"What this tells you is not that international law is broken. It tells you international law was never the load-bearing wall. It was the wallpaper. The load-bearing wall is veto power. The load-bearing wall is SWIFT access. The load-bearing wall is carrier groups and air bases and the petrodollar system and who controls the cables under the oceans."
Brilliant as always, Ope. The cables under the oceans were a complete surprise to me, when I researched them for my chapter on Libya. Were those charged by the ICC the ones USrael had set up as terrorist thugs who were no longer useful, or those like Gbagbo who were never meant to be in power, according to them?
I think it’s both. The architecture is structured so that “useful” militias can be recoded as war criminals once they outlive their usefulness, and figures like Gbagbo can be marked for removal much earlier because of how he entered and then reposition himself: he rode a crisis election and regional anti‑coup norms into office with at least tacit Western/French cover, then gradually shifted into a more sovereigntist, selectively anti‑imperial posture that cuts across the metropole’s economic and security preferences. The same legal machinery and language is deployed in both cases, but the underlying test is whether you are still aligned with the network of power that runs through those cables, bases, banks, and vetoes. In Gbagbo’s case, I suspect the ICC process also functioned as a lesson to other leaders about the costs of drifting too far off that alignment.
Seen from that angle, the submarine cables detail you highlight stops being a technical curiosity and becomes a design note: once you treat infrastructure as the starting point, the pattern of who ends up in the dock (and who does not) reads less as the neutral application of norms and more as routine system maintenance.
"What this tells you is not that international law is broken. It tells you international law was never the load-bearing wall. It was the wallpaper. The load-bearing wall is veto power. The load-bearing wall is SWIFT access. The load-bearing wall is carrier groups and air bases and the petrodollar system and who controls the cables under the oceans."
Brilliant as always, Ope. The cables under the oceans were a complete surprise to me, when I researched them for my chapter on Libya. Were those charged by the ICC the ones USrael had set up as terrorist thugs who were no longer useful, or those like Gbagbo who were never meant to be in power, according to them?
Tereza, thank you!
I think it’s both. The architecture is structured so that “useful” militias can be recoded as war criminals once they outlive their usefulness, and figures like Gbagbo can be marked for removal much earlier because of how he entered and then reposition himself: he rode a crisis election and regional anti‑coup norms into office with at least tacit Western/French cover, then gradually shifted into a more sovereigntist, selectively anti‑imperial posture that cuts across the metropole’s economic and security preferences. The same legal machinery and language is deployed in both cases, but the underlying test is whether you are still aligned with the network of power that runs through those cables, bases, banks, and vetoes. In Gbagbo’s case, I suspect the ICC process also functioned as a lesson to other leaders about the costs of drifting too far off that alignment.
Seen from that angle, the submarine cables detail you highlight stops being a technical curiosity and becomes a design note: once you treat infrastructure as the starting point, the pattern of who ends up in the dock (and who does not) reads less as the neutral application of norms and more as routine system maintenance.