The Young Turks and International Law

Abstract International law has been used both to justify and to contest global inequality. While the relationship between international law and colonialism has been extensively studied, its use in anticolonial struggles remains understudied. This article sheds light on a particular moment in which international law was instrumentalized for anticolonialism, the 1902 Congress of Ottoman Liberals. This congress brought together exiled Ottoman intellectuals who opposed domestic despotism, as well as European colonialism, and who strategically deployed international treaties. The article argues that the use of international law by the Young Turks reveals that it was oriented both internally and externally: the anticolonial use of international law was a means to contest domestic despotism and anticipate a different polity and world order. However, international law is also unstable, and this mutability helps its readers reconfigure its premises. Such instability reveals variations in how anticolonial thinkers interpreted the law, as well as European intentions themselves. Crucially, the argument claims that the diagnoses of anticolonial thinkers at times diverged dramatically from one another. These disagreements revealed the anticolonial predicament of having to live in and resist a world that was rigged against them, even if they were not direct parties to the colonial relationship.