Narrating the non-European nation-state[1]
André Dao, Postdoctoral research fellow, Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law, Melbourne Law School
In Antony Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, the chapter on the League of Nations’ Mandate System turns on a key analogy. ‘The great literature of modernity’, writes Anghie, was ‘preoccupied with mapping the interior, with tracing and examining the workings of an inner consciousness.’ Meanwhile, international jurists, including those at the League, ‘sensed that access to the interior of the state would revolutionise their discipline in much the same way that Joyce had revolutionised the novel’.[2] In this reflection, I want to explore this seeming correspondence between law and literature, and the way this correspondence is linked by an idea of modernity.
I want to do so through the concept of legal personhood. One of the many tectonic shifts that Anghie charts in the League is a shift in the technique of making international legal persons: from the positivistic search for putatively objective criteria of government, population and territory to the more sophisticated techniques of pragmatist jurisprudence: administrative standards, data/gathering and statistics, report writing. We can think of these latter techniques as techniques for narrating the interior of the nation. To put it another way, Anghie shows how the new found sociological depth of the nation-state has to be narrated.[3]
We can think of the parallel in literature as the Bildungsroman: in its traditional form, the Bildungsroman is a novel that charts the development of the protagonist into a person of moral, metaphysical and psychological depth. This moral, metaphysical and psychological growth, in turn, allows the protagonist to find their proper place in the socio-politico-juridical order. The Bildungsroman is thus, as Joseph Slaughter has shown, the paradigmatic novel of citizenship because it shows how citizenship, or being the subject of human rights, is more than a legal status: the human being must learn to become (that is, to think, feel, and act as) a rights-bearing citizen.[4]
Note that there is a distinction here between who a person really is, and their legal personhood, which we can think of as a kind of mask – the per-sonare – through which an entity can act and speak legally.[5] Crucial to the modern conception of personhood is the idea that these two dimensions are necessarily linked: that legal personhood is somehow the proper recognition of the fully human person with moral, metaphysical and psychological depth.
As Roberto Esposito has observed, this modern person contains a split, between the fully human person ‘considered to be the center of juridical imputation’ by virtue of their capacity for reason, and that which we call ‘the body’, ‘reduced to biology, practically assimilated to the animal’ and therefore ‘a piece of property akin to an internal slave.’[6] Esposito’s argument is that this conception of the person introduces within liberalism a ‘hierarchical and exclusionary effect’:
‘At its apex one finds the healthy adult, to whom can be awarded the title of being truly and properly a person; next there is the infant, who is considered to be a potential person; and then the elderly invalid, who has been reduced to a semi-person; to the terminally ill to whom the status of non-person is given; to finally the madman who has received the role of anti-person.’[7]
Much of colonial and postcolonial literature is concerned with narrating the successful or unsuccessful attempt by the native to become the right kind of person, to become fully human within this schema.
What we see from reading Anghie is that this structure is repeated in the nation-state: the nation is the entity with sociological depth and reality; the state is the legal person through which the nation can legally speak and act. As with the individual person, statehood or international legal personality, is understood to be the proper recognition of the nation that has achieved the requisite sociological depth and reality. In Esposito’s account, European liberalism is centrally concerned with awarding the ‘mastery of the body to its legitimate owner’, so that the body is directed by the individual ‘person’ associated with that body – and not by some other person, as occurs in slavery.[8] Anti-colonial struggle – at least when focused on capturing the state apparatus – can be understood in analogous fashion, as anticolonialists try to form a legal person, the postcolonial state, that will wrest control of the nation-body from another legal person, the colonial state.
Viewed in this light, we can see that International jurists at the league used their new techniques to narrate a defective interiority to make international legal persons – mandate territories – that were potential, semi-, nonor anti-states. These narratives, as Anghie writes ‘create difference with respect to the most intimate and minute aspects of social life in mandate territories’.[9] Every difference became a project for the Mandate System: the League took upon itself ‘the task of transforming the interior of non-European societies and peoples, ostensibly to liberate them.’[10] Like the natives in a colonial novel, the mandate territories were narrated into a tuteletary structure, as international legal persons, as the league charter put it, ‘not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’.
In this reflection, I want to make two points about this correspondence between the laws and literatures of personood.[11]
The first point is about aesthetics, or style. One face of modernist style is an aesthetic of scientific certainty and universal knowledge. As Anghie shows, this style is readily taken up by the League and the mandatories who constructed a ‘massive system of scientific truth…which could now make new and more powerful claims to being universal.’
But another, equally important face of modernist style is a kind of radical doubt, and an anxiety over the possibility of any inter-subjectivity, let alone universality. A key technique of that style is irony, a point Anghie picks up on in a lengthy footnote where he compares the similarities between Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, which made the analogy between the civilising mission of Roman imperialism in Britain and contemporary British imperialism in Africa, and the opening of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, when Marlow says of London ‘And this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth’.[12]
Yet as Anghie points out, Lugard has none of Conrad’s irony – the thrust of Conrad’s novel is that the real heart of darkness lies within the European coloniser. In Conrad, then, we have the ambivalence of modernist literature, which is both the carrier of Eurocentrism, producing and reproducing the modern European person with their complex interiority, while also critiquing this modern person. It’s an ambivalence that Anghie finds even in some of the League administrators, like Quincy Wright, whose reports are, ‘haunted by an awareness of the fact that the statistics…could acquire a completely different significance in a different cultural setting’.[13]
What this suggests, I think, is another style of legal modernism – that is to say, another way of doing international law – which eschews the certainty and universality of modern international institutions without rejecting modernity outright. Indeed, Professor Anghie treated the audience to a masterful use of irony in his recent Sir George Turner public lecture, invoking the UN Charter’s determination ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ only to show precisely how the Charter – and liberal international law more generally – has licensed war after atrocity after war.[14] We might think as well of Vasuki Nesiah’s invocation of the rehearsal rather than the final performance: perhaps we can rehearse our lines, our arguments for legal personhood, without fully committing to their completion.[15] Or we might think of Shahd Hammouri’s call for an ‘ironic fearlessness’ in the wake of Israel’s genocidal violence that has both killed off part of our common humanity, and ‘the false labels of European liberalism…as collateral damage.’[16]
We can also find resources for thinking about these other modernities in the anticolonial writers – I’m thinking here, as an example, of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks which is, among other things, a kind of Bildungsroman, but one that does not chart a linear story of his progress towards becoming fully human. Rather it is a Bildungsroman with an uncertain Bildung: ending not in the achievement of full citizenship but with a prayer: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who questions!’[17] Throughout this first book, Fanon deploys a withering irony to critique not only the false universalism of colonial modernity, but the racial essentialism of Négritude. This is not merely a destructive irony, or a paralysing doubt – Fanon’s irony and doubt are generative: they call him (and us) to action. Thus in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon insists on a national consciousness which is not nationalism, a ‘consciousness of self’ which is not ‘the closing of a door to communication’.[18] Only at the heart of this national consciousness can ‘international consciousnss liv[e] and gro[w]’.[19] As Kris Sealey argues, this is a ‘nationalism of the future, of possibility, neither myopically grounded in “Replace the foreigner” nor chained to a frozen and mythic past.’[20] Fanon’s ironic engagements with nation, culture and humanism allow for something new to emerge.
The second point is about what Edward Said called the permission to narrate. I have said that the interiority of international legal personality – the nation – must always be narrated, and that in the colonial context, the native nation is narrated as not yet ready to stand on its own – as not yet modern; as needing to be disciplined in order to become modern.
What is pernicious about the international legal techniques described by Anghie is the way this being narrated by others comes to stand in for self-determination – indeed, how it comes to displace the possibility of a self-narrated self-determination.[21] We might see here, then, one of those persistent features of international law: that its techniques for narrating community are, by and large, tools best wielded by imperial agents and local elites.
Of course, nowhere is this dynamic more discernible today than in the case of Palestine. As Said writes, the ‘existence of the Palestinian people whose history, actuality and aspirations, as possessed of a coherent narrative direction pointed towards self-determination’ is inadmissible.[22] Writing in 1984, he describes how his own and other Palestinians’ attempts to narrate the Palestinian nation are denied, including through mechanisms such as a written profile of the Palestinian people or a census to ascertain their numbers. Thus even when speaking with sympathetic Arab diplomats, Said finds that to speak of Palestinians outside the Occupied Palestinian Territory is too much: ‘Palestine yes, Palestinians no.’[23]
41 years later, history repeats itself as farce: in September 2025 we were treated to the spectacle of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom recognising a Palestinian state that does not exist, that will have no military, and that will not have exclusive control of its own borders.[24] This is a recognition that dictates that democratic elections be held to determine the future governance of the state, but that a specific party cannot run in those elections. A recognition that was conditional on certain ‘commitments’ to internal reform. A recognition that says nothing about the right to return. The international legal person that such recognition creates is one in which the Palestinian nation is so circumscribed as to be all but absent. And if that were not enough, we are now told that the US is backing a plan to install Tony Blair as the head of a putative Gaza International Transitional Authority, which would be the ‘supreme political and legal authority’ in Gaza for up to five years.[25] The plan is said to be modelled on the international bodies which administered Kosovo and Timor-Leste’s ‘transitions to statehood’.[26] The echoes of the Mandate system are difficult to miss.
And this is said to be great progress, the approximate catalyst of which is apparently the dissemination of images of starving children. And for those who have been puzzling, as I have, over why now – why famine, and not bombing, or the systematic targeting of doctors and hospitals, or the murder of aid workers, or, in short at any point in the nearly two years of this phase of the genocide: I think that at least a partial answer is that the image of the starving child does not conjure up a people ‘possessed of a coherent narrative direction pointed towards self-determination’. Instead, as Said wrote in 1984: ‘never has so much been written and shown of the Palestinians…They are there all right, but the narrative ‘of their present actuality – which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine, later Israel – that narrative is not.’[27]
This disappearance of the native was already apparent under the League’s Mandate System when, as Anghie writes, ‘for the purposes of the mandate, the natives existed more vividly in Geneva, where all this information was gathered and processed, than they did in the mandate territories themselves.’[28] Without the permission to narrate, ‘native discontent could express itself only as rebellion’. Yet even then, because the natives could not represent themselves – not even when taking up arms – ‘the meaning of [their rebellion] was interpreted and established by the League’. In the absence of native evidence, ‘the meaning of this action is lost’.[29]
On 23 May 2025, the Palestinian translator, writer and researcher Alaa Alqaisi published a short piece titled ‘We Knocked Until Our Hands Broke’.[30] The article recounts the ending of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, in which three Palestinian men attempt to smuggle themselves across a border inside a water tank. They are told to remain silent. And they do so, despite the blistering heat. When the smuggler opens the tank at the end of the journey, he finds that all three men are dead. He cries, ‘Why didn’t you knock?’ As Alqaisi explains, Kanafani’s question has been asked ‘again and again, by academics, by politicians…It has become a riddle, a challenge, sometimes even a finger pointing in blame.’ Alqaisi’s answer to Kanafani – an answer that comes not ‘from the comfort of distant capitals’, but from ‘the ruins of memory, and from the edge of an ongoing catastrophe’ is stark: ‘Ghassan, we did knock. We knocked until our hands broke. We knocked until the walls bled. And still, no one opened the door.’
Without the permission to narrate – without confronting anti-Palestinian racism[31] – the meaning of Palestinian thought and action will be lost, channelled into the circumscribed legal person of dominated statehood.[32] Palestinian knocking will go unheeded. As Alqaisi writes: ‘Not because no one heard. But because those who heard looked away. Because abandonment is not an accident – it is a decision.’
[1] An earlier version of this essay was originally delivered as a reflection for a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of Antony Anghie’s groundbreaking work, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law held at Melbourne Law School on 7-8 August 2025.
[2] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 135.
[3] In the title of a later article, Anghie makes this explicit: ‘Narrating the nation and international law’ in Philip Darby (ed) From International Relations to Relations International: Postcolonial Essays(Taylor & Francis Group, 2015). There, Anghie notes that ‘the novel’ is perhaps ‘uniquely capable of exploring’ the question of ‘[h]ow are the lives and fates of individuals and communities connected with broad historical events and forces?’ (35).
[4] Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
[5] Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: the Noton of Person; the Notion of Self’ in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History ed. Carrithers et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5.
[6] Roberto Esposito, ‘The Dispositif of the Person’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 8 (2012), 25.
[7] Roberto Esposito, ‘The Dispositif of the Person’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 8 (2012), 25.
[8] Roberto Esposito, ‘The Dispositif of the Person’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 8 (2012), 25.
[9] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156.
[10] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 146.
[11] I draw here on Joseph Slaughter’s argument that ‘the logics of literary and legal personification so routinely collapse into each other that it can be difficult, if not practically impossible, to disentangle one from the other, to go back and distil a pure theory of personhood that can be said to belong properly to one discipline and not to the other.’ Joseph R Slaughter, “Pathetic Fallacies: Personification and the Unruly Subjects of International Law,” (2019) London Review of International Law 7(1), 25.
[12] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157 fn 168.
[13] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 177.
[14] Antony Anghie, ‘Law and Disorder: Reflections on the United Nations at Eighty’, Sir George Turner Lecture, Melbourne Law School, 5 August 2025.
[15] Vasuki Nesiah, ‘”We are proud to apologize for genocide”: The racial investment in humanitarian capital’, Beehive Seminar, Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law, 22 July 2024. Recording available at https://www.lpgcil.org/past-events/3-august-platformed-hate-speech-against-women-self-regulation-and-the-corporate-power-of-social-media-platforms-b85y9.
[16] Shahd Hammouri, ‘Part of Us is Dead’, (2024) Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 15(2), 263.
[17] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (tr.) (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 181.
[18] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington (tr.) (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 247.
[19] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington (tr.) (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 248.
[20] Kris F. Sealey, Creolizing the nation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 169.
[21] See Joseph Massad, ‘Against Self-Determination’ (2018) 9(2) Humanity 161, especially at 184: ‘the substance of self-determination varies according to the colonial of its beneficiary: for the settler-colonists a purported jus sanguinis is linked to a purported jus soli while for the colonized jus sanguinis is delinked from jus soli‘. That is, Massad shows how from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the Oslo Accords of 1993, the international law (made by and for colonising powers) narrated a self-determination for Palestinians that was either entirely absent (under British colonial rule), or with severely curtailed rights to land (first under the 1947 Partition Plan and then under every subsequent international agreement); conversely, from Balfour on, ‘worldwide Jewry, colonizing or not, [were granted] a “national home” in Palestine’ (183).
[22] Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, (1984) London Review of Books 6(3).
[23] Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, (1984) London Review of Books 6(3).
[24] Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong, ‘Australia recognises the State of Palestine’, 21 September 2025, https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/media-release/australia-recognises-state-palestine; Mark Carney, ‘Statement by Prime Minister Carney on Canada’s recognition of the State of Palestine’, 21 September 2025, https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2025/09/21/statement-prime-minister-carney-on-canada-recognition-state-palestine; Keir Starmer, ‘UK formally recognises Palestinian State’, 21 September 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-formally-recognises-palestinian-state.
[25] Patrick Wintour, ‘Washington backing plan for Tony Blair to head transitional Gaza authority’, The Guardian, 26 September 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/washington-backing-plan-for-tony-blair-to-head-transitional-gaza-authority.
[26] Patrick Wintour, ‘Washington backing plan for Tony Blair to head transitional Gaza authority’, The Guardian, 26 September 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/washington-backing-plan-for-tony-blair-to-head-transitional-gaza-authority.
[27] Edward Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, (1984) London Review of Books 6(3). Noura Erakat, Darryl Li and John Reynolds take up Said’s idea of the permission to narrate to take the American Journal of Internationa Law to task for the ‘patterns of exclusion and tokenization’ in their coverage of the question of Palestine: ‘Israeli authors regularly publish on universal themes, while Palestinians are relegated to the particular – granted the “permission to narrate” on a single issue and only when their perspectives are arrayed alongside even more numerous opposing ones.’ Noura Erakat, Darryl Li and John Reynolds, ‘Race, Palestine, and International Law’ (2023) AJIL Unbound 117, 77-81, 78.
[28] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 184.
[29] Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 176-7.
[30] Alaa Alqaisi, ‘We Knocked Until Our Hands Broke’, Arablit, 23 May 2025, https://arablit.org/2025/05/23/we-knocked-until-our-hands-broke/. I am grateful to Jessica Whyte for bringing this piece to my attention.
[31] See Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin (eds.), Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025).
[32] See Tamara Tamimi, ‘Delivering Justice for Palestinians through International Law? Between Perceptions and Fulfilment’, (Phd thesis, Queen’s University Belfast School of Law, in progress) for a rigorous and compelling exploration of the gap between what international law can deliver and the subjective and collective Palestinian perceptions of justice. See also, Lana Tatour, ‘Palestinians Want Liberation, Not Recognition’, The Century Foundation, 12 June 2024, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/palestinians-want-liberation-not-recognition/.
