International law and the international law of war are shrugged off by those who justify their lawlessness by multiple ideological euphemisms for lawlessness. Photo: File
In his piece on Makhanda (Mail & Guardian, 5 to 11 September 2025), Leroy Maisiri marvels at the gross and longstanding failure of that town towards rebuilding its capacity to supply municipal services despite an array of court judgements and interventions by the attorney general and the Human Rights Commission, among others.
The case is worse because Makhanda is not only the home of a major university but has benefited from offers of help from experts based at the university — scientists, water experts and the like who are not only academic experts but in many cases, residents of the very same town who suffer the lack of drains and facilities like their neighbours. This “case study of municipal incapacity” has gone on long enough that there is nothing precipitate about his suggestion of replacing municipal government, as conventionally known, with “decentralised, participatory and directly democratic forms of organisation”.
For some of us, it was a mental and emotional battle in the apartheid era to shrug off the sense of obligation of obedience to all authority into which we had been conditioned in our youth; many in South Africa had no such scruples, having known the apartheid government to be vicious and illegitimate all their lives. Others of us took time to assess the governing powers, to be converted to knowing them as illegitimate, and to recognise that we not only had an ethical obligation of disobedience but in fact, a moral duty to work against it.
Since 1994 it has been that much harder to come to comparable conclusions, for the government was appointed by a majority by democratic means — the very thing the majority in this country, and thousands across the world, had fought for. But as time passes, the same criteria have been coming to pass as in former years; at best the government at national, provincial and municipal level has failed to do what government exists to do, but in many ways it has actively abandoned the duty to govern by prioritising corruption and personal gain by the governors. So the suggestion of setting aside the formal structures of self-styled “government”, at all its levels and agencies, in favour of a radical alternative mechanism is a logical piece of political philosophy, not a joke.
But wait: Makhanda (and the municipality of Makana) is symptomatic of a wider malaise of failed government — failed authority, failed law, failed recognition of the right of anyone to tell anyone else what to do. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza, Ukraine and Chicago are clear examples: international law and the international law of war, and the strictures of “the international community” (whether the United Nations or the International Court of Justice or the many informal gatherings of national leaders who have been trotting the world to this end in recent weeks, and indeed since the 1940s) are shrugged off by those who are constrained only by doing their own thing and who justify their lawlessness by multiple ideological euphemisms for lawlessness — freedom, legacy, destiny and so forth. Donald Trump’s dramatic antinomianism towards US law and the hitherto revered Constitution is just the same phenomenon in other jeans.
The countervailing philosophy sounds so dull — and terms such as “law and order” ring creepy in the mouths of tyrants who are no more devoted to democratic process than the latter-day fascists (remember PW Botha?). No wonder those right but dreary-sounding principles fell like dominoes in the 1930s — and both in Germany’s internal affairs and the feeble determination of the powers to insist on the Treaty of Versailles, right principles just looked so dull that they fell to the blandishments of populist propaganda. As many have noted — not least in unearthing fascism in the White House — we find ourselves in a moment of supreme risk and vulnerability: the whole global order of years of diplomacy and peacebuilding can be flipped over by the cynical or power-hungry at will.
My professor of international affairs used to say that the international system works fine “unless we get a rogue leader or a rogue nation in the system”; it only needs one, and the whole of the rest of the community battles to contain it. When rogues multiply, the task of containment becomes nigh impossible.
When we asked him about a possible third world war, he would say “Europe will never go to war again; they will fight like hell about fish, but they won’t go to war.” He is now (perhaps mercifully) “late” — I would love to have heard him alongside Professor Michael Clarke on our screens. But all bets may be off in a world in which Trump (of all people) is trying to control Vladimir Putin (of all people) while Benjamin Netanyahu (of all people) laughs at both of them.
Historically even strong and stable systems have difficulty containing a single determined and irrational “rogue”; we have not been without them since 1947. When half a dozen of them are on the loose at any one time, the world must be under no illusions about the level of threat the world is facing, or its immediacy — or for whom the alarm bells are tolling. It is us.
Peter Lee is a retired bishop in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa who holds degrees in history and theology from Cambridge. He writes in his personal capacity.