By Junaid S. Ahmad
There are occasions when state power reveals its insecurities with embarrassing transparency. The United States’ revocation of Dr. Naledi Pandor’s visa—executed without reason, without process, and without even the courtesy of bureaucratic finesse—is one such moment. It is not a matter of administrative procedure. It is a symptom. A tremor of anxiety running through an empire confronted by a woman whose authority is rooted not in might but in moral clarity.
Pandor, a former Minister of International Relations, a distinguished academic, and one of the most respected voices in the global struggle for Palestinian liberation, is hardly the kind of figure whose movements need to be policed. She commands no militias, stirs no insurrections, and threatens no borders. Her influence derives from something far more subversive: coherence, principle, and the audacity to insist that international law should apply universally rather than selectively.
Her central “offense,” of course, was South Africa’s decision—under her stewardship—to bring a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice. It was a move that shook the architecture of impunity, interrupting a decades-long assumption that Western-backed states remain immune to the world’s highest judicial mechanisms. The ICJ case galvanized the Global South and infuriated those invested in shielding Israel from accountability. Once South Africa shattered the taboo, global dialogue shifted, and Pandor became both symbol and strategist of this recalibration.
Against this background, the visa revocation appears not as an isolated gesture but as part of a broader retaliatory pattern. From the bizarre American political fantasies of a “white genocide” in South Africa, to the vile treatment of South Africa’s president during an official visit, to the refusal to receive its ambassador—each episode signals a punitive attitude toward a country that dared to challenge imperial prerogatives.
The targeting of Dr. Pandor is not merely administrative mischief. It is a deliberate effort to punish a Global South diplomat who refused to genuflect before power.
The Threat She Represents
What, then, makes Pandor such a threat to American power? It is not merely her criticism of Israel. That alone, while provocative to some, would not have triggered such a response. The deeper threat lies in her refusal to compartmentalize global injustices, and her ability to narrate oppression as a structural, interconnected phenomenon rather than a series of discrete events.
On her most recent visit to the US, in city after city, Pandor spoke with piercing clarity about how the logic of domination in Gaza mirrors forms of dominance elsewhere. Her critique was global, mapping relationships of power that stretch from the Middle East to Africa to South Asia. This is where Washington grows uneasy: when the oppressed begin to see their struggles as shared, and when voices like Pandor help articulate the architecture of empire.
In this context, her remarks touching on Pakistan—never sensational, always measured—served to illuminate this wider analysis. She noted, often indirectly but unmistakably, the tragic pliancy of the current military-civilian order in Islamabad to imperial and Zionist interests. And she did so in a way that resonated strongly with Pakistani-American audiences, many of whom understand all too well the repression of dissent inside their homeland.
In several engagements, Pandor alluded to the plight of a political figure—widely known, widely admired, and widely punished—whose pursuit of justice has rendered him intolerable to Pakistan’s entrenched establishment. She did not need to speak his name for the audience to understand the reference; the situation in Pakistan is now so stark, so laden with injustice, that even indirect acknowledgment carries tremendous weight.
Her comments struck a deep chord because they reflected a broader truth: that oppression does not respect borders, and that regimes aligned with empire frequently adopt the methods of empire. Pandor’s critique was not aimed at personalities but at structures—at the machinery of domination that sacrifices justice to the appetites of global power.
Empire’s Fear and the Visa That Betrayed It
This is what empire cannot abide: clarity of analysis, breadth of moral vision, and the ability to illuminate connections across continents. A figure like Pandor cannot be allowed to circulate too freely within the United States because her presence has catalytic potential. She reframes debates. She humanizes victims. She speaks in the language of law rather than the language of propaganda. And she exposes the hypocrisy of invoking human rights selectively while violating them systematically.
By revoking her visa, Washington attempted to place a boundary around her influence. Yet the attempt has only drawn more attention to her work and to the anxieties that drove this petty act of reprisal.
The message is unmistakable: the world’s most powerful empire is afraid of a woman whose only weapons are truth and integrity.
And that fear, ironically, magnifies her authority.
The Moment and the Movement
Dr. Pandor does not require rescuing. Her legitimacy rests on foundations far sturdier than any visa stamp. Whether she sets foot in the United States again is immaterial to her global stature. Her influence is already transnational, already expansive, already woven into the moral fabric of contemporary struggles for liberation.
But her treatment by the United States matters for a different reason: it reveals the boundaries that empire attempts to impose on dissent, and the lengths to which it will go to punish those who challenge its preferred narrative. In this sense, defending Pandor is not a personal obligation; it is a political one. It is a refusal to normalize retaliation disguised as procedure.
Let us therefore take three truths forward: First, Dr. Naledi Pandor remains one of the clearest moral compasses in global politics. Second, her analysis of oppression—whether in Gaza, the Congo, or Islamabad—remains indispensable. Third, her visa revocation is not a reflection of her weakness, but of empire’s fear.
The real question now is not who fears Dr. Pandor. We know that answer.
The real question—the one that determines the future of solidarity—is: Who among us is prepared to stop fearing the empire that fears her?
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/
), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/
), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/
).
Junaid S. Ahmad
Professor of Law, Religion, and Global Politics
Director, Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID)
Islamabad, Pakistan
@Academicatarms