Adil Hasan Khan’s reflection celebrates Antony Anghie’s formative TWAIL text, drawing on Khan’s presentation at the ‘Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law: 20 Years On’ Conference organised by the Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law in Naarm/Melbourne on 7 and 8 August 2025.

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TWAILR: Reflections ~ 77/2025

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A Liberal Reckoning?

There is now an emerging consensus that the death toll from the ongoing imperial genocide being conducted by Israel in Gaza has reached the staggering figure of around half a million people or more. That is around one fourth of the entire population of the strip. Over the past month or so, repeated images of starved people dying from a policy of deliberate mass starvation as a blunt tactic of annihilation has led to many so called progressive liberals coming out of the woodwork in the collective West to loudly proclaim that this ongoing suffering is unbearable to witness. However, it is important to remind ourselves not only that many of these same people are on record in stating that the stopping of food, water and electricity to the civilian population of Gaza was justified on account of the settler-colony’s right to defend itself, but also that this current genocide is exactly what numerous Israeli leaders had said that they were intending to do to the people of Gaza from the very outset. The hungry, herded, and executed people in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites today are being treated like the ‘Amalek’ and ‘human animals’ that the Israeli leaders had deemed them to be in order  to justify the genocidal violence to come. These same ‘progressive’ liberal actors and institutions have also persistently sought to undermine the credibility of Palestinian testimonies about this genocide from the very start.

A ‘Bad Muslim’s’ Inheritance

Call it my shameless attempt to latch onto the coattails of my ‘exact look-alike’, Zohran Mamdani, but in this reflection I intend to take a leaf from his Dad’s classic ‘War on Terror’ era book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. I take up the role of the ‘Bad Muslim’, a discomforting figure deemed least reliable as a witness to the global War on Terror era and its violent projects to remake the world. There is much to be said about recovering and practicing a TWAIL ethic that makes imperialists, and their jurist enablers, feel uncomfortable. Never forgetting that, for those afflicted by imperial psychosis, experiences of clarification that ought to evoke shame instead elicit anxiety. 

The onset of the ‘global war on terror’ also happens to be the very context for the publication of Antony Anghie’s 2005 TWAIL classic, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (ISMIL). An animating concern of this reflection is the question of how might one deploy ISMIL in our contemporary global context, amidst the ‘radiance’¹ of Gaza. An answer requires working through some of the discontinuities and continuities between these two contexts, though I suggest it is not that clarificatory to clearly parse the two. 

There is much to be said about recovering and practicing a TWAIL ethic that makes imperialists, and their jurist enablers, feel uncomfortable. Never forgetting that, for those afflicted by imperial psychosis, experiences of clarification that ought to evoke shame instead elicit anxiety.

Imperial Horrors

In a certain sense there is an apparent discontinuity. The Palestinian scholar Abdaljawad Omar has described this war on Gaza, as a war of ‘shock without awe’. As Omar powerfully put it: 

… these acts of wanton destruction epitomize the chaotic nature of the strategy currently being pursued by the Israeli military … This approach strips away an essential legitimizing mechanism in the eyes of the observers and supporters … it just invokes horror … To the world and to itself, Israel now appears as it has always appeared to us Palestinians: as a regime of pure terror. 

It is this this ‘horror’, where unlimited violence is the end, that has been livestreamed onto our screens.² In contrast, in Afghanistan and Iraq, violence was (eventually) presented as the sophisticated, precise and targeted (‘awesome’) means of achieving ‘liberal ends’. Hence, in the latter context, Abu Ghraib was shocking. But what has perhaps been even more critical is the fact that this livestreaming of unlimited violence has not prevented liberal Western states and their institutions, including their liberal media and universities, from offering anything less than a full-throated support for this genocide, not only by continuously rearming Israel, but also by putting immense pressure on other states and international institutions to not bring the slaughter to an end. It is hard to miss an overwhelming liberal institutional death drive in all this., Consider the near total sacrifice of any standards of journalistic integrity and independence by the liberal legacy media, or the endless willingness of liberal universities to sacrifice any pretence to academic freedom in order to silence any criticism of Israel on campuses, or even the willingness of democratically elected public representatives to shed even the pretence of being responsible and responsive to their own electorates and citizens. 

Faced with this war of ‘shock without awe’, imperial violence without the cover of ostensibly universal ideals, some have questioned whether there remains any critical purchase in practicing critique in its revelatory mode. As practiced by critics of imperialism, critique in this mode cuts through the legitimizing cover of purported universal principles to reveal the very real operations and maintenance of violent hierarchical relations of imperial power underneath all that is claimed to be conducted in the name of these ideals. The reasoning goes, what is there left to reveal when it comes to the exercise of such ‘naked violence’? 

Revelatory Critique

Inheriting is a practical activity through which heirs actively receive a training from within a tradition in how to conduct other practical activities. Consequently, when it comes to inheriting ISMIL, it is specific modalities of conducting critique (the how) that we might receive and train ourselves with in the present. And this formative how of ISMIL’s critique is the conduct of revelatory critique against the liberal covers for Western imperial violence, memorably including the liberal imperial projects for ‘achieving’ human rights, good governance, and democracy, amongst others. As Tony, drawing upon his literary alter ego Joseph Conrad, observes in a chapter in an edited volume published shortly after ISMIL, the telos of critique in this mode is above all to make one see ‘by the power of the written word’. What one sees through the conduct of revelatory critique is that these imperial liberal ideals operate to obfuscate the continuing existence of violent imperial relations of power and justify the violent ‘civilizational’ disciplining of black and brown bodies judged to be lacking by international lawyers. In other words, what revelatory critique reveals as operating at the heart of international law is a process that Tony memorably calls ‘the dynamic of difference’. 

Adequately responding to gaslight liberalism, and its distinctive form of cover for imperial violence … requires that we pay attention to the specific spatial and temporal morphologies of how different liberal imperial covers for this ongoing genocide in Gaza have been, and could yet be, run. 

I would like to argue that there is much more that connects us to the context(s) of ISMIL’s writing and our present amidst the ‘radiance’ of Gaza. These connections are not settled and familiar. They are uncanny.   

Thus, the experience of re-reading the final substantive chapter of ISMIL in the present is one of unsettling recognition. The chapter was written in the wake of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and then Iraq, several years after the rest of the chapters in the book. It appears to critically engage with another imperial war that was, in its initial stage, also one of ‘shock with minimal awe’. ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ was styled as an imperial ‘religious crusade’. Many of us, including myself, now misremember these imperial wars and violent occupations as always being about the purported securing of the liberal universal ideals of democracy, secularism and women’s rights. But these ideals were actually, even as potent covers or justifications for imperial violence, only afterthoughts.³ At the outset of this final chapter, Tony notes that when it came to these imperial practices, engaging in critique in a revelatory mode was not adequate. As Tony observes: 

International law is now being subjected to various pressures that might ultimately result in the emergence of an international system that permits, if not endorses and adopts, quite explicitly imperial practices. The purpose of this chapter, then, is not to examine an ostensibly neutral set of practices – such as those associated with globalization – and reveal their imperial character. Rather, it is to examine the particular character of contemporary imperialism, to sketch out ways in which it both resembles and departs from the imperialism of the past, and to identify the particular strategies and doctrines used to further it and alter the existing framework of international law.

Upon reading the chapter, it becomes clear that here in Tony’s understanding we were confronted by a return of a more ‘primordial’ liberal imperialism. I call it ‘gaslight liberalism’.

Gaslight Liberalism’s Cover

Adequately responding to this form of gaslight liberalism, and its distinctive form of cover for imperial violence, also calls for continuing the practice of conducting revelatory critique but in a distinctive mode. This requires that we pay attention to the specific spatial and temporal morphologies of how different liberal imperial covers for this ongoing genocide in Gaza have been, and could yet be, run. 

Spatially, the distinction between the justifications provided for the genocide internally – especially in Hebrew language media – and externally, to the primarily English language media, has been significant. In the latter case universal ideals often get evoked, albeit farcically containing a litany of ‘double lie[s]’ that, as the title of a popular podcast focusing on some of these media interventions has it, now just constitute ‘bad hasbara’.⁴ But primarily the cover run by Western liberal media and academic institutions for this genocide has largely been going out of their way to ignore it and silencing even any merely descriptive, let alone critical, engagement with this unabated violence within their own countries. For me this modality of repression marks the distinctiveness of how gaslight liberalism runs cover for imperial violence. 

So, while the genocide might not have been undertaken in the name of securing ostensible universal ideals, the silencing of protests against genocide, and the overwhelming complicity of Western liberal states and their key liberal institutions in the perpetration of genocide, has indeed been undertaken through a weaponisation of ‘liberal ideals’. This form of gaslight liberal cover has operated by relentlessly expressing faux moral outrage, not at the brazen enactment of imperial genocide over the past two years, but at the horrified responses to this genocide – with liberals demanding that anti-genocide protestors deny the evidence of their ‘lying eyes’!⁵

The purportedly universal ideal that provides cover for imperial violence and the silencing and punishing of Palestinian and allied protestors in the West has appeared in several minor formulations, including that of liberal tolerance and protecting ‘social cohesion’. But the overarching formulation is that of ‘combatting antisemitism’. Incidents of antisemitism are claimed to have exploded in these liberal societies almost exclusively on account of anti-genocide protests. 

Palestinians and brown Muslims are deemed to be the exclusive inheritors of the actual sordid and generationally repressed histories of European antisemitism, genocide and its aftermaths

Revelatory critique bears witness that, operating barely below the surface of the liberal weaponization of ‘combatting antisemitism’ as a purportedly universal ideal, is a racializing discourse. Any criticism of the conduct of a settler-colonial ethno-supremacist apartheid state enacting a livestreamed genocide is deemed to violate this universalized ideal. Such criticism is seen by liberals as demanding repressive punishing and silencing. As the relentless attacks on the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the abductions of Mahmood Khalil and other student protestors, or the suspension of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s research grant  shows, within the terms of this static dynamic of difference, any public speech about the genocide while being a Palestinian and/or a brown Muslim on its own gets you labelled an antisemite. More than that, Palestinians and brown Muslims are deemed to be the exclusive inheritors of the actual sordid and generationally repressed histories of European antisemitism, genocide and its aftermaths. 

Crucially, a Third Worldist anti-imperial politics does not simply call for the refusal of universal ideals, which in this case is antiracism, but rather ‘to contest the imperial versions of these ideals’. 

Thus, as a Third World anti-imperialist in the West in this moment, one must reveal and fight the deep antisemitism of the policing of Jewish anti-genocide protestors, the subversive co-optation of the idioms of anti-genocide protests by White Christian nationalists profiting from the cover afforded to them by racial weaponization of ‘combatting antisemitism’ to promote their own longstanding ethno-supremacist aims of expelling Judaism as a form of life from the West, as well as the bellicose public re-emergence of card-carrying neo-Nazis on the streets of several Western countries under the banner of anti-immigration protests. One must also refuse the exclusionary centring of ‘Jewish victimhood’ vis-à-vis the crime of genocide (an ‘exceptionalist understanding of Holocaust victimization’),⁶ which, in conjunction with this racialized universalization of the purported perpetrators of antisemitism referred above, have enabled a racialized weaponization of ‘combatting antisemitism’. Indeed, such a weaponised ‘combatting antisemitism’ ideal has operated to silence Palestinian testimonies of genocide from the very inception of the state of the Israel (and the Nakba) and it now increasingly underpins globalized practices of anti-Palestinian racism that attempt to censor any speech protesting the Gaza genocide. As Justin Podur notes: 

… anti-Palestinian racism … is a type of racism that is presented as a type of anti-racism … Anyone who is genuinely anti-racist and opposed to anti-semitism should also be against anti-Palestinian racism.

Liberalism’s Awe to Come?

And what about the temporal contours of liberal efforts to run cover for this genocide? A rereading of the final chapter of ISMIL today reminds us that the ‘war on terror’ was initially limited in its ‘liberal awe’ and was more ‘imperial terror’. Crucially, this imperial terror was ex-post facto justified by, and its ‘imperial excesses’ masked by, liberal universal ideals that sought to generate progressive telos after the fact for imperial violence. This justification was performed by ‘re-purposing’ imperial wars into ‘effective instruments’ for achieving the liberal ends of (re)creating ‘democratic’ state-building projects (‘a war that kills violence in order to bring about non-violence’). If the last few months are anything to go by, there remain remnants of a lingering fantasy powered liberal will – if not quite an enduring capacity – to perform exactly such a function for the Gaza genocide in order to redeem both Israel and international law, and thus resume the ‘prolonged [liberal] distraction to buy Israel time to move its anachronistic setter colonial project further’ through the liberal paradigm of the so-called Oslo ‘economic peace’ process. It is here that conducting ISMIL’s revelatory critique will become vital. 

Critique as Cover

A key object of revelatory critique ought to be the conduct of many critical legal scholars themselves. Some crits have run cover for this genocide by very loudly choosing to stay silent to all that is outside their ‘zone of interest’.⁷ More significantly certain other crits have opted to smugly chide and critique the practices of their colleagues who publicly engage with international law to refuse the silencing lies empire tells abouts its annihilatory violence. This type of critique as cover has been run either in the name of an ironic pragmatic expertise, or a disenchanted revolutionary purity standing above the fray of what is purported to be rival truth claims ‘naively’ seeking validation in an inherently indeterminate, or even imperial, medium. All such critique has revealed is that these colleagues, with all their political maturity signalling, ultimately hold onto to a bog-standard liberal conception of international law and politics (especially when it comes to reading the practices of those they choose to critique) that is devoid of attentiveness to how imperial power operates in the present. Also, in the case of some of these crits, their political practice lacks any commitment to collectively practicing solidarity with Third Worldist political movements, and relatedly, any courage to take the risks that necessarily accompany making this choice. 

Illustrative instances of this practice of critique as cover appears in the scholarship of the Australia-based and United Kingdom-based public international legal scholars, Madelaine Chiam and Tor Krever respectively. In two short pieces published as part of one of the first international law journal special issues focusing on Gaza (edited by Krever, and which included several truly insightful articles by Palestinian international lawyers and comrades), both decried what they claimed to be the headlong rush on the part of fellow international lawyers to provide a legal framing to the violence unfolding in Gaza. The focus of their critical ire was the practice of penning collective open letters (‘an epistolary deluge’).

For Krever, such supposedly naïve practices of penning public letters threaten to juridify the resistance ‘in the name of legal expertise’ of an imperial international law. For Chiam, a lack of political institutional sophistication on the part of open letter writers and signatories threatens the ‘public authority of legal argument’. For her these open letters enact and extend a brute politics of numbers and thus displace the very detached legal expertise that otherwise enables administrators to navigate ‘the complexities of the meaning and application of … [legal] principles’. Tellingly, such a reading imposes a liberal (utilitarian) frame of a ‘politics of interests’ on collective political practices, where desires for collective solidarity and safety get construed as a desire for ‘the comfort of numbers’ among partisans.⁸ Both share a conception of their colleagues writing, circulating, and publishing these open letters against the imperial violence in Gaza as being politically immature.

The adequateness of Third Worldist engagements with international law are evaluated by their practitioners not primarily in terms of their forensic prowess, representational reach, or indeed their international legal institutional validation, but rather in terms of how well they enable the continuation of the ever-losing struggles to care for the liveability of a ‘form of life’ lived with others.

In another piece, Chiam, Monique Cormier and Anna Hood construe their colleagues’ wording in these open letters as risking unleashing ‘too much emotion’. In doing so they participate in the reproduction of academic anti-Palestinian discourses that mark Palestinian critique as ‘toxic’. Krever and Chiam also share a folie à deux that somehow empire’s historical mutations ended back in 2003 with their ‘father’s war’, which renders a deeply melancholic quality to their respective renditions of critique, one that fundamentally fails to acknowledge the operations of gaslight liberalism in the present.

In contrast, for a TWAILer trained and formed by Tony and others, collective public engagements with a liberal imperial international law are not about having the requisite disciplinary expert authority to speak international law but about the collective task of forming and caring for political community with colonised peoples and cultivating the courage to reveal the operations of imperial power. Even the ‘safety of numbers’ is fragile today as simply signing an open letter could get you hauled before a law school disciplinary committee, or put on various Zionist academic watchlists, rendering you more likely to be disciplined, fired, abducted, detained, and deported – responses that the international lawyer signatories to the open letter regarding the (il)legality of the 2003 Iraq War never experienced.⁹ It is worth reminding ourselves that responses by Western university administrators towards students and staff in the wake of the Gaza genocide have reversed the meanings of ‘safety’ and ‘(dis)comfort’ in racialized ways. While some experiences of discomfort are systematically construed as a lack of safety, the unsafety of Others is systematically ignored.¹⁰

The adequateness of Third Worldist engagements with international law are evaluated by their practitioners not primarily in terms of their forensic prowess, representational reach, or indeed their international legal institutional validation, but rather in terms of how well they enable the continuation of the ever-losing struggles to care for the liveability of a ‘form of life’ lived with others. In the challenging words delivered to law students by the inspirational historian Jordana Silverstein: 

… the task is … to open ourselves to our comrades and siblings, and to the times, spaces, and practices of life-making that we can learn through working in solidarity, towards justice and liberation. 

These colleagues understand that the crucial relationship between ‘revolutionary anticolonial resistance’ and ‘international lawfare’ is one where the coordinates of liberation must always be set by the former. Furthermore, they comprehend the imperial violence being enacted in Gaza as global exemplar, not exception; as structure, not event. Global structures of imperial violence demand collective resistance, as they threaten to annihilate all collective futures. ‘Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.’ 

Revelatory Critique as Witnessing

This Third Worldist revelatory critique is not about seeing and then looking away but seeing and bearing witness to a truth about imperial power that is always already in the process of being covered – so that we, and those who come after, might not mis-remember. Revealing that which has already been seen by all, but lied about by those in power, is an activity through which a critic takes up the responsibilities of a witness. It is collective heart work that capacitates such truth-telling, not simply the intellect.¹¹ It is this specific revelatory mode of critique as witnessing that TWAILers must now practice in the face of a form of imperial violence and liberal cover for it that ‘cleaves memory from experience’.

To quote the recently departed poet and activist Andrea Gibson: 

…the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is. 

Such telling neither brings, nor seeks, closure. It fans sparks.

Thank you, Tony! 

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1. I use this concept as it has been developed and deployed by Dr. Samah Jabr, a leading Palestinian psychiatrist based in Al-Quds. Jabr uses the term in both a psychiatric (as the radiating effects of trauma) and an ethical (as an illuminating sign/guidance) sense in order to draw attention to what she calls the ongoing ‘global reverberations’ of not only the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but also the resilient resistance against it.
2. This ‘horror’, in line with the obsessive-compulsive symptom whereby every imperialist accusation is a disavowed confession, has incessantly been projected back in order frame the violence enacted by the Palestinian resistance, such that, as Omar observes in another piece, resistance violence has ‘always been rendered unthinkable, profane, without “qualification” and “illogical”’.
3. In stark contrast, in the immediate aftermath of ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’, the Israeli regime did not suffer from any such postcolonial amnesia, repeatedly describing the attacks as ‘our 9/11’.
4. This has not always been the case when it comes to the historical investment in providing a strong liberal cover to the conduct of imperial violence in Palestine to the rest of the world.
5. In my understating, gaslight liberalism dispenses with and lacks notions of progress and futurity in its constructions of ‘universal ideals’. Consequently, its ‘dynamic of difference’ is largely static, offering a measure of psychic relief and cover to imperialists through silencing or punishing protesting subjects.
6. Such that an armed attack on the state of Israel can be construed (again, very much for a liberal Western audience) as a continuation of the holocaust and thus a betrayal of the Ur-founding promise of the post-war liberal international legal order and the adoption of the Genocide Convention. Concomitantly, this ethno-state’s repeated genocidal actions against Palestinians – both before and after the 7 October 2023 attack – are afforded total impunity and excluded from the remit of this founding promise of ‘Never Again!’, in the name of defending ‘Never Again is Now!’, through performances of what Naomi Klein has called atrocity memorialization operating as a ‘a form of denial’.
7. Case in point are the near ‘wordless on Palestine’ rehearsals performed at the annual conferences of The Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia over the past two years. 
8. In a subsequent article in the European Journal of International Law, Chiam, Monique Cormier and Anna Hood elaborate on their underlying ‘two-sided conflict’ framing of the imperial violence in Gaza. The framing of the violence as ‘having two-sides’ has characterized the liberal peace paradigm and its erasure of global structures and relations of imperialism and settler-colonialism that frame Gaza and the ‘question of Palestine’ for Palestinian international legal scholars and their TWAIL allies.
9. There have of course been far more courageous actions taken by colleagues than just writing open letters. Exemplary here are all the international lawyers as legal observers aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla attempting to break the siege of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid.
10. The consistent racialized bias in these responses – especially anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia – has not prevented liberal academics from running cover for such practices in the name of the university’s abstract neutrality.
11. ‘Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts in the chests that grow blind.’ Quran, 22:46.