Book Talk: The United Nations and the Question of Palestine w/ Ardi Imseis

Join us as Ardi Imseis discusses his new book, The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on primary archival materials and the author’s first-hand experience as a UN Official in Palestine for over a decade, this first of its kind volume aims to provide a critical international legal perspective on why and how the question of Palestine remains a festering wound on the conscience of the international community.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the UN on the question of Palestine. This book explores the UN’s management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the organization’s position and international law. What forms has the UN’s failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN’s fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls ‘international legal subalternity’, according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization is interminably withheld.

Ardi Imseis is Assistant Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University.