MEDIDAS PARA EL TRABAJO CON SUMINISTRO DESDE SUPERFICIE

64 For a multi-layered study of law and irresponsibility in this capacity, see Veitch 2007.

65 For an elaborate discourse analysis of the status of ‘progress’ as a defining trope in modern inter-national law, see Skouteris 2010.

66 One of the few analyses here has been from Elizabeth Wilson. Motivated by a revulsion to both the violence legitimized by the effective control doctrine and the disastrous paternalism of liberal cosmopolitan alternatives, Wilson poses the question as to whether international law can be mobi-lized to support non-violent social uprisings, Wilson 2015, 590 (‘A "privilege of nonviolence" might be given to those who engage in nonviolent conflict and successfully maintain nonviolent disci-pline’). However, her ultimate hope in such measures remains linked to the progress within existing international institutions, see Ibid. 594. As such, she does not confront the contradictions regarding the ways in which international law’s inability to support non-violent political action is more than simply a flaw with the system.

67 This includes the possibility of requiring democratic institution as a requirement for state creation, (see Vidmar 2013a), the clarification of standards for legitimate intervention in civil strife (see Lieblich 2013), and the international legal support of nonviolent movements (see Wilson 2015).

The defence of the effective control doctrine centres on an understanding of popular will as an all-important precept of legitimacy that can only be adequately defined in unique, specific contexts. To quote Roth once again:

the effective control doctrine can be interpreted to embody respect for the self-determination of diverse political communities as to which em-pirical investigation to ascertain public opinion is most often impracti-cable. Moreover, given that 'popular will' itself is a complex and nor-matively-loaded concept, any imposition from abroad of procedures calculated to appropriately measure popular will might be seen as at best presumptuous, and at worst an usurpation.⁶⁸

As we can see in this passage, given the innate difficulties of formulating a univer-sal standard for externally judging local political expression, this doctrine at least provides consistency and coherence when approaching the popular will-interna-tional law relationship. The effective control doctrine reminds us that the intense passions arising abroad in response to domestic struggles do not dispense, and in many ways affirms, international law’s fundamental commitment to non-interven-tion.⁶⁹ But how are we to reconcile this pluralistic, non-interventionist vision with the fact that Assad can arguably be legitimized by Syrian popular will in a manner that allows him to invite external military assistance to crush the formation of any alternative to his rule? Could a doctrinal international legal argument condemn this occurrence without threatening to erode the foundational norms of sovereign equal-ity and non-intervention?

68 Roth 2010, 426.

69 For a study of how the discourse of self-determination in no way undermines, and in many ways strengthens, nonintervention as a core structuring principle of the international legal order, see Wer-ner 2001.

Answering this question is especially important in our current global moment of rising powers and aggressive nationalism where the possibility of major armed con-flict between sovereign states now seems more likely than it has been in decades.⁷⁰ It is not difficult to imagine how the claim of aiding a people in pursuit of their

‘popular will’ can serve as a pretext for powerful states and interests to undermine the ban on the use of force and risk escalating tensions that ultimately result in a major global war.⁷¹ This type of conflagration is precisely what the UN Charter system seeks to avoid, even if it means tolerating widespread internal violence and repression legitimized through a profoundly limited understanding of popular will.

Caught between the Scylla of interstate conflict and Charybdis of intrastate conflict, my purpose in this thesis is to ask how we reached this particular juncture, one where we must accept the ‘lesser evil’ of two already troubling options. In address-ing this question, as outlined in Part 1, I build on analyses that raise larger questions of why the view of popular will, delineated through the effective control doctrine, has failed to uplift conditions for so many despite offering national communities presumptively limitless autonomy in pursing their own destinies. In confronting this issue from a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, James Gathii identifies the central flaw of the effective control doctrine, as pre-sented by Roth, as a failure to account for ongoing colonial legacies.⁷²

According to Gathii, by fixating on the illegality of political and military coercion, Roth situates colonialism as ‘a rare and aberrational feature of international law’

70 For an account of the various erosions on the ban on the use of force that could easily enable an outbreak of violence in this context, see Terry 2019.

71 While this has been much remarked upon in relation to Putin’s actions undertaken in the name of aiding Russian speaking population of Ukraine’s Crimea region (see Roth 2015b), it has also pre-sented itself through the Trump Administration’s bellicose rhetoric against the Maduro government in Venezuela where appeals to the ‘freedom’ of the Venezuelan people are commonplace. However, the rhetoric of US intervention has been roundly condemned by other members of the Security Council, see Security Council Press Release 2019.

72 Gathii 2000.

and this obscures other sources of inequity intimately linked to the question of in-ternational legal standing.⁷³ These include the coercive realities of developmental-ist reforms facilitated by international institutions that harken back to imperial prac-tices,⁷⁴ as well as the possibility of economic interventions being just as devastating as military interventions despite being comparatively less illegal.⁷⁵ Furthermore, Gathii invokes the history of the Eurocentric nation-state form, and its ‘effective control’ over lands, peoples and nature, being foisted upon all societies through violent colonization only to be retrospectively legitimized via suspect invocations of universal morality and ideological neutrality.⁷⁶ While sympathetic to many of Gathii’s points, Roth’s general response has been that such critiques must be judged by their ability to offer a practical alternative.⁷⁷ Bearing this contention in mind, I now shift to the question of what an account of the popular will-international law relationship capable of making a strong methodological intervention into this de-bate might actually look like?