The Peace of Imperialism and the Violence of International Law
From Macaulay’s push for British conquest of India to the US’s takeover of Venezuela, the idea of peace has remained a crucial instrument of violent modern imperialism, all upheld through the structure of the liberal international legal order.
Published on: 20 January 2026, 01:18 pm
“I have successfully privatized world peace.”– Iron Man 2
“… for all these autocrats, dictators, and real-estate agent rulers, they simply want absolutely no bindings…”; “… difference between Putin regarding his aggression in Ukraine and Trump consists in the fact that Putin at least attempts to bring forward juridical, international arguments to justify the attack on Ukraine… The language of International is employed there… Trump makes absolutely no international legal arguments; he acts in his customs specifications as if International Law does not exist at all…” – Anne Peters, Director, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law.
WITHIN ONE MONTH of President Donald Trump being conferred with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, the American Society of International Law (‘ASIL’) on January 5, alleged that the President had violated international law.
In the span of that one month, the United States had unilaterally intervened in Venezuela, and US forces abducted the sitting President Nicolas Maduro.
Much has been written on the illegality of this intervention since then. However, we take this event to make a different epistemic point by interrogating the normative meaning of peace, historiography of US imperialism in Latin America, and examining the USA’s paranoid reading of international law, linking its intervention in Venezuela with a story of Calcutta.
Venezuela, the Security Council Resolution 2803, that gives effect to the Gaza Peace Plan, and several other events surely raise questions about President Trump’s conceptual understanding of ‘peace’. As scholars of Responsibility to Protect, human security, and peace, we too are puzzled by the privatised understanding of peace by FIFA, a football association, that seems to contravene the views of doyens of international law and their scholarly societies.
For the sake of sanity, let us assess the traditional contours of peace. German legal academic Hans Ulrich Scupin states that ‘peace’ is an orderly procedure that upholds the independence of all the sovereign states and condemns the hegemonic nature of an empire-like entity.