The underlying assumption of this kind of reporting (liberal media on Bashir in SA) is that Realpolitik should not matter when it comes to the phenomenon of international law, a law few people know much about, and a law that even fewer legal theorists take seriously.

A common view that the rule of power is reserved for international law and the rule of law is for the nation. This week on the Chronic we argue that we fall prey to our own law-habits when we take international law seriously.

The parochialism and pretence emanating from some South African human rights organisations – with their self-styled globalist mandates thinly veiled by the geopolitical mask of US state department financiers – draws the attention and ire of Ronald Suresh Roberts. Such is the bias and intellectual negligence among the liberal legal fraternity, he argues, that even the celebrity Angelina Jolie might have something to teach them.

• Read: Focusing the Fashionable Mind

Mehari Maru is an Addis Ababa-based consultant on international law, security and governance. He previously worked at the African Union Commission as Legal Expert, and as Coordinator of the AU’s Programme on Migration.

• Read the Interview here

Joshua Craze offers a sobering analysis of the fantasy that is the United Nations mandate and presence in South Sudan, where civil war is the order of every day. The organisation’s peacekeeping mission, Craze argues, is based on the fundamental logic of the UN’s functioning: to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes – regardless of context – and to enforce a neutrality that wilfully ignores reality and guarantees an inherently incoherent response.

“Everyone is waiting for everything to stop. The patrols. The water shortages. The endless reports to headquarters. The long walk out to the toilets at the edge of camp that must be taken early in the morning, before the sun casts its dominion over the sky and the urine starts to steam. The peacekeepers have run out of movies to watch. They want to go home. Everyone is waiting for South Sudan to stop, and for life to begin again.”

• Read The Mission of Forgetting

For more on the Fiction of International Law, head to the Chronic.co.za