How Law Provides for Its Own Failure: "Overpass Norms," Habitus, and Rhetorical Practice

This thesis investigates a particle puzzle: why do states persist in using legalized rhetoric to justify violence, even when it is seemingly against its interest? Challenging the norm/exception binary, and moving beyond conventional explanations grounded in norm compliance, erosion or legitimacy, it introduces the concept of overpass norms—legal codifications that simultaneously enable and constrain the rhetorical justifications of state violence. Building off of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), I reconceptualize the State of Exception and State of Emergency not as deviations, but as strategic outcomes of a legal order structurally designed to uphold and maintain imperial sovereignty. Through a critical, interdisciplinary case study of Israel, I deploy genealogical methods and discourse analysis to trace how legalized rhetoric has become a routinized justification for state violence across time periods and political regimes. Through my analysis, I counter current narratives that the world today faces an unprecedented time in which the rule of law is being completely eroded and disregarded due to a rising wave of authoritarianism. Such tellings ignore the intimate relationship that has always existed between law, violence, and sovereign power. In contrast, I provide a novel theoretical framework that reckons with this nexus, and demonstrates how and why international law structurally provides for its own failure.