As the 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, Freedom, approaces, we are proud to announce the first of this year’s two keynotes: Robert Knox.
Rob Knox is a senior lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool and a member of the editorial board for the renowned journal of Marxist theory, Historical Materialism. His research interests lie in critical and Marxist legal theory, focusing on imperialism and its relationship with International law. More recently, his work has focused on Palestine and on Marxist approaches to analysing the EU.
Together with Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah her recently published the book Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso, 2025), in which they challene mainstream narratives about Palestine by placing Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.
Together with Christine Schwöbel-Patel, Knox has also edited the anthology Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024) on international law and aesthetics.
At the conference, Knox will present a keynote talk on Palestinian liberation and international law:
Palestinian Liberation, Racialisation and the Limits of International Law
Liberal invocations of freedom have typically been coupled with an expansive conception for the law. Law, and in political rights, are seen as the way to guarantee individuals with the widest degree of freedom from interference. Such a position has, of course, been frequently contested by Marxists – and indeed by Marx himself – who have often noted the bourgeois nature of this freedom.
In the current conjuncture, many have baulked at this analysis. In an increasingly vulgar capitalism, in which the ‘legal order’ is often understood as collapsing, law – especially international law – has appeared to offer a ‘site of struggle’ . Nowhere has this been clearer in the case of Palestine, where international law, especially in its explicit condemnation of genocide, has appeared to at least offer a defensive bulwark against an openly racist Israeli Zionism and US imperialism.
In this paper, I seek to reflect on this, situating (international law) within broader Marxist understandings of the history and nature of capitalism. I argue that international law has articulated a particularly racialised and bourgeois notion of ‘freedom’, which fundamentally conditions its existence as a ‘site of struggle’. In so doing, I explore the role that international law has played in the racialisation of Palestine, as well as its role in facilitating the expansion and consolidation of the Israeli state and its racial projects. It is only in such an analytical context, I argue, that we can understand both the possibilities and limits of international law in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Danish Society for Marxist Studies 