A World of One Love and Many Lies: Exploring Polygyny in International Law

Man in a wig and robe holds a gavel, smiling. Text reads "A World of One Love Many Lies" and "International Law and Imperialism." UK flag in background.

Written by Abrie JF Kilian. Polygyny

In line with the rules of the Canadian Bar Association’s International Law Section Contest, I am unable to share the full article until its official publication. Once it is published, this blog post will be updated with a direct link. In the meantime, what follows is a more conversational overview of the CBA article. For those interested in further study, the journal articles' reference section is provided below in full.

Introduction

In the gilded halls of international law, love is revered as humanity’s highest aspiration. Charters and covenants proclaim it; declarations enshrine it; treaties defend the right to marry and form a family as though it were the cornerstone of civilization itself. And yet, behind these lofty proclamations, a quieter truth skulks in the shadows: not all loves are deemed worthy. Especially not those that dare to multiply.

Drawing from my academic article, One Love, Many Lies: How International Human Rights Law Enforces Monogamous Moral Imperialism, submitted for the Canadian Bar Association International Law Section Essay Contest, this blog seeks to illuminate — with both wit and weight — the silent architecture of exclusion built into the very instruments that claim to protect human dignity.

For while international law celebrates marriage, it punishes plurality. In the name of equality, it outlaws choice. In the name of dignity, it denies cultural identity. Beneath the rhetoric of universality lies a quiet, imperial uniformity: one model of love, one template for family, one moral ideal dressed up as a universal human right.

This article lifts the curtain on this contradiction, tracing the genealogy of monogamy’s empire, the collision of treaties at war with themselves, and the living communities caught beneath the crush of a one-size-fits-all morality. Prepare to meet a world where love must conform — or be condemned.

The Secret History of Monogamy’s Empire

Long before marriage became a "human right," it was a weapon of empire. Monogamy, that venerated standard of the modern West, did not ascend to its throne by gentle persuasion or universal acclaim. It was crowned by conquest — the offspring of Greco-Roman civil law, baptized in the ascetic waters of early Christianity, and spread to the ends of the earth under the twin banners of the cross and the crown.

In my full article, I traced how monogamy, far from being a timeless universal, emerged from the social architecture of Rome. There, the "one man, one wife" model served not love but lineage: an efficient mechanism for preserving inheritance, citizenship, and property rights within patrician bloodlines. Christianity then spiritualized this pragmatic arrangement, elevating monogamy to a sacrament while casting polygyny — once commonplace among the Hebrew patriarchs — as a stain upon Christian purity.

But the real triumph of monogamy came not through theology alone. It marched hand-in-hand with colonial ambition. As European empires expanded, they carried not only muskets and merchants, but marriage codes: forcing indigenous peoples across Africa, Asia, and the Americas to trade their diverse marital systems for the "civilized" nuclear family. Under colonial ordinances and missionary zeal, plural marriages were deemed primitive, immoral, and illegal — a social order to be corrected, not respected.

Thus, what international law now presents as an apolitical norm is, in truth, the aftershock of imperialism. Monogamy's reign is not the fruit of human rights evolution, but the relic of conquest — dressed today in the diplomatic finery of universalism, yet still bearing the old scent of domination.

When Love and Law Collide: Human Rights' Contradictions

International human rights law, like a preacher with a gilded tongue, preaches liberty and dignity in every register — until it stumbles upon a second wife. Then, the hymn falters, the choir hushes, and liberty retreats behind the polished doors of moral conformity.

In my full academic article, I examined how two great treaties — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) — find themselves locked in doctrinal civil war over the question of polygyny. The ICCPR, champion of religious freedom and cultural participation, holds wide the gates for diverse marital traditions. CEDAW, under the standard of gender equality, demands the gates be shut — bolted, barred, and buried under the stones of prohibition.

This tension is no mere academic quibble. It strikes at the heart of human rights' credibility. The ICCPR, binding and solemn, declares that cultural life, religious belief, and family autonomy are sacred rights. Yet CEDAW’s General Recommendation No. 21 — a piece of soft law, not binding treaty — thunders that polygynous marriage must be discouraged and ultimately prohibited, wielding equality as its battle-axe.

Thus emerges what I have called the phenomenon of "soft law creep": non-binding interpretations swelling like ivy across the stonework of binding covenants, bending even solemn treaty guarantees toward a singular vision of family life. A vision conspicuously Western, conspicuously recent, and conspicuously intolerant of difference.

Human rights law, once a shield against tyranny, risks becoming a mirror of it — legislating not against cruelty or injustice, but against plural loves that fail to fit the monogamous mold. In protecting the right to love, it has begun to dictate whom, and how, we are permitted to love.

PolygynY on Trial: Canada and the Harm That Never Was

If international law wears monogamy like a crown, Canada guards it like a fortress. In the hallowed courts of British Columbia, the very foundations of liberty and tolerance were put to a curious test: could a nation that celebrates diversity and religious freedom criminalize a form of marriage that had stood, unbowed, for millennia?

In my full academic article, I explored how this question was answered — or rather, evaded — in the Reference re: Section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada. There, the British Columbia Supreme Court upheld Canada's criminal prohibition against polygamy, despite conceding that it infringed upon freedom of religion, expression, and association as guaranteed by the Charter.

The Court's justification? Not concrete evidence of systemic harm, but a "reasoned apprehension of harm." A legal hunch, dressed in judicial robes. Based largely on anecdotes from isolated sects, sociological generalizations, and theoretical risks, polygyny was condemned not because its practice demonstrably shattered lives, but because it might.

Meanwhile, the women who freely chose plural marriage, who lived it with dignity and conviction, were notably absent from the courtroom. Their silence was not due to indifference — it was imposed by a system unwilling to hear anything that might complicate the comfortable narrative of victimhood.

Canada’s paradox became clear: a nation that protects serial monogamy, open relationships, and a thousand shades of nontraditional intimacy — so long as they are sequential, informal, or fleeting — draws the sword of criminal law against those who dare to solemnize more than one covenant at once.

By contrast, jurisdictions like South Africa and Nigeria, as I highlighted, have embraced plural legal frameworks: regulating polygyny with dignity, ensuring protections for women, and preserving cultural integrity without sacrificing human rights. They have chosen governance over erasure. Canada, alas, chose fear.

Thus, Section 293 remains a monument to modern moral imperialism — a reminder that even in enlightened lands, law may serve not justice, but the jealous preservation of inherited norms.

The Feminist Monolith Problem: Whose Voices Count?

In the grand tribunal of international law, where women's rights are championed and their dignity solemnly defended, a curious silence lingers: the absence of the very women whose choices defy the Western template. In the name of liberation, their voices are erased.

As I argued in my full article, the feminist critique of polygyny — most notably enshrined in instruments like CEDAW General Recommendation No. 21 — often assumes a singular narrative: that all women aspire to the monogamous, nuclear model, and that any deviation is a mark of subjugation. Polygyny is painted in thick, monochromatic strokes as a symbol of patriarchy, oppression, and male dominance, with little heed to the rich textures and hues of lived experience.

Scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Saba Mahmood, and Sylvia Tamale have long warned of this colonial feminism — a feminism that mistakes difference for defect, and agency for illusion. To the woman who freely chooses to become a second or third wife, who finds in sisterhood a bulwark against loneliness, or in covenantal marriage a deep expression of faith, the monolithic narrative offers no room, no dignity, and no recognition.

Indeed, as Patricia Dixon’s ethnographic studies show, many women in polygynous unions — from Africa to America — speak of solidarity, shared purpose, and spiritual fulfillment. They are not prisoners pleading for rescue; they are architects of a different domestic order.

And yet, in legal discourse, their testimony is treated as a quaint aberration, or worse, dismissed as false consciousness. The great paradox of contemporary feminist orthodoxy is thus revealed: in the quest to liberate women from imposed structures, it now seeks to impose structures of its own.

To protect women’s rights is a noble endeavor. But to protect them by dictating their loves, erasing their choices, and criminalizing their communities — that is not liberation. It is conquest dressed in the language of care.

A Future Beyond One-Size-Fits-All

If history teaches anything, it is that universality proclaimed too loudly often masks a deeper intolerance. And so it is with marriage in international law: what is praised as egalitarianism reveals itself, on closer inspection, as an insistence upon conformity — not a celebration of diversity, but a restriction of it.

As explored in my full article, the elevation of monogamy to the status of moral orthodoxy was not the fruit of cultural consensus, but the product of Greco-Roman legal structures, canon law, and colonial ambition. It was, and remains, a singular ideal projected onto a plural world.

Yet families — like the souls who compose them — are not forged from a single mold. Across centuries and civilizations, humanity has built its homes in myriad forms: from patriarchal households of ancient Israel, to matrilineal kinships in Africa, to plural covenants within Islamic law and Torah law. Love has never consented to be bound by arithmetic.

The future of human rights, if it is to remain faithful to its highest calling, must reject the one-size-fits-all model. It must embrace principled pluriformity: a legal framework that protects dignity, autonomy, and consent without mandating sameness.

The challenge is not whether law can accommodate polygyny or other plural forms — it can, as South Africa and Nigeria have already shown. The real question is whether international law can find the humility to remember that liberty thrives not when we prescribe how love must look, but when we safeguard the many ways it can be lived.

Uniformity, for all its polished appeal, is the enemy of true freedom. Diversity — not as a slogan, but as a lived legal reality — must be the law’s next frontier.

Conclusion: Dignity in Diversity

International law claims to honour love, but it has too often dictated its form. In the name of protecting freedom, it has imprisoned the heart within a single structure. In the name of dignity, it has denied millions the dignity of choosing their own path.

As I explored in my academic article, One Love, Many Lies, the monogamous ideal was never a universal inheritance — it was an imperial export, polished by Roman jurists, sanctified by theologians, and enforced by colonizers. Today it is preserved not by the consent of cultures, but by the inertia of treaties and the quiet tyranny of soft law.

But love, like liberty, resists constraint. It flourishes in the wild spaces of human imagination: in the second wife welcomed in joy, in the shared hearths of large families, in the covenants made not once but multiplied in trust and faith.

If human rights law is to recover its soul, it must abandon the pretense that freedom demands sameness. It must embrace a deeper, humbler pluralism — one that trusts that dignity is not diminished when it is expressed differently.

The true measure of a just legal order is not how neatly it arranges the loves of its people, but how steadfastly it protects their right to love — abundantly, covenantally, and freely.

Love does not lessen when shared. Nor should liberty.

It is time the law remembered that.

JOURNAL ARTCILE REFERENCES

I. International Instruments

II. UN and Treaty Body Documents

III. Domestic Legislation and Government Reports

IV. Jurisprudence

V. Books and Monographs

VI. Book Chapters

VII. Journal Articles

VIII. Online Sources

Polygyny