I feel lost, as if I have misplaced myself somewhere between silence and clamor. The world withdrew the moment the internet was cut off, not merely into disconnection but into a condition of being unwitnessed. What disappeared was not information, but circulation, visibility, and political presence. In that imposed solitude, an old question returned with unsettling force: what does it mean to be human when one is severed from the city (or Society), from participation, and from recognition as a political agent? This question, often framed as distinctly modern, is in fact at the center of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s political philosophy. In “Fusul al-Muntaza‘a” (Selected Aphorisms), al-Fārābī does not simply describe political orders; he diagnoses civilizational failure. His figure of the “Gharīb”, the stranger, is not a marginal character or an exile at the edges of society. It is a structural product of injustice. In the contemporary context of public international law, this figure reappears in a transformed guise: peoples who are ever-present within global legal discourse yet excluded from participation in its normative production.

This essay advances a theoretical claim within public international law: al-Fārābī’s concept of the stranger offers a critical framework for understanding how contemporary legal regimes transform ethical human beings into juridical “peoples.” This transformation is not merely semantic. It marks a shift from cultivating humans as deliberative and experimental agents toward managing populations as objects of regulation, protection, and control. International law speaks incessantly of peoples—self-determining peoples, civilian populations, protected groups—yet rarely allows them to function as authors of norms. al-Fārābī would recognize this as a symptom of political decay. However, the informational and digital transformations of the present moment reactivate what al-Fārābī describes as experimental forces: capacities for judgment, trial, error, and collective deliberation that resist total juridical containment. Through this lens, the virtual people emerge as a new figure of international law’s stranger.

The City, the Human, and the Production of Strangeness

al-Fārābī’s political philosophy begins from a premise that remains deeply unsettling for modern legal thought: the city exists to perfect the human being. Politics is not oriented toward security, stability, or administration alone, but toward the cultivation of virtue and intellect. When the city succeeds, humans approach felicity (saʿāda); when it fails, humans deteriorate. This deterioration is not accidental. In what al-Fārābī calls ignorant, wicked, or domineering cities, the very faculties that should guide humans toward perfection are redirected. Intellect becomes cunning, imagination becomes deception, and deliberation becomes obedience. Virtue itself is rendered suspicious. Governance, in this sense, operates as a technology of subject-formation. al-Fārābī anticipates what later traditions would describe as biopolitics: political orders do not merely rule over humans; they produce certain kinds of humans. When this production fails, the stranger emerges. The stranger (gharīb) is not merely someone who crosses borders. He is someone for whom the city no longer provides a space to actualize human potential. al-Fārābī writes, in a passage whose violence is often softened by translators:

“If the virtuous city does not exist, the virtuous human becomes a stranger in the world; his life is ruined, and death may be preferable to such existence.” (Fusul al-Muntaza‘a, Chapter 93)

The “gharīb” is not defined by territorial displacement. He is defined by the absence of a political order capable of sustaining ethical life. al-Fārābī’s claim that a virtuous human becomes a stranger when the virtuous city does not exist is not rhetorical despair but a juridical judgment about the conditions of humanity. A world that structurally forces humans into strangeness is a world hostile to human perfection. What is decisive for contemporary international law is that al-Fārābī already marks a shift from the human as an ethical agent to humans as collectivized forms of life. When cities decay, humans are no longer addressed as individuals capable of deliberation but as groups governed through habit, fear, and imitation. This anticipates the transformation at the heart of public international law: the passage from the human being to “the people” as a juridical abstraction.

Public international law prides itself on recognition. States recognize states, institutions recognize peoples, treaties recognize rights. Yet recognition does not entail participation. One may be perfectly visible to law and remain politically inert. This is not a failure of implementation but a structural feature. The people appear in international law primarily as objects of regulation: populations to be protected, disciplined, surveyed, or managed. Humanitarian law, human rights law, and security regimes all presuppose this configuration. The ethical, deliberative human disappears, replaced by “the people” as a collective bearer of rights without agency in their production. al-Fārābī would diagnose this as a profound political pathology. In corrupt cities, he argues, humans retain biological life and social function but lose the exercise of their highest faculties. International law reproduces this structure at the global level.

Experimental Forces, Virtual Peoples, and Legal Agency

At the center of al-Fārābī’s political anthropology lies the concept of experimental forces. These are not innate virtues but capacities that emerge through practice: judgment, deliberation, error, correction, and collective reasoning. Virtue, for al-Fārābī, is inseparable from experimentation. When these forces are suppressed, humans do not merely lose political rights; they lose their humanity in a normative sense. This directly challenges a foundational assumption of public international law: that protection can substitute for participation. Protection without experimentation produces juridical passivity—subjects who are legally acknowledged yet structurally excluded from norm-creation:

“If a person employs their experimental and theoretical faculties in the governance of a virtuous city, these two faculties are exceedingly superior and genuinely virtuous. The superiority of the experimental faculty in governing a virtuous city lies in the fact that the virtuous and wise person applies it in the process of their own development and perfection. Through repeated practice and habituation to the customs and virtues of the virtuous city, this faculty is continuously exercised and strengthened. By attending to this faculty, a profoundly noble capacity emerges within the person, one that proves highly beneficial for the administration of the virtuous city. The full realization and effect of the experimental faculty constitute the excellence of the virtuous city itself (Fusul al-Muntaza‘a, Chapter 93).”

This passage illustrates how al-Fārābī conceives experimental faculties as central to virtuous governance. It is precisely through the exercise and habituation of these faculties that individuals—strangers or citizens alike—develop capacities that enable collective judgment and norm-creation. In the contemporary context, these faculties inform the potential of the “virtual peoples,” who, while legally recognized as groups, can exercise judgment, deliberate, and participate actively in shaping international norms.

al-Fārābī’s stranger functions as a bridge between the ethical human and the juridical people. While no longer addressed solely as an ethical individual, the person gains capacities to experiment, deliberate, and act collectively. Strangeness is not merely exclusion or loss; it becomes a site of potential agency, where juridical peoples may exercise judgment, confront authority, and participate in norm-creation. In this sense, the passage from the human to “the people” is not inherently negative—it is a space in which ethical capacities may be exercised, rediscovered, and transformed.

The informational and digital transformations of the contemporary world amplify these possibilities. Through circulation, documentation, transnational networks, and the visibility generated by digital archives and images, people act across borders without mediation by states. As the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman emphasizes, images are events rather than mere representations: they interrupt political space, create publics, and generate demands that exceed established legal categories. Virtual peoples are neither states nor formal legal subjects, yet they exert pressure on international institutions, shape legal narratives, and contest normative frameworks. Visibility itself becomes a form of political action.

From the perspective of public international law, this emergence of virtual peoples is deeply unsettling. They do not fit neatly within doctrines of standing, jurisdiction, or sovereignty. Yet they reactivate precisely what al-Fārābī feared would be extinguished: experimental forces among the people. This reactivation does not guarantee emancipation; digital visibility can also be absorbed into regimes of surveillance, commodification, and control. The contemporary gharīb is not excluded from law; he is recognized without agency, visible without voice, yet positioned to exercise judgment and deliberate collectively.

These dynamics illustrate the dual character of strangeness in international law. Strangers are simultaneously produced by legal structures and transformed through them: juridical recognition constrains them, but digital, transnational, and collective practices enable experimentation. In this light, the stranger is not only a symptom of political decay but also a bridge to renewed agency, a space where ethical capacities meet collective action, and where peoples can reassert themselves as participants in shaping global norms rather than passive objects of regulation.

Strangers as Agents: Reclaiming Human Experimentation in International Law

al-Fārābī’s figure of the stranger illuminates a central paradox in public international law: humans are recognized, documented, and counted, yet their capacity for judgment, deliberation, and experimentation is systematically suppressed. Statelessness, displacement, and political invisibility are not anomalies but structural consequences of a legal order that prioritizes control over ethical participation. In this configuration, humans are reduced to “peoples”—collective entities whose rights are acknowledged without granting them agency. Protection replaces participation, and visibility substitutes for deliberation. al-Fārābī would recognize this as a profound political pathology, a world in which the highest human faculties are rendered inert.

Yet as I have argued, strangeness is not purely a condition of loss—it is simultaneously constraining and generative, a space of potential agency that, if seized, transforms juridical subjects into active participants in global norm-production.

Digital circulation, transnational visibility, and the proliferation of documentation further amplify this potential. Images, leaks, and archives interrupt political space, create publics, and generate claims that exceed established legal categories. Virtual peoples—neither states nor formal legal subjects—exert influence over international institutions, shape legal narratives, and contest normative frameworks. Far from marginal, these actors reanimate the experimental forces al-Fārābī described: capacities for judgment, trial, error, and deliberation that resist total juridical containment. The stranger, in this sense, is both a product of structural exclusion and a conduit for renewed agency, a paradoxical figure whose very visibility becomes a mechanism of action.

The challenge for public international law is to move beyond mere recognition. Legal frameworks can either absorb these experimental capacities into techniques of control or embrace the possibility that peoples are active agents in shaping norms. Visibility without deliberation is meaningless; acknowledgment without participation produces juridical passivity. The ethical human cannot be reduced to an object of law without extinguishing the very qualities that make them capable of collective transformation. Strangers, therefore, are not simply witnesses to global processes—they are actors whose agency must be recognized, protected, and cultivated.

You, too, inhabit the position of the stranger. Observed, documented, yet often unheard, you exist within structures that grant visibility but restrict agency. Look attentively at your role in international life. Step deliberately into spaces of judgment, trial, and collective action. Exercise your capacities for experimentation, for deliberation, for challenging and reshaping norms. To be fully human is not merely to exist within the juridical order, but to act upon it. The world grants you the status of stranger—yet within that condition lies the power to participate, to experiment, and to reclaim agency. Engage. Act. Transform.