Unacknowledged within much liberal internationalist discourse are the rationalist explanations for war. Where trust wavers in the face of a Machiavellian world order and scarcity of resources fills the mind high on materialism, the “information” and “indivisibility” problem become plausible justifications for military confrontation [1] .
Being socialized to think of the world in terms of human rights and international accountability, it is a lot easier to be fighting for what is just when all one has to do is play a politics of emotional appeal, even when their efforts render the outcome obsolete. The contours of villain and victim become clear, and the discursive architecture is set.
However, what alternative exists when one becomes so disillusioned by this architecture, where they no longer want to participate in the terrorist-victim dialectic, but also understand positionality is within a broader social and political network?
Liberal human-rights discourse often valorizes “moral” legibility at the cost of material advantage. For proponents of liberation movements such as Palestinian liberation and Black liberation among others, this framework increasingly produces little strategic leverage, leaving proponents as “perfect victims” yet politically paralysed [2]
One example is with Muslims in Algeria under French occupation. Whereas many Muslims under French rule demanded equality of treatment, protested against violations of human rights, and petitioned for just treatment to the French government, it was not until the political mobilization of the FLN (Front de Liberation National) that Algeria gained its independence in eight years despite 132 years of being under occupation. The FLN at the time was seen as a terrorist organization to be countered by French forces trying to broker trust with less politically mobilized social justice advocates that were “more civilized” [3].
Liberal human-rights discourse often derives its power from universality and moral appeal. These features allow conflicts to be understood by transnational audiences and international institutions. Yet in doing so, political realities flatten, displacing questions of strategy, power, and constraint in favor of normative consensus in fear of being condemned as “morally corrupt.”
As such, violence becomes unintelligible to the liberal mind. Often viewed only as an infliction of injustice, not an exercise of it, liberal humanitarianism does not eliminate violence from political analysis so much as depoliticize it.
Rationalist accounts of war, by contrast, insist that conflict emerges from structural conditions where bargaining collapses. Information asymmetries, commitment problems, and indivisible stakes render peaceful resolution unattainable even when actors would otherwise prefer it.
Such accounts are analytically unsatisfying to liberal sensibilities precisely because they recognize that where violence cannot be moralized, a moral solution will never be a "practical solution.” They do not offer heroes or villains, nor do they promise that condemnation, or international accountability will necessarily alter outcomes.
Instead, they foreground the persistence of power under conditions of scarcity and mistrust in a world whose morality is largely detached from their politics.
For proponents of Palestinian liberation movements, operating within Western academic and advocacy spaces, this tension is acutely felt. On the one hand, liberal human-rights discourse has provided the primary language through which Palestinian suffering has been rendered visible in a globalized world. On the other hand, its strategic limitations have become increasingly evident.
Appeals to international law and public outrage have not meaningfully altered the material balance of power, nor constrained the actions of dominant actors. As a result, many find themselves caught between continued participation in a dialectical discourse they recognize as politically ineffectual and a refusal to endorse alternative frameworks that appear politically "impractical."
Disillusionment with the humanitarian frame does not rid one of it. Instead, it generates a form of reflexive constraint where critique is articulated through the same discursive frame and language it seeks to escape. As such, even this rejection of the terrorist–victim binary risks becoming uniquely symbolic rather than “pragmatic.”
This crisis does not admit of easy resolution. To abandon liberal human-rights discourse entirely risks forfeiting the only language through which suffering is currently recognized within global political institutions. Yet to remain confined within it risks substituting strategy and visibility for material leverage.
In this sense, the impasse faced by proponents of Palestinian movements is not exceptional but symptomatic. It reveals the limits of a broader liberal internationalist project that promises accountability without material change. A word to the ear versus a knife to the throat elicits different responses, and perhaps solving this puzzle lies at the heart of breaking the integrated modern international world order.
