Under the Shadow of 'The Bullet': TWAIL Reflections on the 'Worth' of War and Peace

Abstract

This essay offers some brief reflections, from a Third World Approaches to International Law (‘TWAIL’) vantage point, on the ways in which the global arms trade, symbolised by the ‘bullet’, is fundamentally embedded within the international legal regulation of war and peace. In mainstream international law, war is cast as a crisis and as a necessary response to threats to security; bringing about peace through the cessation of war is presented as the prime responsibility of the international community. This essay traces the influence of these two fundamentals of international law in relation to contemporary events, specifically in relation to the genocide in Palestine. In this arena, the ‘worth’ of war and peace is measured not in terms of protecting and supporting the already acutely dispossessed targets of the ‘bullet’, but in terms of protecting, supporting and systematically enriching those who produce and deploy it. A TWAIL analysis exposes the imperialist logic of those who benefit in different ways all along the collusive chains of arms-trade – chains that bind perpetrators to victims – and the role of the international legal order, including human rights, in ensuring that both remain entangled with one another in a corrosive carceral relationship. The essay concludes with ways to navigate this coercive and violent order both within and beyond international law and human rights.