Norm Making from the Margins: Armed Groups, the Algerian War, and South–South Legal Politics

Abstract How do armed groups waging asymmetrical wars assert political and legal subjectivity in an international order that historically excluded them? This article recovers the FLN’s groundbreaking legal activism during the Algerian War of Independence, arguing that it staged the most far-reaching challenge of its kind to international humanitarian law’s (IHL) imperial order from below through South–South legal politics. Acting as norm entrepreneurs, FLN jurists contested the existing limits on IHL’s scope and applicability while developing new institutional practices of insurgent normativity that established a disseminable model for other armed groups. In doing so, they put forward a set of legal arguments and practices that helped structure how later armed groups would invoke and substantially develop IHL under conditions of asymmetry. Based on previously inaccessible Algerian, Southern African, and state socialist archival materials, this article deepens existing accounts of normative change by reconstructing the concrete legal practices, institutional strategies, and legal-political thought through which Southern actors challenged IHL and international organizations from the margins of the international order.