Political theory has traditionally started from the assumption that the public and the private belong to separate spheres, with the implication that the domestic household is beyond the reach of the state. This chapter challenges these assumptions. Drawing on indigenous, black, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminisms, it explores the history of heteropatriarchy as a racial and colonial history of reproductive extraction and control. I argue that racial capitalism operates as a bourgeois sexual order which shores up the white propertied family by extracting reproductive labour from those it deems racially perverse, degenerate, and bereft. Racialised ideas around what counts as family ‘proper’ have thus functioned as a central tool of capital accumulation. By re-visiting The Communist Manifesto’s famous demand – ‘Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!’ – through a racial capitalist lens, this chapter reconfigures ‘family abolition’ as the antipolitical undoing of state-sponsored white bourgeois domesticity.

Chapter 1 theorises the state as a set of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems which are central to racial capitalism. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, this chapter charts how the state arose as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that swept through Europe in the late medieval period. This revolution from above saw the emergence of whiteness as politics came to be associated with domestication, mastery, and rulership. State-building was thus from the beginning a racial-colonial project, entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. Since then, politics as we know it has revolved around governance, domestication, and mastery.

Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

This chapter revisits UN General Assembly resolution 181(II) recommending the partition of Palestine. It undertakes critical international legal analysis of the resolution with reference to the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine whose report formed the basis of the resolution. Contrary to the traditional historiography, this chapter posits that the resolution was neither procedurally ultra vires the General Assembly, nor were its terms substantively consistent with prevailing international law as regards self-determination of peoples. Set against the larger context of the international legal status of Palestine from WWI to the end of the British Mandate, this chapter argues that resolution 181(II) was the opening act in the reification of Palestine’s legal subalternity within the newly minted UN system. It demonstrates that the resolution was an embodiment, in legal terms, of the lingering tension between the rule by law of late-European empire and the ostensible rule of law of the post-WWII era. It also shows that the resolution helped hasten the dissolution of Palestine and the dispersal of its people, the consequences of which remain with us today.

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between plunder, property-making, and state power. Focusing on the struggle against the destruction of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it argues that capital from its inception has operated by turning land into objects that can be owned, appropriated, and sold for profit: a process that, following Traci Brynne Voyles, I call wastelanding. By examining the role of state violence in extractivist projects, the chapter develops a critique of environmentalist initiatives premised on reforming, seizing, and ‘greening’ the state. Instead, it theorises land-based struggles against mega-dams, mines, plantations, oil fields, pipelines, and other extractive projects as part of a wider antipolitical project of refusal.

This chapter concludes this book by summarizing its principal findings and situating them in the larger context of the questions posed at the outset. Rather than the international rule of law ordering principle, it is the international rule by law principle that finds express and sustained illustration in the UN’s management of the question of Palestine. This phenomenon is rooted in the clash between hegemonic and subaltern interests that produce and reproduce situations in which the promise of international law is repeatedly presented as the basis of international legitimacy and peaceful coexistence among a citizenry of formally equal nation-states, but which relegates non-self-governing peoples and other subaltern societies to partial and qualified access in the system. The result is the presence of international legal subalternity as a long-range condition, a fixed feature of the international order with wider relevance for a variety of other subaltern actors and regions.

This chapter argues that the contemporary policing of migrant lives is part of a longer trajectory in which the state has always sought to control the movement of the displaced and the dispossessed. Today’s global border regime is a (post)colonial infrastructure of state violence which enables an ‘imperial mode of life’ for some through the containment, abandonment, and super-exploitation of others. To take this seriously is ultimately to reject the idea that migrant justice is attainable through humanitarianism, citizenship, and more open borders. Such measures might go some way towards dampening the violence that is unleashed on migrants on a daily basis, but are incapable of uprooting the violent structures that render migrants disposable, precarious, and super-exploitable. In place of state-centric reforms, the chapter theorises borders as a crucial site in the antipolitical struggle against racial capitalism and the state.

The postscript concludes with a discussion of General Assembly resolution 77/246 of 30 December 2022, passed while this book was entering production. The resolution requests the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in line with the research presented in Chapter 5. As the opinion of the Court is to be given after the publication of the book, this update looks to this recent development as the latest attempt by Palestine to resort to the counter-hegemonic potential of international law with results as yet unknown

This chapter critically examines Palestine’s unsuccessful 2011 UN membership bid. It examines the report of the UN Committee on the Admission of New Members which, under US pressure, could not unanimously recommend Palestine’s membership to the Security Council after examining whether Palestine satisfied the criteria for membership as set out in article 4(1) of the UN Charter. Propelled by this unsuccessful bid, Palestine turned to the General Assembly which upgraded its status to that of a non-Member Observer State in 2012. Although the legal consequences of this upgrade have been considerable, including allowing the State of Palestine to accede to a host of international treaties and multilateral organizations, its juxtaposition against the refusal of the Committee on the Admission of New Members to recommend membership to the Security Council in accordance with the international rule of law is demonstrative, yet again, of the international rule by law principle at work. Although the UN has allowed for a gradual and qualified recognition of Palestinian legal subjectivity over time, its failure to provide the legal and political foundation upon which those rights may actually be realized, namely membership in the Organization, has continued to disenfranchise Palestine and its people.