Confronting Apartheid: Richard Falk and Anticolonial Legalism

This essay uses apartheid as a site to explore the tension between liberal internationalism and anticolonialism in the mid-twentieth century. It digs into a dynamic that is easily overlooked, namely the way that these two paradigms affected the ideas and actions of young international lawyers emerging from U.S. law schools in the early Cold War. The essay opens by tracing how two events—the triumph of the administrative state inside the United States and the triumph of the U.S. war against fascism overseas—shaped definitional assumptions about liberal internationalism, and then tracks the way these assumptions changed when anticommunism and antiracism took flight at home and abroad after the 1940s.

Richard Falk is a useful guide, so this paper will use his career to cut a path through this thicket. Falk is arguably one of the most important international legal theorists of his generation. He authored fifty plus books on a variety of topics and moved between academe and politics during this career. He started as a liberal internationalist and became an anticolonial legalist, and his work at the United Nations—where he helped invent a legal rationale to outlaw apartheid in the 1960s—popularized the assumptions at the heart of the latter intellectual tradition. His assumptions traveled widely, establishing a shared vocabulary among left-leaning lawyers and theorists as they named and confronted neoliberalism after the 1960s