Setting the Scene
In the wake of the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir in April 2025, the Government of India launched what it called a “Political Mission” on the global stage. At the centre of this initiative was the deployment of high-level all-party delegations to key capitals. This practice, referred to here as delegation diplomacy, involved briefing host governments on India’s account of the incident, the alleged role of The Resistance Front (TRF), and Pakistan’s purported complicity in cross-border terrorism. According to official briefings, the aim was not limited to strategic messaging. It was the projection of a legal narrative designed to present India as a state under siege and to frame Pakistan as a violator of international norms.
This initiative exemplifies a broader phenomenon that this post identifies as narrative setting in international law. Narrative setting refers to the structured effort by states to shape the legal character of events by determining how claims are framed, where they are voiced, and through which institutions they are received. It involves three interrelated dynamics: the projection of legal identity, the selection of venues for narrative circulation, and invoking legal categories such as aggression, terrorism, or state responsibility. Within this framework, international law is not only written or adjudicated. It is also performed and curated.
India’s delegations did not simply relay facts. They invoked legal terms such as attribution and state complicity in order to embed meaning within diplomatic performance. As Julia Otten argues, legal narratives do not merely describe. They confer authority and shape the institutional reception of claims.
This strategy finds resonance in other recent geopolitical practices. Ukraine’s appeal to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court following Russia’s invasion in 2022, and Israel’s invocation of international humanitarian law in response to criticism of its military actions in Gaza, both illustrate how legal storytelling operates across diplomatic and institutional contexts. As Alexandra Homolar and Oliver Turner observe, such “narrative alliances” consolidate particular interpretations of law while marginalising others.
These examples mark what this post terms a narrative turn in international law. States are increasingly crafting legal stories, identifying receptive audiences, and occupying institutional venues where their claims can gain traction and legitimacy. As Lucas Lixinski notes, international law derives coherence not only from rules and doctrines but also from the stories that give those rules memory and normative direction.
The analysis that follows interrogates India’s strategy within this broader shift. It asks how legal meaning is constructed through narrative setting, who is authorised to narrate legality, and how institutional structures determine which voices are heard and which are silenced.
Legal Narrativity as Practice: Between Performance and Persuasion
International law is often depicted as a rule-based system governed by neutral procedures and formal norms. Yet this depiction obscures the central role of narrative in shaping how legal claims are constructed, received, and institutionalised. As Mbengue and d’Aspremont observe, legal meaning is frequently produced through stories that frame crises, establish identities, and locate actors within moral and juridical hierarchies.
Legal identity is not derived solely from treaties or doctrines. It emerges from narrative arcs that link past grievances with present claims and future aspirations. Whether in the courtroom or the diplomatic arena, coherence and persuasiveness often matter as much as formal legal reasoning. As Steven Kay KC and Mark Kersten have highlighted, narrative is not a rhetorical supplement but a core logic of legal discourse. Legal actors do not merely cite law; they reframe it, contest it, and project it into wider political narratives.
Crucially, this narrative space is not equally accessible. As Windsor notes, legal narration often reflects the interests and assumptions of dominant actors, while marginal voices struggle for institutional traction. Diplomatic reach, media access, and geopolitical alignment shape whose legal stories are heard and whose are disregarded.
Susan Marks reminds us that international law’s claims to neutrality must be weighed against this unequal distribution of narrative authority. The question is not only who formulates legal arguments but also who can do so with the authority to influence institutional response. These dynamics underscore the structural politics of narrative setting in international law. They help explain why India’s post-attack diplomacy cannot be read simply as communication or self-defence but must be understood as a strategic intervention into the field of legal meaning itself.
India’s Strategy in Context: Legal Narrativity as State Practice
India’s decision to dispatch all party delegations abroad (UAE, Japan, Russia, Republic of Korea, Qatar, Bahrain, USA, Guyana, Maldives, Kuwait, Germany, Brussels, Egypt, Spain, Malaysia, UK, Algeria, Liberia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Brazil, Denmark, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Latvia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Greece, Colombia, France, DR Congo, Slovenia, Singapore, Panama) following the Jammu and Kashmir was more than a diplomatic gesture. It constituted a deliberate legal performance, choreographed to narrate India’s international legal identity as a state under siege, acting within the law, and to cast Pakistan as a sponsor of proxy violence. Though presented as a counter-terrorism measure, this initiative reveals a broader strategy of state positioning through legal discourse. It exemplifies how states use international law not only as a system of norms but as a narrative medium for constructing legitimacy, assigning blame, and asserting interpretive authority in contested geopolitical spaces.
The concept of narrative in this context extends beyond media or policy communication. India’s framing of The Resistance Front as a rebranding of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group already designated under UN Security Council Resolution 1267, is an effort to invoke international legal obligations around counter-terrorism and sanctions. In doing so, India attempts to shift the burden of response onto the international community, implying that failure to act would constitute complicity or dereliction under existing counter-terror regimes. This is a move to assert state responsibility and recast the legal subjectivity of TRF and Pakistan through association and attribution.
This strategy aligns with the performative insights of Gary Minda, who argues that the post-9/11 legal landscape has enabled states to frame domestic threats as global legal crises, often bypassing the rigorous thresholds that international law traditionally demands. By embedding the attack within a broader global narrative of terrorism, India repositions its local grievance as an international legal emergency, one that carries implications for state responsibility, collective security, and norm enforcement.
Yet this narrative, like others, rests on selective invocation. India’s emphasis on terrorism as a breach of international order is not matched by equivalent legal openness to critique regarding its conduct in Kashmir, including allegations of human rights abuses. This asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects a broader pattern in which legal narratives are constructed to highlight certain norms: security, sovereignty, and self-defence. While muting others, such as human rights, humanitarian protection, and self-determination.
This tension invites a return to China Miéville’s materialist critique of international law as a site of struggle, where legal meaning is shaped not only by textual interpretation but also by structural inequalities and geopolitical power. India’s approach is thus not merely a national response to terrorism, but a representative expression of how states increasingly instrumentalise international legal discourse to define, not just defend, their status in global normative hierarchies. Similar techniques are visible in the practices of other states, where the performance of legality consolidates authority and legitimacy.
Comparative Strategies of Legal Storytelling
The legal strategies adopted by Ukraine and Israel demonstrate that narrative setting is not confined to a single region or conflict. States increasingly craft legal narratives to assert legitimacy, justify actions, and frame the normative context within which their claims are received. These practices are not incidental. They are choreographed interventions that align legal discourse with strategic and institutional objectives.
Ukraine’s recourse to the International Court of Justice in 2022, alleging that Russia had distorted the Genocide Convention, was not merely procedural. It represented a discursive strategy aimed at reframing Russia’s use of force as unlawful and morally indefensible. Ukraine’s parallel engagements with the International Criminal Court, the UN General Assembly, and its calls for a special tribunal reflect a broader effort to align legal identity with the values of international legality. As Moshe Hirsch notes, this is a process of constructing collective memory through legal storytelling that links past violations to present claims and future entitlements. It also echoes Anna Reading’s work on memory rights, which sees international law as a medium for narrating contested histories and institutional belonging.
Israel’s approach similarly reflects a strategic narrative calculus. Its legal discourse has expanded from self-defence to include international humanitarian law, asymmetric warfare, and civilian risk mitigation. These themes appear in its responses to International Criminal Court proceedings, UN resolutions on Gaza, and UNRWA. These efforts construct a counternarrative that frames Israel’s actions as lawful, necessary, and embedded in a context of existential threat. This form of legal narration reflects what Mark Kersten and Yasmin Naqvi describe as the structural conditions of law’s performance. Israel’s strategy positions its legal claims within international institutions while simultaneously contesting those institutions’ normative authority. The result is a hybrid approach that seeks not only legal defence, but normative control over how legality is interpreted and received.
These legal performances, however, are never uncontested. Russia has advanced its narrative of humanitarian necessity, protection of Russian-speaking populations, and the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. These claims have been articulated through official statements and legal submissions, forming a controversial but coherent legal identity that challenges dominant framings.
Palestinian actors, including the Palestinian State and organisations such as Al-Haq, have also engaged in strategic legal narration. Their appeals to the International Criminal Court and the UN Human Rights Council frame Israel’s actions as a prolonged occupation marked by systematic violations of international humanitarian law. These efforts aim to embed Palestinian claims within legal institutions and counter prevailing security narratives.
Similarly, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued formal responses to India’s diplomatic outreach, denying involvement in the Jammu and Kashmir attack and framing India’s narrative as a deflection from its human rights record in the region. Pakistan’s interventions at the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation invoke legal principles such as self-determination and humanitarian accountability.
These examples illustrate that legal storytelling is a field of structured contestation. Competing actors mobilise institutional forums and legal vocabularies to justify conduct and define how legality is understood. As this narrative turn unfolds, it becomes necessary to ask what kinds of legal authority are being constructed, who is authorised to narrate, and whose accounts remain excluded.
The Limits and Dangers of Legal Narrativity
The rise of legal narrativity as a tool of statecraft brings with it significant risks. These are not incidental concerns but structural dangers. As Homolar and Turner caution, narratives can harden into discursive regimes foreclosing alternative interpretations, silencing competing accounts, and marginalising dissenting legal subjectivities. When international law is harnessed as an instrument of narrative persuasion, it risks being reduced to symbolic compliance, where rhetorical alignment with legal norms substitutes for substantive accountability.
This concern is particularly acute when legal institutions are politically, financially, or jurisdictionally constrained from adjudicating the claims advanced within dominant narratives. In such cases, as Kersten notes, the legality performance can obscure the unaddressed structural violence, turning law into theatre rather than remedy.
Moreover, the asymmetry of narrative power must not be overlooked. As Yasmin Naqvi has argued, even legal concepts such as the “right to truth” have been unevenly applied, often reinforcing the narratives of powerful states while leaving victims of marginalised or decolonised communities without recourse. This narrative inequality reveals a deeper structural bias in how international law is received, interpreted, and institutionalised.
Legal narrativity, then, is not inherently emancipatory. It can be used to challenge domination, but also to entrench it. The task for international legal scholars and practitioners is not to reject narrative altogether, but to interrogate its politics, to ask whose story is being told, with what legal resources, and to what institutional end.
Conclusion: Speaking Law, Claiming Authority
Narrative is not a supplement to legal argument but its structure. States do not merely comply with or defy international law; they perform, contest, and reshape it through storytelling. Institutional access, material conditions, and geopolitical positioning shape these performances. Legal narration, then, is not neutral. It determines whose claims are heard, whose violence counts, and whose authority prevails. India’s turn to delegation diplomacy is part of this broader shift, using legal language to craft identity and assert legitimacy. Yet whether such strategies advance justice or reinforce global hierarchies depends on whose stories are told, with what authority, and in which forums. To attend to the legal narrative is to trace its form and question its politics. For scholars and practitioners alike, the challenge is to move beyond the surface of legal language and confront the power it performs.
Constructing Legality: Delegation Diplomacy and the Politics of Narrative in International Law
Written by Parthiban BabuSetting the Scene
In the wake of the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir in April 2025, the Government of India launched what it called a “Political Mission” on the global stage. At the centre of this initiative was the deployment of high-level all-party delegations to key capitals. This practice, referred to here as delegation diplomacy, involved briefing host governments on India’s account of the incident, the alleged role of The Resistance Front (TRF), and Pakistan’s purported complicity in cross-border terrorism. According to official briefings, the aim was not limited to strategic messaging. It was the projection of a legal narrative designed to present India as a state under siege and to frame Pakistan as a violator of international norms.
This initiative exemplifies a broader phenomenon that this post identifies as narrative setting in international law. Narrative setting refers to the structured effort by states to shape the legal character of events by determining how claims are framed, where they are voiced, and through which institutions they are received. It involves three interrelated dynamics: the projection of legal identity, the selection of venues for narrative circulation, and invoking legal categories such as aggression, terrorism, or state responsibility. Within this framework, international law is not only written or adjudicated. It is also performed and curated.
India’s delegations did not simply relay facts. They invoked legal terms such as attribution and state complicity in order to embed meaning within diplomatic performance. As Julia Otten argues, legal narratives do not merely describe. They confer authority and shape the institutional reception of claims.
This strategy finds resonance in other recent geopolitical practices. Ukraine’s appeal to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court following Russia’s invasion in 2022, and Israel’s invocation of international humanitarian law in response to criticism of its military actions in Gaza, both illustrate how legal storytelling operates across diplomatic and institutional contexts. As Alexandra Homolar and Oliver Turner observe, such “narrative alliances” consolidate particular interpretations of law while marginalising others.
These examples mark what this post terms a narrative turn in international law. States are increasingly crafting legal stories, identifying receptive audiences, and occupying institutional venues where their claims can gain traction and legitimacy. As Lucas Lixinski notes, international law derives coherence not only from rules and doctrines but also from the stories that give those rules memory and normative direction.
The analysis that follows interrogates India’s strategy within this broader shift. It asks how legal meaning is constructed through narrative setting, who is authorised to narrate legality, and how institutional structures determine which voices are heard and which are silenced.
Legal Narrativity as Practice: Between Performance and Persuasion
International law is often depicted as a rule-based system governed by neutral procedures and formal norms. Yet this depiction obscures the central role of narrative in shaping how legal claims are constructed, received, and institutionalised. As Mbengue and d’Aspremont observe, legal meaning is frequently produced through stories that frame crises, establish identities, and locate actors within moral and juridical hierarchies.
Legal identity is not derived solely from treaties or doctrines. It emerges from narrative arcs that link past grievances with present claims and future aspirations. Whether in the courtroom or the diplomatic arena, coherence and persuasiveness often matter as much as formal legal reasoning. As Steven Kay KC and Mark Kersten have highlighted, narrative is not a rhetorical supplement but a core logic of legal discourse. Legal actors do not merely cite law; they reframe it, contest it, and project it into wider political narratives.
Crucially, this narrative space is not equally accessible. As Windsor notes, legal narration often reflects the interests and assumptions of dominant actors, while marginal voices struggle for institutional traction. Diplomatic reach, media access, and geopolitical alignment shape whose legal stories are heard and whose are disregarded.
Susan Marks reminds us that international law’s claims to neutrality must be weighed against this unequal distribution of narrative authority. The question is not only who formulates legal arguments but also who can do so with the authority to influence institutional response. These dynamics underscore the structural politics of narrative setting in international law. They help explain why India’s post-attack diplomacy cannot be read simply as communication or self-defence but must be understood as a strategic intervention into the field of legal meaning itself.
India’s Strategy in Context: Legal Narrativity as State Practice
India’s decision to dispatch all party delegations abroad (UAE, Japan, Russia, Republic of Korea, Qatar, Bahrain, USA, Guyana, Maldives, Kuwait, Germany, Brussels, Egypt, Spain, Malaysia, UK, Algeria, Liberia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Brazil, Denmark, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Latvia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Greece, Colombia, France, DR Congo, Slovenia, Singapore, Panama) following the Jammu and Kashmir was more than a diplomatic gesture. It constituted a deliberate legal performance, choreographed to narrate India’s international legal identity as a state under siege, acting within the law, and to cast Pakistan as a sponsor of proxy violence. Though presented as a counter-terrorism measure, this initiative reveals a broader strategy of state positioning through legal discourse. It exemplifies how states use international law not only as a system of norms but as a narrative medium for constructing legitimacy, assigning blame, and asserting interpretive authority in contested geopolitical spaces.
The concept of narrative in this context extends beyond media or policy communication. India’s framing of The Resistance Front as a rebranding of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group already designated under UN Security Council Resolution 1267, is an effort to invoke international legal obligations around counter-terrorism and sanctions. In doing so, India attempts to shift the burden of response onto the international community, implying that failure to act would constitute complicity or dereliction under existing counter-terror regimes. This is a move to assert state responsibility and recast the legal subjectivity of TRF and Pakistan through association and attribution.
This strategy aligns with the performative insights of Gary Minda, who argues that the post-9/11 legal landscape has enabled states to frame domestic threats as global legal crises, often bypassing the rigorous thresholds that international law traditionally demands. By embedding the attack within a broader global narrative of terrorism, India repositions its local grievance as an international legal emergency, one that carries implications for state responsibility, collective security, and norm enforcement.
Yet this narrative, like others, rests on selective invocation. India’s emphasis on terrorism as a breach of international order is not matched by equivalent legal openness to critique regarding its conduct in Kashmir, including allegations of human rights abuses. This asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects a broader pattern in which legal narratives are constructed to highlight certain norms: security, sovereignty, and self-defence. While muting others, such as human rights, humanitarian protection, and self-determination.
This tension invites a return to China Miéville’s materialist critique of international law as a site of struggle, where legal meaning is shaped not only by textual interpretation but also by structural inequalities and geopolitical power. India’s approach is thus not merely a national response to terrorism, but a representative expression of how states increasingly instrumentalise international legal discourse to define, not just defend, their status in global normative hierarchies. Similar techniques are visible in the practices of other states, where the performance of legality consolidates authority and legitimacy.
Comparative Strategies of Legal Storytelling
The legal strategies adopted by Ukraine and Israel demonstrate that narrative setting is not confined to a single region or conflict. States increasingly craft legal narratives to assert legitimacy, justify actions, and frame the normative context within which their claims are received. These practices are not incidental. They are choreographed interventions that align legal discourse with strategic and institutional objectives.
Ukraine’s recourse to the International Court of Justice in 2022, alleging that Russia had distorted the Genocide Convention, was not merely procedural. It represented a discursive strategy aimed at reframing Russia’s use of force as unlawful and morally indefensible. Ukraine’s parallel engagements with the International Criminal Court, the UN General Assembly, and its calls for a special tribunal reflect a broader effort to align legal identity with the values of international legality. As Moshe Hirsch notes, this is a process of constructing collective memory through legal storytelling that links past violations to present claims and future entitlements. It also echoes Anna Reading’s work on memory rights, which sees international law as a medium for narrating contested histories and institutional belonging.
Israel’s approach similarly reflects a strategic narrative calculus. Its legal discourse has expanded from self-defence to include international humanitarian law, asymmetric warfare, and civilian risk mitigation. These themes appear in its responses to International Criminal Court proceedings, UN resolutions on Gaza, and UNRWA. These efforts construct a counternarrative that frames Israel’s actions as lawful, necessary, and embedded in a context of existential threat. This form of legal narration reflects what Mark Kersten and Yasmin Naqvi describe as the structural conditions of law’s performance. Israel’s strategy positions its legal claims within international institutions while simultaneously contesting those institutions’ normative authority. The result is a hybrid approach that seeks not only legal defence, but normative control over how legality is interpreted and received.
These legal performances, however, are never uncontested. Russia has advanced its narrative of humanitarian necessity, protection of Russian-speaking populations, and the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. These claims have been articulated through official statements and legal submissions, forming a controversial but coherent legal identity that challenges dominant framings.
Palestinian actors, including the Palestinian State and organisations such as Al-Haq, have also engaged in strategic legal narration. Their appeals to the International Criminal Court and the UN Human Rights Council frame Israel’s actions as a prolonged occupation marked by systematic violations of international humanitarian law. These efforts aim to embed Palestinian claims within legal institutions and counter prevailing security narratives.
Similarly, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued formal responses to India’s diplomatic outreach, denying involvement in the Jammu and Kashmir attack and framing India’s narrative as a deflection from its human rights record in the region. Pakistan’s interventions at the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation invoke legal principles such as self-determination and humanitarian accountability.
These examples illustrate that legal storytelling is a field of structured contestation. Competing actors mobilise institutional forums and legal vocabularies to justify conduct and define how legality is understood. As this narrative turn unfolds, it becomes necessary to ask what kinds of legal authority are being constructed, who is authorised to narrate, and whose accounts remain excluded.
The Limits and Dangers of Legal Narrativity
The rise of legal narrativity as a tool of statecraft brings with it significant risks. These are not incidental concerns but structural dangers. As Homolar and Turner caution, narratives can harden into discursive regimes foreclosing alternative interpretations, silencing competing accounts, and marginalising dissenting legal subjectivities. When international law is harnessed as an instrument of narrative persuasion, it risks being reduced to symbolic compliance, where rhetorical alignment with legal norms substitutes for substantive accountability.
This concern is particularly acute when legal institutions are politically, financially, or jurisdictionally constrained from adjudicating the claims advanced within dominant narratives. In such cases, as Kersten notes, the legality performance can obscure the unaddressed structural violence, turning law into theatre rather than remedy.
Moreover, the asymmetry of narrative power must not be overlooked. As Yasmin Naqvi has argued, even legal concepts such as the “right to truth” have been unevenly applied, often reinforcing the narratives of powerful states while leaving victims of marginalised or decolonised communities without recourse. This narrative inequality reveals a deeper structural bias in how international law is received, interpreted, and institutionalised.
Legal narrativity, then, is not inherently emancipatory. It can be used to challenge domination, but also to entrench it. The task for international legal scholars and practitioners is not to reject narrative altogether, but to interrogate its politics, to ask whose story is being told, with what legal resources, and to what institutional end.
Conclusion: Speaking Law, Claiming Authority
Narrative is not a supplement to legal argument but its structure. States do not merely comply with or defy international law; they perform, contest, and reshape it through storytelling. Institutional access, material conditions, and geopolitical positioning shape these performances. Legal narration, then, is not neutral. It determines whose claims are heard, whose violence counts, and whose authority prevails. India’s turn to delegation diplomacy is part of this broader shift, using legal language to craft identity and assert legitimacy. Yet whether such strategies advance justice or reinforce global hierarchies depends on whose stories are told, with what authority, and in which forums. To attend to the legal narrative is to trace its form and question its politics. For scholars and practitioners alike, the challenge is to move beyond the surface of legal language and confront the power it performs.
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