Editorial #50: De-Fetishizing Crisis through an Affective Approach to International Law

In conversations with colleagues and friends, one word returns with striking regularity: crisis. From democratic backsliding and authoritarian governance to annexation, war, genocide, and humanitarian catastrophe, crisis appears as the defining condition of the present. The term circulates as both diagnosis and atmosphere, structuring how events are narrated and how responses are imagined. This framing is reflected in our own scholarly and editorial engagements: in February alone, two contributions were devoted to analyzing the retreat from or the reconfiguration of multilateral frameworks (see here and here). Our editorials (see for instance #49, #47, #42, #40, #34, #25) – among them one I authored under the title ‘A Nation in Crisis’ – are themselves indicative of this tendency.

This language of crisis has been powerfully reinforced by developments in the United States under Donald Trump. In early February, for instance, we published a piece entitled ‘Trump and the International Legal Order: Against International Law Fatalism’, asking whether the current administration signals the ‘end of an era for international law’. Such interventions capture a widespread anxiety that the foundations of the international legal order are eroding under the weight of unilateralism and open disdain for multilateral commitments. Yet, they also exemplify how quickly we reach for the language of crisis to frame developments that may, upon closer inspection, reveal patterns of continuity as much as disruption.

The United States has been violating international law under virtually every single administration. Even domestically, practices frequently cited as emblematic of Trump-era exceptionalism—such as aggressive immigration enforcement by ICE – exhibit significant historical continuity. Deportation numbers under the Obama administration, for example, exceeded those recorded during Trump’s presidency. What changes under Trump is the abandonment of law’s justificatory language and the explicit embrace of power as the governing principle. Crisis discourse plays a central role in this process. By framing political decisions as responses to exceptional threat, crisis normalizes extraordinary measures, obscures historical continuities, and recasts structural violence as necessity.

This observation motivates the broader inquiry of this editorial. Rather than asking whether international law is finished, the more pressing question we need to ask is how crisis narratives shape our understanding of legality, authority, and political possibility—and whether international law has ever truly operated outside crisis at all.

To take this possibility seriously requires examining the conceptual and affective work that the language of crisis performs within international law itself – especially the emotional economies that legal analysis tends to suppress in the name of objectivity, even as they quietly structure our judgment (see here). In this sense, crisis may be understood as a fetish, i.e., a materially grounded yet seemingly autonomous object that condenses fear and urgency, presenting itself as self-evident necessity while obscuring the historical and social relations through which international legal discourse is produced and exercised.

One of the defining characteristics of the fetish, as reconstructed by William Pietz, is its irreducible materiality. The fetish functions as a material space that gathers an otherwise unconnected multiplicity of elements into the unity of its enduring singularity. Crisis within the contemporary framework of international law operates in a strikingly similar register. It is intensely material. In an era of continuous digital circulation, social media has made it possible to experience violence in near real time.

The authority of crisis is anchored in embodied perception and affective response, too. The body becomes the primary site through which crisis is apprehended. For many, and particularly for BIPoC communities, these images resonate with long histories of racialized disposability and colonial violence. Crisis is felt corporeally, entering the nervous system. In this sense, crisis itself begins to function as a fetish-object.

Such an affective anchoring is structured by racialized regimes of perception. BIPoC bodies – especially the bodies of young men and boys (see here and here) – are frequently constructed latent threats. Across colonial and contemporary security frameworks alike, racialized male bodies are read through a grammar of suspicion and inherent danger. In Germany, for instance, the killing of a young Black man by a police officer was widely justified through narratives of perceived threat and officer safety. As in international crisis settings, the racialized male body was read as danger in advance of factual assessment.

This perceptual economy renders violence against such bodies intelligible as security measures rather than as acts of racial injustice. This dynamic is visible in patterns documented by the UN OHCHR, which verified thousands of killings around aid sites and humanitarian convoys, overwhelmingly involving unarmed civilian young men and boys. The repeated circulation of images of dead or injured racialized male bodies reinforces a structure in which such lives are hyper-visible as evidence of disorder, yet politically invisible as bearers of rights and claims. Their deaths are absorbed into the logic of necessity – tragic but unsurprising consequences of operating in a ‘dangerous environment’.

Crisis thus begins to operate as authority. The image of devastation commands response before interpretation. It produces urgency prior to deliberation. This is what might be called the fetish-as-authority. The materiality of destruction structures legal reasoning by shaping what counts as necessary and proportional. Law enters the scene already oriented by the weight of what appears materially undeniable. Yet, this authority is paradoxical. The same immediacy that compels attention can also narrow the field of thought. The spectacle of devastation organizes legal discourse around emergency, while receding the structural and historical conditions that produced the violence. Crisis stabilizes a particular interpretation of events by presenting material destruction as both origin and justification.

Gaza’s reconstruction reveals the full arc of this fetishized crisis. Crisis authorizes violence, legitimizes exceptional governance, and then reorganizes social life through privatized rebuilding and technocratic administration. What appears as response and repair is also a continuation of rule—one in which material devastation grounds authority while foreclosing political transformation. The recent reconstruction architectures associated with the Trump administration’s Gaza plan make this dynamic unusually explicit. Under the plan endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (17 November 2025), Gaza’s ‘future’ is routed through an externally led governance – the Board of Peace – paired with an international stabilization force, and a transitional administrative structure. In these schemes, Palestinian self-determination appears as conditional language, deferred into a managed horizon, while the immediate institutional emphasis falls on demilitarization, administrative oversight, and donor coordination (see here, here, and here). The plan’s political economy imagines Gaza as a site of redevelopment in which reconstruction is treated as a market for contracts. The prominence of Jared Kushner in articulating this development-forward vision, and the repeated emphasis on investment-friendly rebuilding, underscores how crisis translates devastation into opportunity: a terrain for capitalized renewal rather than a project of restitution, de-occupation, and realized self-determination (see here). Competing initiatives – including Egypt-linked frameworks discussed in the wake of Resolution 2803 – do not necessarily break with this underlying logic so much as repackage it. The effect is a recognizable form of post-war coloniality.

This is where the fetish frame bites. If not for the authority conferred by crisis—its material undeniability and its affective compulsion – would such externally imposed architectures be acceptable as a normal mode of governance? Crisis makes them appear necessary. It converts what would otherwise look like a colonial administration of a people’s future into the common sense of ‘rebuilding’. The fetish-as-authority thus works twice: first, by using devastation to justify emergency violence; and then, by using the same devastation to legitimate a reconstruction regime that privatizes governance and renders political transformation perpetually premature.

A second core feature of the fetish is its relation to singularity and repetition. The fetish condenses a unique originating event – an act of synthesis that binds heterogeneous elements into a novel identity – and then acquires the power to repeat that event symbolically. Crisis in international law operates in an analogous way. Each moment is narrated as singular and unprecedented. And yet this form of narration is endlessly repeated. Crisis becomes permanent. This is the paradox that animates contemporary legal discourse: international law is constantly ‘in crisis’. Yet, crisis is precisely what allows it to reassert its necessity. The original moment (e.g., war, terror, genocide, etc.) becomes a fixed reference point that authorizes legal ordering. Emergency functions as a founding scene that must be continually reenacted for authority to persist. Crisis thus operates as a repetitive ordering device, binding together fear, legal vocabularies, media spectacle, and moral outrage into what Pietz would describe as a composite fabrication.

This repetitive power is spatial as well as temporal. If the fetish is a material space that gathers heterogeneity into singularity, then crisis in international law is fundamentally territorialized. ‘Gaza’, ‘Sudan’, and ‘Congo’ become crisis-objects. The space itself becomes the bearer of truth. What disappears in this process is precisely the transnational web of relations (i.e., arms trade, geopolitical strategy, racial capitalism, colonial history, etc.) that exceeds the territory (see here and here). Like the fetish, the crisis-space appears to contain its own causality.

From this singular fixation emerges what Pietz calls the fetish’s ‘peculiar historicization’. Crisis freezes an originating event and grants it ordering power. International law is structured around such events which become founding ruptures organizing legal interpretation. This is not neutral chronology but selective anchoring. Every new act is read back through the fixed event and the present is endlessly interpreted as continuation. Historical depth gives way to historical fixation.

The attacks of 7 October are central to this dynamic. They are repeatedly invoked as a singular, originary rupture – an event that crystallizes crisis and anchors the entire legal and political narrative that follows. In fetishistic fashion, this moment is fixed as both temporal beginning and justificatory ground, saturating legal discourse with the language of existential emergency while severing the event from the longer histories of occupation, blockade, and structural violence in which it is embedded. Through this fixation, 7 October becomes not only an act of violence to be condemned, but a crisis-object endowed with enduring authority. It authorizes extraordinary force, narrows the field of legal imagination to self-defense and military necessity, and subsequently underwrites post-war governance schemes that treat Palestinian political self-determination as indefinitely deferrable. The singularity of the event is endlessly repeated in legal and political reasoning, while the structural conditions that made such violence intelligible—and predictable—are rendered secondary or even irrelevant.

Crisis also operates through reification. Like the fetish in Marxian analysis, crisis naturalizes institutional codes of social value. International law classifies and crisis intensifies these distinctions. Certain deaths become legally grievable. Others fade into background noise. Certain violences are framed as violations; others as tragic necessity. These hierarchies appear objective, as properties of the situation itself, rather than as products of institutional mediation. As Judith Butler has argued in her work on grievability, not all lives are recognized as equally mournable. Grievability is differentially distributed according to political and normative frames that determine whose loss registers as loss. Crisis discourse within international law participates in this distribution. It helps constitute which lives count as lives whose destruction demands legal redress, and which deaths are absorbed into the logic of collateral damage.

The Gaza–Israel context illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. Israeli deaths are widely framed as attacks on life itself, immediately invoking existential threat, the right of Israel to defend itself, and even the right of the state to exist. This framing is powerfully condensed in the repeated characterization of the 7 October attacks as ‘the most deadly massacre against Jews since the Holocaust’. The significance of this formulation lies in its performative force. By anchoring the event to the Holocaust – the paradigmatic site of absolute moral rupture in international legal and political consciousness – the phrase situates Israeli suffering within a frame of existential exceptionalism. It elevates the violence to a singular historical register that demands unconditional urgency, suspends contextual inquiry, and authorizes extraordinary measures. The comparison functions as a crisis-object: it fixes a moment beyond ordinary legal calibration. Within this frame, the legal question of whether violence against Palestinians may constitute genocide is persistently deferred or narrowed, while Israel’s right to security is foregrounded as axiomatic.

This reifying power of crisis is also visible in how Palestine solidarity is increasingly governed within Europe and the transatlantic space. In Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe more broadly, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians – whether through protest, speech, or academic critique (see our ‘Knowledge under Occupation’ symposium) – have been met with heightened surveillance, restrictions, and disciplinary measures (see also here). These responses are frequently justified through the language of crisis: the need to protect social cohesion, combat antisemitism, or preserve public order in a moment of exceptional threat. Crisis thus authorizes not only violence abroad but repression at home, narrowing the space of legitimate political expression. Within this fetishized crisis frame, certain narratives become unsayable. Legal claims that foreground Palestinian grievability, structural violence, or colonial continuities are recoded as dangerous, extremist, or morally suspect.

The foregoing analysis raises the unsettling question: has it ever been different?

International law emerged from war, colonial expansion, and mercantile transvaluation between radically unequal social orders—the very historical space in which the fetish concept itself took shape. Crisis, then, is one of its founding scenes. To analyze crisis as fetish is to ask how violence becomes stabilized as necessity; how material devastation acquires ordering power; how repetition masquerades as rupture; and how international law participates in constructing consciousness of social value under conditions of permanent emergency – questions that were also taken up in a symposium organized by EJIL: Talk!, where Arnulf Becker Lorca offered ‘Five Reasons to Stay Away from the ‘Crisis and Renewal’ Narrative in International Law’.

Yet, we are far from being the first ones to express such concerns. They were articulated with striking clarity by ICJ Judge Hilary Charlesworth as early as 2002, when she warned that:

‘A concern with crises skews the discipline of international law. Through regarding ‘crises’ as its bread and butter and the engine of progressive development of international law, international law becomes simply a source of justification for status quo.’

Charlesworth proposed a reorientation toward an international law of everyday life—one that foregrounds structural injustice rather than episodic catastrophe. Such an international law of everyday life would, in my view, require methodological transformation. It would demand that emotions – long treated as unprofessional, subjective, or analytically suspect – be taken seriously as sites of knowledge rather than obstacles to reason. Emotions such as grief, fear, anger, empathy, and compassion are historically and politically produced. Attending to emotion opens international law to historicity, revealing how suffering is felt, remembered, and transmitted across time, particularly among communities marked by colonial and racial violence. Methodologically, this requires shifting the focus from exceptional crises to lived continuities, from elite perspectives to embodied experiences, and from legal abstractions to the affective conditions under which international law is encountered in everyday life.

In this context, it would be remiss not to mention that Miranda Fricker develops the idea of ‘virtuous hearing’ or reflexive critical openness as an ethical corrective (see also here and here). This requires cultivating epistemic virtues – among them a sensitivity to injustice – that involve emotional capacities such as attentiveness, humility, and responsiveness.

So, this editorial may well be understood as a plea to rethink the very foundations of a discipline long invested in crisis and emotional detachment. Let us acknowledge that emotions are conditions of ethical engagement. Let us connect more consciously with grief, empathy, anger, and compassion. For doing so is not to abandon academic rigor. It is to recognize that these affective orientations shape whose suffering is heard, whose testimony is credited, and which forms of violence are rendered visible and intelligible. An emotionally reflexive international law would not replace doctrine with sentiment. It would simply interrogate the affective economies that already structure legal authority.