Beyond Pathology

In The Pathology of Plenty, Lys Kulamadayil unpacks how the resource curse has come to inflict postcolonial countries and examines international law’s complicities in sustaining this socio-economic and political predicament. International law, here by Kulamadayil’s analysis, is not the panacea, rather a constitutive cause of the problem. The book opens with a vignette of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba forewarning that international law is a license for western extraction of Congolese minerals and people, one which operates at the expense of his own peoples’ right over their natural resources. From its opening page, the book makes clear that the pathology of plenty –  a condition of deep impoverishment despite possessing a wealth of resources – is not the sin of colonialism alone. Arguably, those in the postcolonial elite (and its aspirants) have colluded to embrace the neocapitalist extractivist project, wrecking permanent destruction of several ethnic and racialised peoples in their wake. The book traverses the various registers this pathology uses: within the legal register, ranging from the distributional failures caused by property regimes governing resource use to the making of anti-corruption laws; political registers such as World War II anxieties about sovereignty over natural resources and the dollar hegemony of tax haven banks; and economic vocabularies of the elite.

Our starting point remains the same as Kulamadayil. We diagnose international law’s detrimental effects, proclivities and productiveness as pathological. However our analytical reflex is different: in this case, we are less invested in pathologising international law and more interested in deconstructing international law’s violent, carceral properties to make it anew, if at all. In other words, we visit Kulamadayil’s work with an interest in abolition.

Abolition, in this moment of international law’s ‘death’ and ‘polycrisis’, has become blasphemy. Some call it Trumpian, some call it ahistorical and glib, and quite a few others worry that abolition would extinguish the tenuous currency of critical thought within international law. In the course of our fledgling project, we have returned to this blasphemy and have been constantly struck by how abolition has been unfairly simplified likely because of the ways in which it confronts international law’s neat yet insidious bracketing of ideas, revolutions, and peoples.

Abolishing International Law? Abolition in International Law? Abolitionist International Law?

The question remains: what is abolition then? What does it mean to do abolition? As Ruth Gilmore notes, abolition “isn’t just absence; . . . abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.” Far from the fears expressed above, abolition isn’t an act of abdication or eradication, neither of law nor of justice. It is also not necessarily the complete rejection of the toolboxes international law has devised for itself. Abolition, instead, is a transgressive exercise of freedom-dreaming. Emerging from a recognition of the scarcity of international law and the impossibility of existing within such a system, abolition is the pursuit of building a world that we “cannot live without”, and if appropriate even using the tools of the old to do so (the Gaza freedom flotillas, one could argue, are one example). From Burkinabe revolutionary Thomas Sankara’s fiery speech at the General Assembly in 1984 calling racialised peoples to refuse the Western capture of thought and imagination, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that brought over twenty million to the roads making comprehensive abolitionist demands, to the Pathalgadi movement by Indigenous Adivasis in India who erected stone tableaus obituarising the Indian Constitution to symbolise Indigenous peoples’ abjuration of international and national polity, abolitionist ideas – even if mad – have been predicated on the Global Majority’s historical and ongoing encounters with the full extent of the violence – physical, epistemic, economic and intellectual – of international law.

Abolition, with both its deconstructive and reconstructive requirements, forces us to traverse and account honestly with international laws’ ‘messiness’. Abolitionist analysis demands attention beyond the prison, extending to international law’s other carceralities. Carceralites, here, can be understood as “conditions or sets of social arrangements that advance a reliance on punishment, surveillance or incapacitation. It includes the ideological, political, legal and public investment in deploying apparatus to control non-normative behaviours from aggressive physical harm to minor nuances that inconvenience people in power.” Carcerality, as a concept, captures the interconnections and dialectical arrangements between imprisonment and carceral spaces, surveillance and confinement and where these attach to gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, citizenship and status, class and caste, and disability. Within international law, carcerality can be achieved through the deployment of temporal devices (famously, international law’s principle of intertemporality), strict understanding of subject matters (separations between private and public law), spatial ordering (remember terra nullius?) to transform spaces into sites of containment where certain populations are made vulnerable to  marginalisation, racialisation, policing and surveillance, and punishment.

The Carceralities of International Law in Iran

In this section, we turn to one vignette from the book and illustrate what could be gained – conceptually but also politically – by locating it in abolitionist thought. In Chapter 4 titled Hope of Plenty, Kulamadayil turns to the Iran story, documenting how Iran reconfigured international law’s hegemonies using its petroleum proficiency. She shows how Iran – since the Muhammed Mossadegh-led nationalist anti-imperial movement of the 1950s – remained defiant (or as some would say, recalcitrant) in the face of the economic warfare unleashed on it by British forces through the imposition of unfair sanctions and the freezing of its assets and oil exports. Kulamadayil chronicles Iran’s pivotal contribution to anchoring the sovereignty over natural resources in the Parliament, in the people of Iran, rather than in the monarch, a position that later came to significantly inform the New International Economic Order of 1974. Iran not only acquired a rentier monopoly as almost 40% of the world economy started relying on its oil wealth, but also developed a potent brand of petroleum nationalism. Petro-wealth allowed Iran to reclaim a position of power in international affairs, giving it the arsenal to channel international law and drag powerful imperial States to the International Court of Justice for unfair sanctions or their convenient reneging of treaty obligations, to avoid, reject, and withdraw from unfavourable international legal rules, and to also to make new legal regimes to govern its natural resources. Kulamadayil credits Iran’s international law innovations as a win for Third World internationalism.

Today, Kulamadayil’s portrayal of the global response to the nationalisation of Iranian petroleum nationalism remains acutely salient as we enter the 7th week of the US-Israel war on Iran. This time too, amid accusations of economic terrorism, Iran it has refused to be rescued by international law and instead used its economic clasp to bend, detonate, and remake international legal rules: whether it is by creating new systems of access for an erstwhile ‘common’ passage such as the Strait of Hormuz or refusing US proposals seeking embargoes on uranium enrichment. So we ask: what might we be losing by locating Iran’s engagements with international law exclusively within the register of the pathology (of plenty)? And what could we gain by posing the abolition question to Iran?

Firstly, the lens of abolition reveals how Iran relies on carceralities to actively advance its hegemony in international law. One such entanglement with carcerality is gender. Even though the book presents Iran’s petro-rise as a kind of genderless story, rendering gender carceral was pivotal to Iran’s political and economic authority. In the past months, both Netanyahu and Trump appealed to the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ slogan of the feminist protests against the Khomeini regime, a classic case of the white supremacist man saving brown women trope that peoples from former colonies are all too familiar with, even as the US opened its attack on Iran by striking a school in Minab killing several young girls. “Saving women one bomb at a time”: many feminists rightly said. Gender justice – painfully – became the justification for imperial, carceral and crushing violence on women. Once again. Gender’s carceral utility is not unfamiliar to the Iranian people. In the 1940s, when Iran started to solidify its place as a major petro-player, one of the first investments of the Shah monarch was in the military, a modernisation programme funded heavily by the US. As Iran’s petro-capital started to grow, Iran came under the rule of the Khomeini regime which ushered a more aggressive wave of policing, this time using the prison industrial complex, police and military to curtail women’s right to movement, agency, and dignity. Soon enough, Iran’s oil wealth started to fund its religious institutions, creating an unchallengeable license for the ruling regime to discipline female liberty. The pathology of plenty is unfortunately unable to fully grasp that such gendered carceralising was not a mere coincidence, but a consequence of the plenty and key to Iran’s reconfiguration of power dynamics at international diplomatic tables. Similarly, the carceral work of processes of racialisation – especially affecting the indigenous Bakthiaris from the Zagros mountains in Iran – have been and continue to be central to the making of the global capitalist order that Kulamadayil’s analysis of Iran’s nationalisation policies have been anchored on, but remain a spectre in the pathologising pursuit. Carcerality, we note, given its conceptual roots in abolition, forces a full acknowledgement that Iran’s engagements with international law are not simply a populist win, but also often works against its own people, as the State continuously channels the forces of capitalism, anti-feminism, and imperialism to serve the State’s own interests.

In charting its engagement, abolition also plots the cyclical movements of carcerality as they cut through the bounds of fixed identities of the postcolonial or the Third World too. Case in point is Iran’s relationship with sanctions. Sanction regimes necessarily operate as a form of penalisation, and while the consequential effects of sanctions are highly diverse, they operate to create forms of economic containment for certain populations. A long-standing recipient of sanctions by Western States that it has triggered many a dispute about, following the US’s unlawful attack in 2026, Iran has now innovated a new system to manage the Strait of Hormuz, charging different tolls based on its relationship with each requesting State, creating new routes of passage, and new models of vessel inspection, very much evocative of the same penalising logics of the sanctions system it once denounced. The effects of this new regime are worst felt in the devastating energy, fuel, and food crisis it has created, leaving millions of people across the Global South – human beings who  had no fault in the military madness that caused the crisis – in the lurches of poverty and famine. Seeing the Iran war through an abolitionist gaze makes visible the lateral and vertical circulations of carceral logics. These oscillate between the civilian population of Iran facing the hard end of international law, the muscle-fights between imperial US and petro-capital Iran, and the everyday realities of migrant workers in India or farmers in Kenya.

Secondly, when discussing Iran’s refusal to go to arbitration in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company case where the UK took Iran to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for breaching the 1933 concession agreement, Kulamadayil writes about the legal indeterminacies produced by the Court declining jurisdiction. The Court’s decision, she argues, helped catalyse the search for new private arbitration mechanisms to settle disputes between States and private investors. It is this search which ultimately led to the formation of the international investment law regime. Here again, the pathology of plenty has a propensity to view the birth of new law as inherently benevolent; surely, investment law did diminish the risk of unfair sanctions and even diverted contractual disputes traffic away from the ICJ, a tribunal notorious for its imperial biases. But the same investment law – as we now know – has successfully constrained many postcolonial attempts to nationalise, lifted investor obligations towards securing labour rights, and even framed what are deeply political conflicts as simply technocratic, contractual disputes.

Finally, abolition holds room to accept and build up from defeat in a way that pathologising never can. Iran’s history of revolutions – from the constitutional revolution of 1911 to the Mossadegh-led nationalisation movement in the 1950s to the more recent anti-establishment protests of 2025 – has been etched by an all too familiar sense of defeat. Of knowing that the promises they seek will not arrive. Indeed, despite their undying revolutionary struggles, Iranian people continue to grapple with imperial violence, economic harm dispensed from the international and their own government, and gender injustices; it is a pandemic of rightslessness caused by demands for a regime change by forces that have only known the language of dispossession. But as Khosravi writes, this defeat does not extinguish liberation. For the Global Majority, defeat is what drives remaking, it churns the imagining of worlds that could be lived otherwise. Throughout history, whether it is the negritude movement or the prison abolition movement in the US or recent Genz-led revolutions in Nepal or the ongoing resistance of Palestinians surviving genocide, the lamentation of defeat has bred radical new hope. For Iranian people too, the current war is not a condition that can be escaped. Neither is it a condition that calls for a restoration of ‘plenty’. Instead this moment begs the question: “How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility?” This is a consciousness – a defeatist consciousness – that remains unique in its self-interested shedding of attempts to preserve international law.

Beyond Pathology

At a time where the punitive reflex of international law is only ever more visible, it has become very clear how the instrumentality of international law is continuously utilised to levy punitive consequences on the “unfree”. Kulamadayil’s interrogation of the ways in which international law understands the relationships between nature, resources and justice through its predetermined paradigms of progress and development highlight the necessity to attend to its pathologies. We show that introducing abolitionist thinking to Kulamadayil’s analysis would understand not only international law’s deference to (racial) capitalism and hegemony, but also its obfuscation and its defence. Abolitionist methodology here provides a tool to unpack what connects seemingly disparate institutions’ functionalities and technologies of power and domination with the goal of dismantling them. Thinking through abolition does not just entail sympathetically recalling Lumumba’s prescient recognition of international law’s curtailments, but also requires shedding light on how people under such “precarious politics of carcerality” freedom-dream beyond these curtailments. Which tools of the old do they make use of? Which new tools do they devise? To what extent do such abolitionist efforts internalise the white Statecraft they first set out to denounce?

Kulamadayil, by her own confession, is not opposed to abolitionist imaginations. In drawing the conclusions that law is “both foundational and facilitative” to the pathology of plenty, Kulamadayil sets us up to “consider alternatives”. Turning to abolition therefore demands a sustained engagement with the reconfiguring alternative vocabularies/conceptualisations of (resource) sovereignty peppered throughout the book, but equally those which remain incomplete or reliant on “dubious recollections” and therefore “contestable classifications of international reality”. It requires admitting that Mossadegh’s attempt to concretise the concept of popular resource sovereignty does not necessarily unsettle the inherently beneficial nature of economic development in the post-colony. It requires noticing that the same logics permeate international law’s recent actions – such as the widely celebrated ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change – which operate to confine climate compromised populations to the living dead with no land or agency to call their own, while still recognising them as sovereign (Viswanath, Farraj, Smith and Sipalla, forthcoming). It requires admitting –  even sometimes at the expense of optics, of politics, and of hope –  that our resistances to international law stifle the realities of those we should be serving.

Much like Patrice Lumumba, we remain hopeful – even sure – that the Global Majority will survive international law. But for those who are perhaps primarily concerned with whether international law will survive the fatal threats it faces, we invite a closer embrace of international law’s messiness. Evoking Lenette, we ask our readers to “sit with the mess”. That includes recognising that law exists outside that which international law demarks as legal, that resistance to international law may not find emancipation in the law, and most importantly, that critique itself often unwittingly replicates the structures and syntaxes it sets out to denounce. We warn against the static predilections that diagnose, prescribe, name and solve. Instead, we invite the collective dreaming of all the world’s international law makes impossible.  The truth is these worlds are already being brought into existence. Ours is merely a call to take inspiration.