The Law Is On Your Side

This course was born out of my disagreement with Audre Lorde's quote, "the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house." I do not believe that the world-building tools at our disposal belong to the masters. The masters never built the tools, they only appropriated them to build an insurmountable house. The tools always belonged to the people, and knowing how to wield them can help us dismantle the house and build a better world.

International law is a tool and a house, and its embedded contradictions are a result of this duality: It is a tool to fight for the freedoms and rights of each individual//it is a house created by European nations to abet European colonialism. It is a tool to hold nation-states accountable//it is a house for some nation-states that can halt any effort to hold them accountable. We have had ~378 years to make it an effective body of law//the year 2025 saw the highest number of conflicts across the world since WWII.

But here is the fact of the matter: if you are a community organiser, activist, human rights advocate, practitioner committed to collective liberation, or even just a concerned citizen of the world, international law is on your side. So if your work is still focussed on:

• Changing people’s minds (even though they don’t know how to influence the system any more than you),

• Highlighting the humanity of migrants, refugees, or victims of the system (instead of highlighting the failures and obligations of the system),

• Arguing that morality and humanitarianism should compel nations to uphold human rights (instead of reminding them that they are legally required to do so)

Then you are doing brave, important, and transformative work—which can be deeply enhanced by a knowledge of international law.

The Law Is On Your Side course seeks to empower participants with a basic understanding of how international law works. Across six sessions, the course unpacks specific political ideas that are relevant in current global discourse (‘illegal immigration,’ ‘a state’s right to self defense,’ ‘terrorism’) from the perspective of international law. Committed to decolonial pedagogy, it critically examines both its omissions and its impact, and what collective mobilisation can do to advance the law’s intrinsic people-centric inclination.