26 January 2022
Police Action or War?
The conflict in Indonesia in 1945–1949 was not a police action against insurgents in the context of a colonial territory in which domestic law alone was applicable; it was an international armed conflict in the context of independence in which international law should have played its role. The crimes committed during the conflict from both sides were war crimes and crimes against humanity. Continue reading >>
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25 January 2022
Aggression, War Crimes, and the Indonesian Revolution
The specter of the Indonesian Revolution is still haunting our understanding of Dutch imperial violence. In this blog post, I want to highlight two central issues regarding the conflict’s legal history – one involving the alleged non-application of the laws of war to the conflict which has been a mainstay argument in Dutch official narratives, and the other regarding the ways in which we delineate today our legal-moral reasoning with respect to Dutch transgression. Continue reading >>
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25 January 2022
The Grotian Myth and Dutch Modern Imperialism
The self-image of The Netherlands as a nation with a legalist (or Grotian) approach to international affairs has turned a blind eye to how Grotian legal reasonings and arguments have been used to legitimize Dutch colonialism and to shape the post-colonial structure of international law. Continue reading >>
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24 January 2022
Decolonization and Human Rights: The Dutch Case
Human rights and decolonization have a complicated relationship. From their inception in the mid-20th century as normative features of the nation-state, human rights co-existed with imperial colonial systems. As aspirational values molded on the Western philosophical tradition, human rights also served as empowering tools in the moment of decolonization while simultaneously hampering claims to national independence. This is why, in the engagement with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, we have embarked on this symposium to examine human rights both as a language of critique and as a constitutive part of the imperial legacy. Continue reading >>07 December 2021
The Changing Culture and Perception of Corruption
In Nigeria, coups d’etat have often been a cause for celebration. Ironically, even as a series of juntas promised to reform corrupt practices Nigeria’s perceived problems grew worse, leading to ever-more stringent rhetoric against corruption and, as Ugochukwu Ezeh suggests in his contribution to this symposium, a near consensus that corruption represents a fundamental threat to Nigerians’ personal security and that of the nation itself. While it is challenging to measure the prevalence or magnitude of corruption objectively, the perception of corruption is that it gets worse and worse, despite the struggle against it. Continue reading >>
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21 July 2020
‘All nations must be considered to be civilized’
Even though Art. 38 (1)(c) ICJ Statute is supposed to remain the starting point for the identification of general principles of international law, Special Rapporteur Vázquez-Bermúdez suggests avoiding the reference to ‘civilized nations’. Getting rid of the explicit reference to the standard of civilization remains merely cosmetic as long as international sources doctrine does not simultaneously reflect the persisting influence of colonial ideas. Decolonizing international sources doctrine requires remedying Eurocentrist conceptions of what constitutes ‘the principal legal systems of the world’ and understanding the role of the idea of a legal system in the standard of civilization. Continue reading >>
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