Contingencies of Context

Abstract

This chapter considers the presence of anticolonial political thought in and as international law, and in particular the legacies of the Algerian Revolution for the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. The Additional Protocols extended to wars of national liberation the status of international armed conflicts, a move often explained as a straightforward product of context: an effort to expand the reach of humanitarian law to conflicts like those in Algeria and Vietnam. Returning to the legal arguments of the Algerian revolutionaries, however, reveals more complex arguments about what made the conflict international. Rather than straightforwardly nationalist, those arguments entailed robust conceptions of sovereignty, aggression, and the nature of decolonisation as a legal project. Tracing those arguments through the deliberations over the Additional Protocols, the chapter shows how, rather than simply reflecting its context, law operates as a site of historical meaning-making to adjudicate the past’s significance.