my theologies strewn out in the dark

formerly @eveesque, ⚧️🇲🇲⚢ materialist transfeminist poet-writer. at work on the cyborg cycle. very inactive here, apologies!

The shift from colonialism to neo-colonialism is evident in the contemporary international legal system’s mystification of neo-colonial violence. Contemporary international law continues to propagate the myth that state violence is a priori legitimate and non-state violence is a priori illegitimate. The nineteenth-century international legal classification of “uncivilized warfare” has been rebranded in the contemporary notion of “terrorism.” Indeed, global North condemnations of “terrorism” cannot be disentangled from the colonial notion of “uncivilized” violence. Neo-colonial states brand their violence under slogans of “national security” or “war on terror” or even “humanitarian intervention.” Although they depict their violence as proportionate and legitimate, neo-colonial states use the same forms of violence that they claim are “terrorism” and with greater frequency. Indeed, neo-colonial states inflate fears of “terrorism” to distort their proportionately superior violence and oppression of neo-colonized peoples. Notably, non-state groups are generally incapable of perpetrating systemic violence or genocide because they lack the technical capacity to do so. Similarly, anti-colonial groups usually do not have an objective of annihilating their colonizers, but rather decolonizing their societies. Simply put, neo-colonial states are exponentially more destructive than the anti-colonial groups that resist them. In spite of that, the international legal system distorts neo-colonial violence. Although the United Nations has not adopted a legal definition of “terrorism”—primarily because of definitional conflicts with liberation and self-determination struggles—contemporary international law prohibits an abstract notion of “terrorism.” Contemporary international law also proscribes an ambiguous notion of “excess state violence” (i.e., genocide or war crimes). In between armed resistance of non-state groups and “excess state violence” is a significant source of violence: the mundane, daily violence of the state. Consequently, contemporary international law mystifies the systemic and daily violence of neo-colonial states.