Date: 16 February 2026

The Law and Development Research Group of the Faculty of Law at the University of Antwerp, in partnership with Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights at Birzeit University, has successfully concluded its first-ever intensive Winter School on “The International Order After Gaza: Failures, Emancipatory Possibilities, and Decolonial Futures.”

As part of the “Emancipatory Human Rights” project supported by ENABEL, the program brought together students, scholars, and practitioners from Palestine, Belgium, Europe and around the world, to reflect on the political and legal legacies of the genocide in Gaza, interrogate and debate the limits of the current international legal and political order, and explore the space for emancipatory and decolonial alternatives.

Over several days, more than twenty participants from Birzeit and Antwerp Universities engaged in lectures, discussions, and field visits that connected conceptual, legal, and practical work on key issues such as self-determination, genocide, corporate complicity, institutionalized and rising repression, and the future of human rights. The program featured leading scholars in international law and human rights, alongside experienced practitioners working with international organizations such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as non-governmental organizations including the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), The Hind Rajab Foundation, and the European Legal Support Center (ELSC).

The program further included visits to key legal and political institutions in Brussels, including the European Parliament and the Belgian Federal Parliament, and The Hague to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, during which participants were confronted with the stark discrepancy between their mandates and the reality of impunity in the face of ongoing atrocity crimes such as in Palestine. In an informal but heartwarming moment, the participants were welcomed and hosted for dinner by members of the University of Antwerp’s students’ movement for Palestine.

The Winter School foregrounded an emancipatory approach to human rights, rooted in lived experience and critical scholarship. Participants reflected on how the ongoing genocide and apartheid in Palestine expose the brutality of settler-colonial violence, the normalization of mass atrocities, and the complicity and failures of an international order that claims to prevent and punish such crimes. In the discussions, Palestine was presented not only as a site of injustice and suffering, but as a lens that reveals broader global dynamics of colonial and imperial violence, authoritarianism and fascism, environmental destruction, and the erosion of multilateralism, while also opening space to imagine decolonial, dignified futures.

The Winter School paid tribute to those who could not be present, namely the late Professor Koen De Feyter whose work was instrumental in conceiving the Winter School, and one of the participants from Palestine and who was arbitrarily arrested by the Israeli Occupying Forces just days before traveling to Belgium and who remains in detention. Their absence is a reminder that academic work and spaces are inseparable from structures of violence, resistance, and solidarity, which are critical for collective continuity, especially in the current global context.