7 - Conclusion

Summary

This chapter concludes this book by summarizing its principal findings and situating them in the larger context of the questions posed at the outset. Rather than the international rule of law ordering principle, it is the international rule by law principle that finds express and sustained illustration in the UN’s management of the question of Palestine. This phenomenon is rooted in the clash between hegemonic and subaltern interests that produce and reproduce situations in which the promise of international law is repeatedly presented as the basis of international legitimacy and peaceful coexistence among a citizenry of formally equal nation-states, but which relegates non-self-governing peoples and other subaltern societies to partial and qualified access in the system. The result is the presence of international legal subalternity as a long-range condition, a fixed feature of the international order with wider relevance for a variety of other subaltern actors and regions.