Between Perception and Praxis: Sartrean Existentialism and the Responsibility of International Lawyers in the Context of Gaza

Abstract

This dissertation examines the widening gap between public perception and the practice of international law in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It argues that this rupture reflects not merely institutional failure, but a deeper crisis of moral agency within the discipline. Drawing on International Court of Justice rulings on Israel’s illegal occupation and provisional measures in South Africa v Israel, alongside Francesca Albanese’s 2025 report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, the dissertation situates Gaza within broader critiques of proceduralism, spectacle, and structural bias in international law. It contends that international law’s formalism, crisis-orientation, and historical entanglement with colonial and imperial power—particularly in its reluctance to confront Zionism as racism—undermine its universalist claims and erode public trust. To address this impasse, the dissertation advances Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism as a normative and methodological lens for rethinking the role of international lawyers and academics. Sartre’s principle that “existence precedes essence” reframes legal actors as radically free and therefore responsible agents whose interpretive choices shape legal meaning. Concepts of freedom, bad faith, and praxis illuminate how procedural neutrality can function as self-deception, masking political and moral commitments embedded in legal reasoning. Engaging Martti Koskenniemi’s critique of indeterminacy and the “invisible college,” the dissertation proposes an existentially committed formalism: one that acknowledges the political nature of legal interpretation while strategically mobilizing legal language for emancipatory ends. The study further draws on the history of Arab existentialism and the concept of iltizam (commitment) to demonstrate a regional precedent for politically engaged intellectual practice. By foregrounding critical self-reflexivity and moral responsibility, the dissertation argues that international lawyers must move beyond technocratic detachment and confront the structural conditions that enable mass violence. While existential agency cannot dissolve geopolitical asymmetries, it reconstitutes the lawyer as a conscious actor who resists complicity within constraint.

Ultimately, the dissertation contends that a Sartrean, human-centred ethos offers a path toward restoring credibility to international law by aligning legal praxis with liberationist commitments and by responding authentically to the moral demands posed by Gaza.