as being legal. This is even more clearly the case in the contemporary
scene, with humanitarian intervention and the war on terror being essentially
legal claims that were put forward and opposed in legal terms. Given this, it
is unsurprising that legal scholarship has become increasingly concerned
with mapping the connections between empire, race, war and law.4
First and foremost in this endeavour has been the Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL) movement. These scholars have challenged the
prevailing consensus within the international legal discipline, which essentially
treated international law’s relationship to imperialism as purely historical and
contingent. Against this, TWAIL scholars have insisted on the continued and
inextricable relationship between international law and imperialism.5

1
For two examples specifically focused on Empire see Balakrishnan (2003) and
Passavant and Dean (2003).
2
See Callinicos (2009); Harvey (2003); Kiely (2010); Wood (2003); Milios and
Sotiropolous (2009).
3
There are occasions when states will frame their actions as being consciously against
the prevailing international legal regime—see Berman (2005).
4
The literature here is voluminous, but for a few examples see: Alvarez (2009);
Bartholomew (2006); Bowden (2005); Bowring (2008); Byers and Nolte (2003); Krisch (2005);
Marks (2003); Miéville (2005); Rasulov (2010); Simpson (2004); Zolo (2009).
5
There is a great deal of TWAIL literature, but for a representative sample see: Anghie
(2005a); Chimni (2006); Gathii (2007); Mutua (2001); Okafor (2008); Rajagopal (2003).
 Civilizing interventions? 113

The first section of this article begins by reconstructing the TWAIL account of
the law on the use of force. It argues that this scholarship is underpinned by a
particular racialized concept of imperialism. Imperialism is seen as being driven
by a logic of racial ‘othering’, which continually creates a distinction between the
‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’. As far as this concept is concerned, race is both binary
and primary. It is binary because the racial logic of imperialism is understood to
erect a division between ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ and this division is primarily
deployed to the detriment of the ‘uncivilized’. It is primary because this logic is
seen as the central driving force of imperialist expansion.
The second section illustrates the limits of this approach by exploring the
changing legal justifications advanced for the use of force. It focuses the major
military incursions of the 1990s and 2000s—beginning with the 1991 invasion of
Iraq. It is argued that the difference between the legal justifications for the first
invasion of Iraq and the later invasions cannot be accounted for by the concept of
racialization outlined above. Whereas the 1991 invasion was justified by reference
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to Security Council authorization under Chapter VII of the United Nations (UN)
Charter, the later interventions were justified by claims of humanitarian
intervention, implied Security Council resolutions and self-defence. It is argued
that one can only understand this shift from Security Council based justifications
to forms of legal argument that did not require this as the manifestation of inter-
imperialist rivalries within the Security Council. The third section then attempts to
show how inter-imperialist rivalry has shaped the racialized character of legal
argument.

How uncivilized!
This section analyses how TWAIL scholars have understood the role that race has
played in the legal arguments around the use of force. Although a number of
scholars have addressed this, the most systematic examinations of the law on the
use of force have been carried out by Antony Anghie and Makua wa Mutua.
Accordingly, this article will engage closely with their accounts in an attempt to
draw out the broader logics at play.

Pre-emption as civilizing mission

For Anghie (2005b), the legal logic of the war on terror can be traced back to the
early colonial idea of the ‘civilizing mission’. Anghie begins by examining the so-
called ‘Bush Doctrine’ of pre-emptive self-defence. As is by now well known, this
doctrine was framed as a way of refashioning self-defence under Article 51 of the
UN Charter. According to the United States (US) government, the novel threat of
global terror meant international law would need to be radically transformed.6
Okafor and Baxi both note that these claims of ‘newness’ already rely on a
racialized and Eurocentric historical narrative. This is achieved through a
definition of terrorism which excludes the historical violence that was inflicted
upon the non-European world in the colonial period (Baxi 2005, 24). More
pertinently, it occludes the fact that the non-European world was subject to

6
National Security Strategy (2002).
 114 Robert Knox

paramilitary violence throughout the Cold War, often under the direction of the
US and its allies (Okafor 2005, 186; Baxi 2005, 23; Blum 2003).
The most important aspect of the ‘Bush doctrine’ was the form that this
‘new’ vision of self-defence was to take. Traditionally, states are understood as
being able to act in self-defence when another state has already attacked them,
or if such an attack is imminent. Under the customary rules derived from the
Caroline affair, imminence was defined as a situation where although the threat
had not yet materialized the ‘necessity of that self-defence is instant,
overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for
deliberation’. The Bush administration argued that in the changed conditions
of the post-9/11 age, where terrorists and terrorist-supporting states could
acquire weapons of great destructive power and might attack at any time, such
an approach could not work. Whereas a conventional military attack could be
predicted by a build-up of troops or intelligence, attacks under the new
conditions simply could not be anticipated. As such, the US could let the
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‘smoking bomb turn into a mushroom cloud’ (Blitzer 2003) and would have to
intervene pre-emptively.7
Of course, if one takes international law’s universality seriously, a problem
follows from this. Since all sovereign states are supposed to be formally equal, and
consequently possess the right of self-defence, the doctrine of pre-emption should
also apply to everyone. On this reading, one could argue that ‘both North Korea
and Iran have a legal right to attack the United States’ (Anghie 2005b, 49). One
response here would have been to have accepted this as a purely juridical
problem, but acknowledge that in factual terms such an attack would be unlikely.
Yet this was not the legal argument that was advanced by the Bush
administration.
Instead the doctrine of ‘pre-emption’ was accompanied by another, that of
‘rogue states’. It was argued that the threat that generates the need for pre-
emption is not caused by all states. Instead it is caused by a small number of
irresponsible, terrorist-supporting states that either threaten the world by their
existence, or are incapable of properly controlling populations that dwell within
them. By consequence, these states cannot possibly possess the legal right to
intervene pre-emptively. Moreover because of their role in promoting terrorism
these states form the target for such interventions.
Anghie’s argument is that this doctrine is an almost direct reproduction of the
colonial international law of the nineteenth century (Anghie 2005b, 51). This
colonial international law relied on a distinction between civilized and uncivilized
states: the particular basis of civilization varied at different historical periods—
religion, culture, political or economic organization—but what remained constant
was the fact that it largely excluded the non-European world. Civilized states
were full members of the international ‘Family of Nations’ and consequently
possessed the right to wage war, whereas uncivilized states existed only as objects
to be acted upon (Anghie 2004, 327).
The connections between nineteenth-century colonial international law and
the Bush doctrine run deeper than this. Since rogue states are the source of

7
Much of the relevant law was dealt with by the UN’s High Level Panel on Threats,
Challenges and Change in its report ‘A more secure world’ A/59/565 of 2 December 2004.
 Civilizing interventions? 115

instability within the international order, merely intervening with military force is
not sufficient. Instead, it is necessary to transform them into liberal, democratic and
stable states. It is for this reason that the rhetoric of the war on terror has always
been accompanied by arguments for regime change and the promotion of
democracy and human rights. As such, ‘humanitarian arguments are inextricably
connected with—fused with—self-defence, rather than seen purely as alternative
and adjunct arguments’ (Anghie 2005a, 298). Here one can very clearly see the
way in which the racial character of the war on terror is revealed. It is not
simply that violence can be used against the ‘uncivilized’ rogue and failed
states, but rather than this violence can be used in order to transform them
into ‘civilized states’. As such, the war on terror ‘represents a set of principles
and policies that reproduces the structure of the civilizing mission’, the doctrine
that directly animated the expansion of Europe into the non-European world
(Anghie 2005a, 309).
For Anghie this is a specific example of the general way in which the civilizing
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mission recurs in international law. He argues that international law’s key

problematics were formed in the colonial encounter between Europe and the non-
European world. This encounter did not end with formal decolonization and the
enduring legacy is that international law is structured by a ‘dynamic of
difference’, which posits a ‘dichotomy between the civilized and the uncivilized’
(2005a, 4). Within this process international lawyers continually create a ‘gap
between two cultures, demarcating one as “universal” and civilized and the other
as “particular” and uncivilized, and seeking to bridge the gap by developing
techniques to normalize the aberrant society’ (Anghie 2005a, 4).
Hence, in Anghie’s account, international law involves continually creating
racialized ‘others’ and then attempting to transform these ‘others’ through the
civilizing mission, the war on terror just being one way in which this is realized.8
Here, race is at the core of the law of the use of force. This concept of the
racialization of international law is a very specific one, with two important
characteristics. Firstly, international law is driven by this racial logic. It has
primacy inasmuch as it serves as the organizing principle that structures
international legal argument. Secondly, the particular way in which this
racialized logic functions is to create a binary distinction between the civilized
and uncivilized.

Savage humanitarianism
One of Anghie’s great successes is to show the fundamental unity that
characterizes the language of humanitarianism and the war on terror.9 Yet even
outside this nexus TWAIL scholars have argued that the language of
‘humanitarian intervention’ represents a racialized and imperialist doctrine. In

8
This is reflective of the fact that Anghie—like other TWAIL scholars—draws upon
postcolonial theory, particularly Said and Bhabha (Anghie 2005, 9). Obviously, one of the
key theoretical moves of postcolonial scholarship has been to argue that there is an endless
push towards consolidating the European ‘self’ through the creation of a non-European
‘other’. See Said (2003) and Bhabha (2004).
9
See Nesiah (2004) for an account of the relationship between the logics of militarism
and humanitarianism.
 116 Robert Knox

‘Savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights’, Mutua argues that
the spread of human rights discourse in general, and humanitarian intervention in
particular ‘fits a historical pattern in which all high morality comes from the West
as a civilizing agent against lower forms of civilization’ (2001, 210). For Mutua, the
substance of the international human rights movement is rooted in European
historical events and philosophical traditions, yet the primary target of its
interventions is the ‘Third World’ (Mutua 2001, 214– 216).
However, the problems run deeper than this. Mutua argues that the language
of humanitarian intervention is marked by a tripartite, racialized metaphor of
‘savages, victims and saviours’. In the first part of this metaphor, non-European
culture is said to be the cause of mass human rights abuses. Hence, the first step in
the metaphor interpellates (some) non-Europeans and their cultures as savages,
who need to be ‘civilized’ (Mutua 2001, 219– 227). These savages need to be
civilized because of the second part of the metaphor—the ‘victim’. The victim is
portrayed as an innocent who has been arbitrarily abused. Essentially, the victim
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is posited as powerless before the savage culture and hence requires ‘outside
intervention to overcome the conditions of victimization’ (Mutua 2001, 229). This
is explicitly racialized, since ‘[t]he face of the prototypical victim is non-white’
(Mutua 2001, 230).
These two steps set the stage for the final part of the metaphor, that of the
saviour. It is here that the Eurocentric universalism Mutua initially problematized
is most fully realized. In order to save the powerless victims from their savage
culture it is necessary that a saviour intervene. As such, Western states and
institutions are portrayed as fundamentally ‘good’ agents that need to civilize the
‘savages’ in order to rescue the ‘victims’ (Mutua 2001, 233 –243). For Mutua, like
Anghie, the law on the use of force is structured by a racialized logic of the
civilising mission.

The racialization of international legal argument

Thus, for both Anghie and Mutua, some the most prominent justifications for the
use of military force over the past twenty years operate according to a racialized,
imperial logic. However, it is not simply that these scholars agree that the law on
the use of force is racialized; they also share an understanding of the particular
way in which this racial logic functions. For both, the racial logic underpinning the
law on the use of force is primary and binary. The racial logic is primary because it is
understood as the driving force behind international law. Both Anghie and Mutua
argue that the drive to ‘other’ some groups and then attempt to ‘civilize’ them is
an intrinsic tendency in international law and the prime mover in its articulation.
Hence the question of race is directly foregrounded as structuring international
legal argument.
The logic is binary for two reasons. Firstly, it operates with a classical notion of
colonial Manichaeism, whereby the primary division is between the civilized and
the uncivilized (Fanon 1963, 41). In this vision, the importance of the law lies in
designating ‘uncivilized’ areas as outside the ‘Family of Nations’ and positing
them as legally inferior and thus open for intervention. Secondly, this Manichaean
logic is seen as determining the particular way in which racialization occurs.
Hence, one explains the process of racialization as operating primarily against
those who will be the target of the interventions.
 Civilizing interventions? 117

What this ultimately means is that the form in which racialization occurs is
determined by this relationship between an advanced core and an exploited
periphery. The logic of civilization is deployed as part of a process whereby this
core is enabled to exploit and oppress the periphery. Although this is an
understanding that is perhaps best exemplified in TWAIL scholarship, it is also
one widely shared by a number of contemporary scholars. Thus, both the war on
terror and humanitarian intervention have been understood as doctrines enabling
the US to legitimate its interventions into peripheral territories.10
Whilst there is much to recommend in such accounts, they suffer from a
problematic conception of imperialism and its relationship to race. Underpinning
the above accounts of racialization is an implicit vision of imperialism in which a
dominant, unified imperialist core exploits an oppressed periphery. In such a
vision, the logic of imperialism is immediately racial, and racialization (both in
terms of its form and in terms of its target) can be explained purely according to
the logic of the core exploiting the periphery.
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The problem with such an account is that is incapable of explaining the shifts in
the specific legal arguments that have been deployed to justify military
interventions. As will be argued below, over the past twenty years one can
distinguish between at least three different types of legal argument that have been
deployed to justify military intervention. Specifically, at the beginning of the 1990s
it appeared that the US and its allies would be able to legitimate their
interventions through action taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. It was
only when they faced determined opposition in the Security Council that other
legal justifications began to be used. Yet if the law on the use of force is directly
driven by a racial logic that serves simply to legitimate expansion into the ‘Third
World’, it seems difficult to understand why these different legal justifications have
been deployed at all.

War and law

The Charter regime

In order to understand the racial logic of the law on the use of force, looking at
humanitarian intervention and the war on terrorism is insufficient. Instead they
must be understood in light of the other, more ‘traditional’, legal arguments for
the use of military force. In particular, it is necessary to situate them in the
trajectory of the wave of military interventions that followed the end of the Cold
War, especially the first invasion of Iraq. This part of the article will briefly
reconstruct some of these interventions and the legal arguments used to support
them.
The post-1945 law on the use of force was designed to be sufficiently restrictive
to prevent a repeat of the great military conflicts of the first half of the twentieth
century (Gordon 1985). As such, the aim was to limit the situations in which
military force could be used and centralize this usage in international institutions,

10
Richard Seymour (2011, 2 – 3) explicitly invokes the notion of ‘binary stratification’,
the war on terror being seen as rationalizing imperialist violence. A number of other
scholars rely on the binary account; for example: Amin (2006); Bartholomew (2006);
Bowring (2008); Chimni (2004, 16 – 17); Vitalis (2000).
 118 Robert Knox

primarily the UN. Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, states are obliged to
refrain from the threat or use of force ‘against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state’.
The two relatively uncontroversial exceptions to this prohibition are contained
in Article 51 and Chapter VII. Article 51 concerns self-defence, as described above.
Chapter VII—the collective security regime—deals with Security Council
authorizations of the use of force. If the Security Council determines that there
has been a threat or breach of the peace or an act of aggression (under Article 39) it
can authorize the use of force under Article 42 (using the phrase ‘all necessary
means’). Since these authorizations are decided in the Security Council, they can
be prevented by a veto by any of its permanent members.
Throughout the Cold War this collective security regime was ‘paralysed’ (De
Cuéllar 1989). Owing to the rivalries between the Western countries and the Soviet
bloc, both of which had permanent members on the Security Council, any attempt
at authorizing military force was vetoed. There were only a few exceptions to this.
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Perhaps the most famous was the 1950 Korean War, which occurred because the
Soviet Union (USSR) had elected to abstain from the Security Council from
January 1950, in protest at the exclusion of the People’s Republic of China (Blum
2003, 48– 49).

The first invasion of Iraq

It was because of this background that the 1990 intervention in Iraq was dubbed
by George HW Bush the beginning of a ‘New World Order’ in which an
effective UN could guarantee international peace and security (Bush 1990). In
1990 the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait, claiming that Kuwait had been
‘stealing’ Iraqi oil, as well as relying on an older irredentist claim that Kuwait
was a part of Iraq. The Kuwaiti government immediately asked its allies for
help, invoking a claim of ‘collective self-defence’. However, the main legal
justification for the invasion of Iraq was authorization by the Security Council
under Chapter VII. Resolution 660 declared that there had been a breach of
international peace and security and, under the now infamous Resolution 678,
the Security Council authorized member states to use ‘all necessary means’ to
enforce Resolution 660.
The political discourse that accompanied this event depicted Saddam Hussein
and the Iraqi state as essentially uncivilized barbarians (Said 1994, 353 –355). This
was reflected in the international legal logic of the argument. The Security Council
declared Iraq to be a source of instability in the international order, meaning it
would have to be contained. The reason that it had to be stopped was that it had
attacked ‘powerless’ Kuwait. In other words, this was a racialized form of legal
argument, indeed one reminiscent of Mutua’s account of humanitarian
intervention—with savage Iraq attacking the victim Kuwait and the international
community serving as a saviour. However, the particular form that the legal
argument took was that a breach of international security under Chapter VII of the
UN Charter.
The particular form that this legal argument took is important because Security
Council authorization under Chapter VII is one of the most legally uncontroversial
ways in which a military intervention can occur. It does not incur the
problems of ‘thresholds’ that have to be reached in the case of self-defence,
 Civilizing interventions? 119

such as whether the amount of force is sufficient to constitute an armed attack or

whether the attack has occurred or is imminent. Equally, acting under a Security
Council resolution means that one is not limited to respond in a proportionate way
to an armed attack, but instead can take all measures ‘necessary’ to restore
international ‘peace and security’ (Schachter 1991, 460).
Yet despite the manifest advantages that were gained in adopting this form of
legal argument, it was not the most common used to justify the military
interventions that followed the First Iraq War.

Kosovo
The next important part of this story is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s
(NATO’s) ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. The facts surrounding this
intervention are controversial but for the purposes of this argument it is only
necessary to have a schematic account. Essentially, in 1998 the government of
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Serbia removed the autonomous status of Kosovo. Following this, there were
allegations of repression on the part of the government and terrorism on the part
of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Security Council passed Resolution 1199,
characterizing the situation as a threat to international peace and security.
Crucially, however, it did not call for the use of ‘all necessary measures’ to restore
the peace and hence did not prima facie authorize the use of military force.
Consequently, when the US-led NATO coalition declared it might intervene, it
could not directly reference Chapter VII. Instead, the legal justifications advanced
were forced to take several forms. The first argument was that although the
Security Council had not explicitly called for intervention this was implied in its
determination that the situation in Kosovo was a threat to international peace
and security (Lobel and Ratner 1999, 152). This was reinforced by the fact that
the Security Council was once again ‘paralysed’ by the geopolitical wrangling
of the permanent members. On this basis, it was argued that intervention
was the only way the ‘will’ of the UN and the ‘international community’ could
be upheld.
The logic of this argument was taken further by advocates of ‘unilateral
humanitarian intervention’. Their argument—explicitly advanced by the United
Kingdom government (and especially beloved by Tony Blair; see Blair (1999)) and
some legal commentators11—was that the international legal order had changed.
In the language of the (later) International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, states were no longer the possessors of untrammelled ‘sovereign’
rights (2001, 11 – 19). Instead, owing to the development of the international
human rights movement, states had a duty, or responsibility, to protect their
nationals. As such, the argument ran, when states failed in this duty, it was
necessary for the international community to intervene, ideally through the UN,
but otherwise through regional organizations of responsible law-abiding states
(International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001, 51 –55).
Finally, one surprisingly popular response amongst legal commentators was
that although the actions may have been ‘technically’ illegal, they remained close

11
With varying degrees of ambivalence see Henkin (1999), Wedgwood (1999) and
Reisman (1999).
 120 Robert Knox

to the law and fulfilled a legitimate and moral purpose (Simma 1999). In this
formulation, whilst the intervention may have been prima facie unlawful, legality
had to be weighed against protecting innocent civilians and upholding the
stability of the international order.

Afghanistan and the war on terror

The legal arguments justifying the war on terror followed a similar pattern. The
war on terror has largely been justified in terms of self-defence. The pattern for
this was set by the intervention in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.
Following these attacks the Security Council passed Resolution 1368, reaffirming
the inherent right of self-defence against terrorism. In framing terrorism as an
issue of self-defence (as opposed to a criminal matter), the door was left open for
military incursions against terrorists under Article 51, without Security Council
approval (Frederking 2007, 160). This was the prime justification deployed by the
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US in its invasion of Afghanistan.

Such a doctrine involved modifications to the ‘traditional’ account of self-
defence. A large part of this concerned the idea of ‘imminence’. The argument was
advanced that terrorism represents a continuous threat and so generates the right
to intervene in self-defence on a continuous basis. The doctrine also ran into the
problem that in the traditional understanding of self-defence there also needed to
be a connection between the armed attack suffered and the state against which
force was used.12 This was negotiated in various ways—through the idea that
there was a right of self-defence directly against non-state actors (Trapp 2007) or
that rogue or failed states were incapable of controlling terrorism and hence
needed to be intervened in (Murphy 2002, 50).13
Whilst this is known as the ‘Bush Doctrine’, it has also been the primary legal
justification of the Obama government. Hence Harold Koh, then legal advisor of
the Department of State, stated, ‘we continue to fight a war of self-defense against
an enemy that attacked us on September 11 . . . and that continues to undertake
armed attacks’ (Koh 2010). This has been the foundation of the intensified
campaign of drone strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan (DeYoung
2011).
One intervention not mentioned in the above accounts, but one that created a
great deal of legal debate, was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although the debate
around the invasion has been exhausted almost entirely, it does fit with the logic
described above. Some argued for pre-emptive self-defence (Sofaer 2003). Others
made a humanitarian argument. Neither of these was an official government legal
position. Instead the argument was that the Security Council had implicitly
authorized the use of force. It was argued that Resolution 1441, which declared
Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of its international obligations under Resolution 687,
had revived Resolution 678 and with it the authorization to use force (Gray 2008,
358– 366).

12
Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v US), 1984
ICJ 392 (26 November).
13
This was directly reflected in the 2002 National Security Strategy, which stated that
the US would ‘make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or
provide aid to them’ (National Security Strategy 2002).
 Civilizing interventions? 121

Rivalry and hegemony

Of vetoes and rivalries
These examples allow us to pose an essential question. Whilst all of these
interventions operated according to a racialized imperial logic, relying on the idea
that peripheral territories are a threat to the international order which must be
civilized, the particular legal form that this racialization takes has varied.
Crucially, given the uncontroversial nature and broad scope of Chapter VII
resolutions, why has this been a relatively rare form of legal argument? Generally,
the examples closest to this have been the various attempts to argue for ‘implied’
Security Council resolutions, with all the controversy that such arguments
generate.
The importance of this question is that it undermines the primary and binary
account of racialization. The war on terror and humanitarian intervention are
racialized forms of legal argument, but this racialization could have been carried
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out through other, more uncontroversial legal constructs. If one simply analyses
racism as enabling the core to exploit the periphery, one cannot explain why these
uncontroversial legal arguments were not used.
One obvious point about the interventions following the first invasion of Iraq
described above is that they were framed in such a way as to avoid the possibility
of a Security Council veto. In the case of ‘implied’ Security Council resolutions this
is obvious. Yet, equally, expanded claims of self-defence under the auspices of
fighting terrorism, or claims of unilateral humanitarian intervention, are not
subject to the possibility of a Security Council veto.
Although this may seem a rather banal observation, and indeed one that many
have pointed out (Byers and Nolte 2003), it is nonetheless important. At the time
of the first invasion of Iraq, the Cold War had just ended. The then Soviet Union
was reeling from a series of reforms and upheavals, had pledged itself to
cooperation the West and was increasingly dependent on Western aid (Brenner
1991, 132; Bennis 1991, 114; Farnsworth 1999, 236). China was similarly reeling
from this breakup and in any case had not assumed the crucial global economic
role it currently occupies. As such, the geopolitical rivalry that had ‘paralysed’ the
Security Council had momentarily abated. What the historical record shows us is
that this was in fact a relatively rare situation. In the whole period following the
creation of the UN the Security Council was ‘paralysed’ and, as is shown from the
brief considerations above, it remained so for much of the period following the
first invasion of Iraq.
These facts take on a great deal of significance in the light of the various
debates about the nature and scope of ‘imperialism’, perhaps best known within
(but not limited to) the Marxist tradition. As previously noted, the
primary/binary accounts seem to rely on an understanding of imperialism
which foregrounds the relationship between a core and a periphery in which the
former dominates the latter. Although the language of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ is
particular to World Systems theory, the idea of such a division—that there are
more and less advanced regions of the global economy and that the former
dominate the latter in some way—is central to most accounts of imperialism.
Simultaneously, there has been fierce disagreement over the relationship amongst
the advanced powers. In particular, the debate has turned on the question of
whether there is a unified core of imperialist powers whose interests coincide, or
 122 Robert Knox

whether this imperialist core is composed of rival imperialist states seeking to

monopolize the benefits of imperialism in their own interest (Brewer 1990, 89).
In the ‘classical’ accounts of imperialism, this debate was central. The original
theorists of imperialism—primarily Hobson and Hilferding—took rivalry
between European powers to be the main feature of imperialism. On the eve of
the First World War, this equation was increasingly challenged. On the one hand,
there was Kautsky’s account, in which the tendency of imperialism was seen as
towards creating a single world trust (1970). Against this, Lenin and Bukharin
insisted that the tendency was towards creating intensified military and political
competition between rival imperialist powers, pushing the world towards large-
scale military conflict (Bukharin 1972, 133 – 143; Lenin 1970, 112 –118). In the
period of decolonization attention shifted away from rivalry and instead began to
focus more strongly on the question of ‘development’ and the ways in which the
international system promoted the underdevelopment of peripheral social
formations (Brewer 1990, 88 –89).
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In present times the debate about rivalry has resurfaced. In these debates, the
question is no longer about a single unified trust of imperialists, but rather about
the development of the US into the world’s ‘sole superpower’. Here the question
has been whether the strength of US imperialism is such that it has no ‘rivals’ and
is instead able to dominate the globe through its overwhelming military and
economic power, with other states allying with the US in the global order. Other
accounts argue that the US protects the interests of a capitalist class not tied to any
nation state.14 In such accounts, much has been made of the above doctrines of
humanitarian intervention and the war on terror. The use of the legal doctrines of
humanitarian intervention and the war on terror is seen as a sign of the
unopposed dominance of US hegemonic ambition—whereby the US is able to carve
out legal doctrines that enable it to intervene (Amin 2006, 112 –113; Wood 2003,
143– 165).
These debates have also extended to the question of whether this hegemonic
power is in decline. In particular, commentators have argued that the rising power
of China has been matched by the waning power of the US—with the centre of
international political gravity shifting eastwards (Arrighi 2007; Li 2008). These
accounts interpret the doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the war on
terror as imperial overreach, in which the US has attempted to supplement its
declining economic power through displays of military dominance. The debate
around the decline extend far beyond the Marxist tradition, encompassing various
scholars of international relations15 and the intelligence community, the National
Intelligence Council publishing a report in 2008 arguing that the world in 2025
would be characterized by a relative decline in the military, economic and political
power of the US (National Intelligence Council 2008, 113).
The account in this article would seem to support the position that the
international order is characterized by rivalries between the US and other

14
Hardt and Negri (2000; 2004) to some degree set the scene for arguing against
geopolitical rivalry. Similarly, see Robinson (2004). For accounts stressing US hegemony
more strongly, see Panitch and Gindin (2003) and Wood (2003). Against this are accounts
that have stressed the continued importance of rivalries, such as Callinicos (2009).
15
This debate has long roots and resurfaces periodically. For some more recent
examples see Cox (2007) and Reus-Smith (2004).
 Civilizing interventions? 123

imperialist powers, as well as the narrative of US decline. Whilst there was a brief
period in which the particular imperialist coalition led by the US was able to act
through international institutions without being challenged by other economically
and military powerful states, this was short-lived.16 Hence, in the brief period
around the end of the Cold War, when Russia and China were at their weakest, it
was possible to rely on arguments through the Security Council. Yet, as the
position of these states in the international order was strengthened, they were able
to plausibly threaten the power of wielding their veto.
In all of the interventions described above, the resort to legal justifications
outside the Security Council was driven by the knowledge that within the
Security Council a veto was likely forthcoming. In the case of Kosovo, it was
widely understood that given Russia’s traditional closeness with Serbia, and
political interests in the region, it would veto any attempt at authorizing the
use of force (Chinkin 1999, 842). Indeed, both Russia and China attempted to
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pass a resolution condemning the NATO bombing (Gray 2008, 42). This meant
that the divergent interests occasioned by inter-imperialist rivalry split over
into the Security Council, leading the US to articulate a doctrine that allowed
it to avoid this.
The war on terror is of course a more complicated process. Following the
September 11 attacks, there was a great deal of international sympathy for the
US. Russia and China both had an interest in defeating the Taliban, which
supported secessionist movements within their borders (Frederking 2007, 168).
However, even at that time the Chinese government was sufficiently assertive
to attempt to impose conditions on any military mission. The aim was to
authorize the particular intervention, but prevent it from spreading into a
more generalized US military offensive. It is likely for this reason that the US
instead sought to rely on the argument of self-defence, as opposed to seeking
further Security Council resolutions in support of the invasion (Frederking
2007, 165). By the time of further interventions under the rubric of the war on
terror, Russia and China had grown sufficiently assertive to render any Security
Council resolutions unlikely. This was underlined by the furore around the Second
Iraq War, where Russia, China and France threatened to veto any Chapter VII
resolution (Gray 2008, 357 –358). As a result of these challenges, US policymakers
articulated legal doctrines that enabled them to secure their interests against
emerging rivalries.
The pattern has been one of relatively short periods of overwhelming US
dominance, or temporary coincidences of interest with rival states, punctuated by
a more general picture of inter-imperialist rivalry.

16
There is a period lasting for approximately 7 years when a number of interventions
were authorized by the Security Council in inter alia Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Rwanda,
Albania, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone. However, throughout this period
there were tensions, particularly over the no-fly zones in Iraq (Operation Provide Comfort)
and Operation Desert Fox, an operation against Iraq for ‘failing to comply’ with UN
weapons inspectors. In these latter instances, a combination of implied Security Council
authorization, self-defence and humanitarian intervention claims was employed. See Gray
(2002).
 124 Robert Knox

Legalized hegemony as hegemony of weakness

Viewed from this perspective, we can begin to see further commonalities in the
way in which racialized legal argument has functioned. Essentially, in the cases
surveyed above a similar pattern of argument has occurred. In every instance, the
US and its allies had an interest in military intervention. However, these interests
clashed with those of other imperialist states, in particular China and Russia, and
on some occasions Western European states. So as to preserve their interests in the
face of moves to the contrary, these states threatened to block any military action
through the Security Council veto. In order to guard against this, it was necessary
for the US government to articulate legal arguments enabling the US to act, whilst
also excluding the possibility of rivals pursuing similar arguments.
These legal doctrines all followed a common argumentative structure. They
began by positing that an event, or series of events, represented a threat to the
international system as a whole (the Kosovo crisis, Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction and the general threat of terrorism). Following this, it was asserted
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that, owing to rival states acting against the interests of the world order, the
‘normal’ channels of international law were blocked. As such, the argument
proceeded, it was necessary for a select group of states to act as guardians of the
system, acting outside its ‘normal’ channels in order to protect it.
This structure of legal argument bears a great deal of similarity to what
Gerry Simpson has called ‘legalized hegemony’. In Great powers and outlaw
states Simpson argues that the international legal order is characterized by
Great Powers, a ‘powerful elite of states whose superior status is recognized
by minor powers as a political fact giving rise to the existence of certain
constitutional privileges’ (Simpson 2004, 68).17 Simpson argues that the mark
of these Great Powers is that they are able to legally entrench their status (and
‘hegemony’) in law. In so doing, they grant themselves rights greater than those of
‘normal’ states, which enable them to act in order to preserve the international
system in their own interest.
For Simpson, the mark of Great Powers is that special juridical rights and
privileges flow to them. Although Simpson’s argument contains much in common
with that outlined in this paper, there are important divergences. Central is that,
for Simpson, Great Powers are only such when they act ‘in concert’, since it is only
collectively that powerful states can be imagined to have an interest in maintaining
the international order. Consequently, he understands juridical privileges as being
directed not against rival Great Powers, but rather at subordinate members of the
international legal order.
Thus, for Simpson, the Cold War period was one in which there were no Great
Powers, simply ‘superpowers’ vying for dominance—lacking any commitment to
‘long-term collective action’ that would maintain the system (2004, 75). Simpson’s
account very much mirrors the binary account outlined above and shares with it
an inability to explain the changing forms of legalized hegemony. Further, his
position seems unable to account for the fact that contemporary attempts to
articulate ‘legalized hegemony’ were asserted over the objection of other Great
Powers. This is important because for the majority of the post-1945 period there
has been discord amongst the major powers, which was reflected in the paralysis

17
Italics omitted.
 Civilizing interventions? 125

of international organizations and in attempts to argue for special rights that

would allow Great Powers to act outside these organizations. This would suggest
that the majority of attempts to articulate legalized hegemony were in fact marked
by discord between the Great Powers.
If we understand the linkage between attempts to articulate legalized
hegemony and inter-imperialist rivalry a different picture emerges. Rather than
seeing legalized hegemony as a sign of unified strength, we can now see it as a
sign of weakness.18 In the face of rivals that are able to articulate their agendas
through the normal channels of the international legal order, powerful states
attempt to create legal doctrines that embed their ‘special’ rights to intervene,
under the rubric of upholding the international order. Hence, the doctrines of
humanitarian intervention and the war on terror are an attempt by the US to
entrench its ability to intervene in the peripheries, in the face of rivals whose
power is reflected in the international legal order. A necessary component of this is
also that these rivals cannot use these doctrines.
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The racialized nature of these doctrines needs to be seen in this light. Most
obviously, we can no longer see race as the ‘primary’ issue. The drive to create
‘others’ (or even an explanation focused around exploiting the peripheries) cannot
explain the particular forms that racialization takes. Instead we need to look to the
changing material structures of imperialism, the conjunctures in which these
structures are realized and the rivalries these relations generate.
More important are the problems with the ‘binary’ aspect. In the binary
account, the focus is solely on the denigration of the target of intervention and the
legitimation of the intervening state. It pays no attention to those states which are
not the target of intervention, but equally are cast as not possessing the special
right to intervention—that is to say, the rivals threatening to block action. But
these states are also cast in a racialized role. They are posited as ‘irrational’ or
‘selfish’, holding particular national interests in higher esteem than the values of
the international community as a whole. The purpose of this is both to justify
acting outside the Security Council and also to prevent these states from relying
on these doctrines. Crucially, these arguments are not designed to justify direct
military intervention against the rival states. In this way, the civilized/uncivilized
dichotomy that is relied on above is problematized because there is a wider—and
more fragile—attempt to articulate a hierarchy within the advanced capitalist
countries: attempting to stratify and divide rivals.
One pertinent example is the attempt to divide between ‘Old Europe’ and
‘New Europe’ in the run-up to the Second Iraq War. However, the most important
examples in this respect are Russia and China. In both of these cases, accusations
of selfishness or irrationality are tied together with criticism of their ‘non-liberal’

18
Carty (2004) articulates a similar vision, drawing heavily on Marxist literature.
However, he unfortunately frames the issue in terms of structural pressures that cause the
US to break international law. This misses the ways in which the US is specifically
attempting to articulate particular legal doctrines in serious legal terms, as opposed to simply
‘violating’ the law, and precludes an understanding of the forms these doctrines take. Wood
(2003, 143– 165) makes some reference to the idea of the war on terror as being driven by
potential rivalry. However, she argues that there are no competitors, and sees the war on
terror as an indirect display of force so as to cow potential competitors (Wood 2003, 157).
This account entirely fails to take account of the way in which the US has been forced to act
outside the Security Council by the legal power of other states.
 126 Robert Knox

and ‘non-market’ regimes. Hence in the 2002 National Security Strategy speech,
alongside the idea of rogue states there were heavy references to ‘Russia’s uneven
commitment to the basic values of free-market democracy’ and to China
‘following an outdated path’ of ‘threaten[ing] its neighbors’.19
Even in Obama’s ‘liberal’ 2010 National Security Strategy, there are references
to promoting a ‘strong, peaceful, and prosperous Russia that respects
international norms’, supporting ‘efforts within Russia to promote the rule of
law, accountable government, and universal values’ and supporting ‘the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia’s neighbors’.20 Similarly, the US
would welcome a responsible China, working with it, ‘encouraging’ ‘China to make
choices that contribute to peace, security, and prosperity as its influence rises’ and
remaining ‘candid on our human rights concerns’.21 More bluntly, in November
2011 Obama demanded that China ‘act like a grownup’ (meaning it is currently
acting like a ‘child’), whilst outlining his plans to expand and consolidate US
influence in the Asia –Pacific region (The Guardian 2011). The function of such
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language is to portray the closest imperial rivals of the US as unable to assume the
mantle of guarding the fundamental values of the world order.
Hence, we can argue that inter-imperialist rivalry has been central to the
racialization of the law on the use of force in two respects. Firstly, the particular
legal form that the racialization of the peripheries takes is driven by the need to
undercut imperial rivals. Secondly, these rivals are themselves directly racialized,
so as to prevent them from utilizing these doctrines.

Georgia as legal crisis

These issues were all at play in the 2008 Russia–Georgia war. Although this event
has receded somewhat from public consciousness, it nonetheless remains an
important turning point. In brief, there had been tensions between Georgia and
Russia for several years. Citizens living in Abkhazia and South Ossetia had long
claimed to be mistreated by the Georgian government, with South Ossetia declaring
independence from Georgia in 1990, an act never recognized by Georgia. The
separatists were backed by Russia in these claims: for reasons of ‘solidarity’ (South
Ossetia shares language and ethnicity with North Ossetia, part of the Russian
Federation, and Abkhazia had autonomy in the Soviet period) and realpolitik
attempts to destabilize Georgia. Additionally, the Russian government had begun to
feel increasing geopolitical insecurity. In the aftermath of the Kosovo intervention,
Kosovo had (eventually) unilaterally declared independence from Serbia—with the
approval of US-aligned states—and NATO was expanding into former Warsaw Pact
areas (Georgia was a leading candidate for NATO membership) (Asmus 2010, 70).
There were mutual accusations of a military build-up (Illarionov 2009, 64 –72)
and in early August, alleging that Georgian villages had been attacked, the
Georgian military moved into South Ossetia, attacking the separatist capital of
Tskhinvali. In response to this, the Russian military launched a full-scale assault,
driving the Georgian military out of South Ossetia, but expanding beyond this to
attack various locations, ending up only hours away from the capital Tbilisi

19
National Security Strategy (2002).
20
National Security Strategy (2010, 44).
21
National Security Strategy (2010, 43).
 Civilizing interventions? 127

(Asmus 2010, 179 –189). Given the closeness of Georgia to NATO, there was
consternation about this. However, what is ultimately surprising is how little
condemnation there was. The US took a relatively hard rhetorical line, but did not
go beyond this, and much of Western Europe took a ‘soft line’—motivated in no
small part by their energy dependence on Russia (Callinicos 2010, 97).
Callinicos has argued that this event exposed the fact that the power of the US
had been severely weakened over the previous decade, with Iraq and Afghanistan
sapping its strength (2010, 4). Thus, alongside the 2008 economic crisis, which
weakened the US and its allies, there was a concomitant geopolitical crisis, which
was the culmination of a series of tendencies towards international rivalry
(Callinicos 2010, 110). Importantly, this also represented a legal crisis. In its
‘defence’ of South Ossetia and further invasion of Georgia, one of the main legal
justifications that Russia relied on was that of humanitarian intervention. The
Russian government argued that in their attack on South Ossetia (a territory that
remains part of Georgia) the Georgian military had committed grave violations of
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international human rights and humanitarian law; even ‘genocide’ was alleged
(Traynor and Black 2008).
It appears, then, that Russia was attempting to usurp the imperial legal
prerogative that the US had carved out for itself and its allies. The response of the
US government to this was therefore telling. President Bush declared that Georgia
was a ‘sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected’ (Schwirtz
et al 2008). Here one should resist the urge to allege rank hypocrisy. Vitally, Bush’s
argument was not that there was no humanitarian crisis, or to disagree on the
facts; instead it was simply not contemplated that Russia had the right to make this
argument. In other words, the doctrine was conceived in such a way as to exclude
Russia, as a rival, from being able to invoke it. The fact that Russia was able to do
so without particularly adverse consequences points to the renewed vigour in this
rivalry, as well as the continuing decline in the power and influence of the US.

Conclusion: Libya and the new(er) military humanism?

The argument of this article has been relatively simple. It began by examining
some prominent accounts of the relationship between racialization and the law on
the use of force. It was argued that, although these were persuasive, their focus on
the primary role of race as well as its binary nature could not explain the changing
forms of racialization in law on the use of force. Following on from this, the article
examined several key interventions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It
was argued that despite the efficacy of the use of Security Council resolutions,
such Resolutions were not the most common legal form that racialization took.
The article then argued that what drove the changes in legal argument was the
need of the US and its allies to avoid the Security Council. This was because several
of the US’s key rivals were sufficiently powerful that they could translate their
opposition into legal terms. Doctrines such as the war on terror and humanitarian
intervention were not representative of the power of US unilateralism, but rather
represented a position of relative weakness. Consequently, any understanding
of the global colour line must recognize its complexity. Whilst there is a
fundamental racialized division, founded on the differentiation between advanced
imperialist powers and peripheral formations, this shifts according to a series of
 128 Robert Knox

conjunctural imperatives. At the same time, there are a number of other ‘lines’ that
intersect with it as imperial powers attempt to stratify their rivals.
What of more recent events? This article began with a discussion of the way in
which the intervention in Libya had pushed the language of humanitarianism
back into the headlines. The example of Libya might be said to cut against the
above argument. Libya was one of the few examples of a ‘humanitarian
intervention’ authorized under Chapter VII. However, it already seems that this
may have been an aberration. Lukács put it well when he noted that ‘[c]lass
solidarity in the capitalist classes is only possible when they look outwards’
(Lukács 1972, 49). To translate this, imperialist states act ‘in solidarity’ when there
is a fundamental threat to the system. Such a threat was present in the movement
that has now been dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’. Whatever the political outcomes of
these uprisings, they fundamentally threatened the stability of the region and
governments friendly to various imperial powers. Moreover, none of the imperial
powers had been able to find much of a foothold in the popular movements. Libya
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represented an opportunity for imperialism to reinsert itself in the region.

Even within this broad purpose there were differences and some states stood
to gain more than others from the intervention. The US government saw a
successful intervention in Libya as a way to re-legitimate doctrines of
humanitarian intervention (Calabresi 2011). In contrast, the Russian and Chinese
governments feared such an outcome, insisting that any mandate should simply be
for the protection of civilians through the imposition of a no-fly zone (Murphy
2012). The ambiguity between opposed imperial interests and the necessity of
intervening in the revolutionary process was reflected in the fact that Russia and
China merely abstained rather than veto or vote positively for Resolution 1973.22
Consequently, the Libya intervention has hardly ushered in an era of
‘multilateral’ humanitarianism. Whilst it may have re-legitimated military
humanism, the question of intervention in Syria has already come up against
inter-imperialist rivalry. Russia, traditional ally of the Baath Party, felt ‘tricked’ by
Resolution 1973 and will only back a resolution on Syria if regime change is
explicitly ruled out (Murphy 2012). Both Russia and China are being denounced,
in at times distinctly racialized terms (The Guardian 2012).
However, one of the corollaries of the above argument is that one must be
extremely suspicious of those claiming to uphold the UN as against US unilateralism.
This has been a very strong tendency amongst both liberal (Sands 2006) and left/
critical international lawyers,23 and the broader public more generally.24 As this
article has argued, even the most ‘normal’ and ‘uncontroversial’ multilateral
interventions remain racialized and imperialist.25 The prime reason driving the US

22
S/RES/1973 of 17 March 2011.
23
In Bartholomew (2006) a great deal of the analysis essentially centres on the defence of
the UN as against US imperialism; Bowring (2008) puts forward a more radical critique that
reaches the same position.
24
Rasulov has argued that those scholars who argue that US imperialism has created an
imperial law that runs against the UN are analogous to the ‘feudal socialists’ criticized by
Marx, since much of their argument concerns the superiority of European domination to
‘upstart’ US imperialism (Rasulov 2010, 466).
25
China Miéville has argued persuasively that unilateralism is simply one strategy
adopted by imperialist powers in given situations, and that multilateralism can be just as
brutal and imperialist (Miéville 2008).
 Civilizing interventions? 129

away from the Security Council is not its disdain for multilateralism but rather the
threat of other imperialist states. As the Georgia example shows, these states will also
willingly adopt this language as and when it becomes convenient for them to do so.
Thus one cannot simply counterpose the imperialist, unilateral and racialized uses of
force of the US to the UN Charter regime. To do so is to miss the way in which that
regime itself is bound up with the imperialist system as a whole, of which rivalry is a
structural feature.26

Notes on contributor
Robert Knox is a PhD candidate in law at the London School of Economics. His
thesis explores the way in which the concept of imperialism has operated in
Marxist and Third World approaches to international law. His main interests are
in the fields of legal theory (especially Marxist and critical legal theory) and public
international law (particularly the law on the use of force). He is an editor of the
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journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Email:

robertjknox@gmail.com

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