Posted on May 5, 2026
Zina Miller ‘97 is a professor of law and international affairs at Northeastern, specializing in human rights, critical international law, and transitional justice – thinking about forms of justice for past violence, whether under conflict, authoritarian rule, or historical systems of oppression.
Amid all the talk about nuclear capacity, deterrence, the price of gas – what does this moment look like from where you sit in human rights and transitional justice, and what’s missing from the conversation?
In the world of international law, there are some big questions right now about hypocrisy, the role of law in restraining not only illegal but immoral actions. When the Bush administration illegally invaded Iraq in 2003 – illegal because there was neither a Security Council resolution authorizing force nor any legitimate claim of self-defense – they spent a surprising amount of time trying to make their legal case through the Security Council. The US arguments were rejected by pretty much all international lawyers, but it was important to that administration to engage with international law and its limits, even if only to argue around them (none of which excuses the horrors of that war either). This administration, by contrast, has made the thinnest legal justifications, with Trump himself treating them as irrelevant.
On the Israel side, there is the long-term obsession with Iran as a threat – not unfounded, although the existence of a threat does not itself legitimize war. But what’s more striking is the pattern: Israel is going after Hezbollah the way it went after Hamas in Gaza, with the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure (not to mention civilians), and both Israel and the US are extending that approach into Iran – strikes on railways, bridges, petrochemical facilities, the industrial and economic substrate of an entire society. Trump openly threatened to bomb bridges, power plants, the water desalination system – and said publicly that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran didn’t meet his terms. When asked whether this would amount to war crimes, he said he wasn’t concerned.
So, from the perspective of human rights and humanitarian lawyers, we are looking at the Middle East and seeing a wholly unnecessary loss of life and total disregard for the bedrock rules governing when force can be used and who can be targeted. The point isn’t that every civilian death is a war crime (it isn’t). The point is that the rules have stopped functioning as constraints, or even as serious subjects of deliberation. These administrations – and thus the many others who will follow suit — do not view international law as a meaningful space in which any of this can or should be argued. An Israeli state that has faced no effective consequences for destruction and genocide in Gaza, nor for the de facto annexation of the West Bank, has every reason to keep going, especially when backed by a US president who treats the question of war crimes as beneath his concern.
Iranians have been protesting their regime for years, at tremendous cost. If the regime were to fall, what does your field tell us about what comes next – and how might the interference of outside powers shape the aftermath?
I’m not an Iran expert, and any specific answers require well-founded local knowledge. What I can say is that, as much as I support the protesters and their incredibly brave efforts to oust this oppressive, brutal regime, I don’t believe that an indiscriminate bombing campaign and assassination of regime figures is going to help them. To the contrary, the bombing is destroying infrastructure ordinary people depend on, will discredit domestic opposition by associating it with a foreign campaign and create power vacuums the most ruthless factions are already filling. This is precisely the opposite of what the opposition needs and of what the comparative literature on regime transitions identifies as mattering most. The Iranians who have been protesting at tremendous cost for years are the ones who will pay for this because any future built out of this rubble will be shaped not by them but by regime or other remnants left standing.
What’s the atmosphere right now in your circles – on campus, in human rights and legal communities, in the Jewish spaces you move through?
There’s an ongoing sense of precarity (academics scared for their jobs if they speak out, immigrants, people of color, the list goes on) but alongside that, there’s a sense of the necessity of fighting back hard against the regimes of oppression operating today. Almost everyone in my circles is filled with rage right now. Rage at the unceasing, needless violence the US and Israel are perpetuating in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and so many other places. Rage at the deportations and disappearances from the streets of US cities. Rage at the white nationalism, the corruption, the grift, the greed.
A colleague gave a graduation speech recently that I keep coming back to. She argued that the real problem these students would face isn’t civil disobedience – it’s civil obedience: universities and law firms succumbing to Trump, figures with power refusing to divest from the companies manufacturing the weapons being used to kill civilians across the Middle East. Most of us are working hard to hold onto hope through resistance and struggle. What gives me hope is my students. The ones who are fighting back, who are speaking out, who are building community and solidarity in the face of all of it.
In our previous conversation, you said that peacemaking without reckoning with history, memory, and justice tends to fail. Do you see any of that work happening anywhere?
From those in power, absolutely not. There isn’t any real peacemaking going on. What we’re seeing instead is the active rewriting of history and prevention of justice, alongside the making of war. In the US, the Trump administration and its allies are working hard to undo what limited progress had been made (far too late) in memorializing slavery and its afterlives, not to mention rewriting curricula on race and LGBTQ history and so much more. In Israel, laws have been on the books for years to prevent memorialization of the Nakba, let alone confronting how the erasure of Palestinian life continues today. And it’s worth saying that it’s not just that the Nakba cannot be commemorated, it’s that another Nakba is being conducted today in conditions that will prevent its own future commemoration. The destruction of archives, universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions in Gaza is itself a form of preempting memory. These are not regimes that want to see complex histories discussed or remembered, let alone repaired.
What we can do right now is carefully document what is, with the hope that the record will matter even when those in power are determined that it shouldn’t. That work is being done by historians, archivists, lawyers, journalists and activists within and in cooperation with the affected communities themselves — Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian, Black, Indigenous. International tribunals, however compromised and selective, are still working. Truth commissions elsewhere in the world offer models, imperfect but real, of what reckoning can look like when political conditions eventually allow for it. None of this is a substitute for justice now. But documentation, like memory, is itself a form of resistance to the project of erasure.
