Professor Dirk Moses, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

The right of violent resistance to occupation and the protection of international law generally are often asserted by proponents of occupied peoples. If only international law were respected, so the argument goes, indigenous peoples would be able to repel colonists' transformative occupation. In this paper, I challenge this common view by showing how the law of occupation has always favoured the occupier as does international law more generally. If peoples want to resist transformative occupations, they have to face the forces arrayed against them without misplaced trust in the law.