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.

The conclusion explores the wider meaning and significance of the antipolitics of refusal. Drawing on recent scholarship by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Bonnie Honig, I move towards an understanding of the antipolitical – not as an escape from, or return to, the polis – but as a project of building autonomy, care, and horizontalism beyond racial capitalism, the state, and their violent terms of order.

This chapter critically examines the distinctive institutional and normative regime created by the UN for the Palestinian refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba in the form of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It juxtaposes that regime against the international institutional and normative regime applicable to all other refugees in the world, as administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The special regime for Palestinian refugees is widely regarded as reflective of the UN’s unique responsibility for their plight. Yet, a critical examination of the UN record on the early history, mandate, and regulatory framework underpinning this regime reveals that it was never intended to give effect to Palestinian refugee rights as established under prevailing international law, including as affirmed by the UN itself. The resulting ‘protection gap’ that has consequently emerged for Palestinian refugees, marked by uneven and confused state practice concerning their plight as well as ongoing gender discrimination against them by the UN, is demonstrative of the Organization’s role in the maintenance of Palestinian legal subalternity on the international plane.