International Law and the Territorial Controls of Non-State Armed Groups

While ‘territoriality’ has been heavily explored in the existing literature through the lens of globalisation and private international law, this paper investigates the notion of Non-State Armed Groups’ (NSAGs) territorial controls in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the perspective of public international law. What international legal norms apply to NSAGs’ territorial controls in post-Arab Uprisings Yemen and Libya, and how is the existence (or lack of) such norms explained by IR theory? In answering this central research question, the paper makes the proposition that from their subjection to extra-judicial killings by drones and various modalities of direct and/or proxy wars, to their being the object of different proposals to hold NSAGs accountable to internationally-set standards of human rights without recognising them as independent states; NSAGs’ territorial enclaves are the terra nullius par excellence of contemporary International Society. The heavily securitised nature of the international response to the situation in Yemen and Libya versus the humanitarian condition of the impacted populations is especially highlighted, in order to further support the proposition that the situation evidences the continuation of colonialism via the cultural and political means of public international law. Further, the paper applies by way of an assessment the theoretical framework of International Society from the English school in international relations theory, and it proposes the critical expansion of this analytical framework to the non-state domain of NSAGs in MENA. In addition to increasing our knowledge about the complex interplay between ‘sovereignty,’ ‘territoriality’ and ‘self-determination’ on the one hand, and state-centric international legal and theoretical frameworks on the other, the paper puts populations within NSAGs’ territories centre stage, both analytically and