PaolaZichi, Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palestine, Abingdon: Routledge, 2025, 253 pp, hb, £108.75

Legal orders are often defined within popular imagination by their responses to crisis.For international law, which increasingly lurches from one crisis to another, this can be both frustrating and daunting for those of us cautiously invested in the overall success of that system.Of all such crises, none seem to capture the present political moment more than the so-called 'Palestinian question'.The genocide recognised by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory as perpetrated against the people of Gaza by the State of Israel, in which several Western States are arguably complicit, is not only politically divisive but also calls into question whether international law can really accomplish anything of practical value (Oona Hathaway, Maggie Mills and Heather Zimmerman, 'Crisis and Change at the United Nations: Non-Amendment Reform and Institutional Evolution' (2025) 46 Michigan J of Int'l L 1).Since international law cannot 'solve' the Palestinian question, so popular imagination would seem to say, it must therefore be useless tout court.There is an unfortunate implication of passivity within this kind of discourse vis-à-vis the Palestinian people, who are frequently cast as mere recipients of external action, whether that be aggression and exclusion, or recognition and aid.This implication -that history, international relations, and international law are things that happen (or fail to happen) to Palestine -is both expressively problematic and, as the outstanding monograph I now have the privilege to review demonstrates, empirically inaccurate.For example, creeping tendrils of passivity often infect debates surrounding the international status of the State of Palestine.Amongst those maintaining that statehood is yet to be achieved, the relevant arguments typically disclose a status which international law withholds from Palestine, or which is otherwise unavailable due to ongoing controversy within the international community (James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: OUP, 2007) 421-448; Jure Vidmar, Territorial Status in International Law (Oxford: Hart, 2024) 13, 89, 140-141, 167-170, 172).Conversely, amongst those (like me) who believe Palestine to be so widely recognised that its statehood can no longer be doubted, the spectre of passivity can still arise, since the seemingly 'external' fact of recognition may appear to render the complex and controversial history of Palestine contemporaneously moot on questions of statehood.In reality, the historical richness and diversity of Palestinian politics have played a considerable role in establishing international recognition (see generally, John Quigley, The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East