Palestine and International Law: Confronting Legal Violence and Mobilising for Liberation

Guest Editors: Mohsen al Attar and M Behesti Aydogan
Deadline for Abstracts: 30 June 2025
Deadline for Full Papers: 31 August 2025
Deadline for Revised Papers: 15 October 2025
Publication: 01 December 2025

International law is, yet again, under the microscope. Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza has exposed the complicity of the legal order in maintaining conditions of apartheid, settler-colonial domination and systemic impunity, sprinkled with a heavy dose of white ignorance. In the face of law and state-sanctioned annihilation, the failures of international legal institutions—the UN Security Council, ICC, and rules-based order—are impossible to ignore.
This special issue of the Boğaziçi Law Review builds upon the conversations that took place at the 2024 conference, Rethinking International Law After Gaza, and were expanded through a subsequent symposium on Opinio Juris. Our goal is to deepen scholarly and activist engagement with the contradictions of international law as, first, a terrain of violence, second, a site of contestation, and, third, a (potential) site of liberation.
We invite submissions that grapple with the central question: Can international law be more than what it has been for Palestine and Palestinians? This might involve critical engagement with the law’s epistemic and material complicity with Israeli violence, or reflections on law’s value as a tool for emancipation. Our interest lies especially in works that transcend the perpetual binary between “inside” and “outside” legal strategies, or guerrilla and insurgent, and instead explore what a decolonial or post-modern praxis of legal resistance might look like.

Possible themes include:

● International law as a settler-colonial grammar (eg. Patrick Wolfe)
● Zionism, racial sovereignty, and the contradictions of white liberalism (eg. Charles Mills)
● Western legal diplomacy and the violence of neutrality
● Scholasticide and the criminalisation of thought and speech (eg. Tshepo Madligozi)
● Genocide, apartheid, and the failures of international criminal law (eg. John Duggard)
● The Third World’s legal consensus on Palestine: a post-Westphalian legal order?
● TWAIL, Palestine, and the crisis of radical positivism
● Zionism as racism: legal memory, UN resolutions, and political erasure (eg. UN General Assembly)
● Solidarity as legal method: toward a jurisprudence of liberation

We commit to publishing:

● 5-7 scholarly articles (6,000–8,000 words)
● 3-5 critical essays or reflections (2,000–5,000 words)
● Co-authored or collective pieces involving activists, scholars, or practitioners
● Contributions from Palestinian scholars and others historically marginalised within international legal academia
● Submissions in English or Turkish

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit abstracts of 300–500 words, along with a short bio, by 30 June 2025 to BLR2025@bogazici.edu.tr. Professors al Attar and Aydogan will respond within 7 days. Full drafts will be due by 31 August 2025. Submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review, but we also encourage early engagement and conversation with the editorial team.