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Abstract The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.
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"This book delves into the legal and labour history of Hashemite Iraq to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraq's state formation. Focusing on this specific time and place in international legal history, it shows how Iraq was a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty. One direct result of this was the development of the doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty. This study traces how this doctrine impact on everyday life of working class Iraqis by looking at its impact on imperial law, land law, the transnational law of oil concessions and pipeline agreements, criminal law and emergency law. It takes case studies including the production and trade of the oil fields in Kirkuk, railways in Baghdad and Basra, looking at how workers organized themselves. This unique approach shows in a very real way how international law was the force for key employment practice developments in an emerging nation state."-- Provided by publisher
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Semi-colonialism is a perplexing concept in international legal scholarship that has more often than not been conflated with colonialism proper. To remedy this analytic confusion, I propose a shift from a focus on the ideological aspects of the imperialism of international law to the semi colonial practices of informal domination on the ground. To do this, I revisit the understudied concept of the ‘protectorate’ in international law, and analyze its geopolitical uses. The geopolitical dimensions of protection illustrate the importance of geopolitics in the history of international law. After examining the connections between geopolitics and international law, the second part of the article looks into the origins of the strategic region of the ‘Middle East,’ focusing on the history of the protected states of the Trucial treaty system in the Persian Gulf. Finally, I turn to the ‘Question of Oman’ at the United Nations (1957-1965) to illustrate how the practices of informal domination operated through semi-colonial techniques of veiling imperial domination, the legal obfuscation of power relations, the legitimization of unilateral treaty breaking and geopolitical maneuvering with international legal arguments.
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