International law has long been described as a “discipline of crisis”. Hilary Charlesworth’s formulation captured something essential: international law emerges most visibly in moments of catastrophe – war, mass violence, humanitarian breakdown – when it is called upon to restrain power, assign responsibility, and promise a horizon of order. Crisis has never been external to international law; it has been its condition of existence. Yet today, something more troubling is underway. International law is not only responding to crisis; it is itself in crisis. What we are witnessing is not merely the failure of rules in exceptional circumstances, but a profound breakdown of the discipline’s authority, legitimacy, and political imagination.

This crisis has become unmistakably visible over the past few years. The genocide in Gaza, conducted in plain sight and accompanied by the systematic destruction of civilian life, has exposed the hollowness of legal prohibitions that are invoked rhetorically while rendered inert in practice. In Ukraine, the illegality of aggression is affirmed almost unanimously, yet enforced selectively, reinforcing a hierarchy of victims and violators that mirrors geopolitical alignments rather than legal principle. Venezuela’s prolonged economic strangulation through sanctions, devastating in their social effects, has normalized collective punishment under the guise of legality even as the armed attack against it and the abduction of its President and First Lady by the Trump regime in Washington shreds any notion of sovereign equality even further. Greenland has reappeared in geopolitical discourse as an object of acquisition under threat of force, reminding us how easily colonial logics can be revived when power sheds its inhibitions.

The End of Liberal Pretense

What marks this moment as distinct is not simply lawlessness, but the abandonment of even the pretense that law and “civilization” constrain imperial ambition as was the case during the colonial era. The revival of overt colonial and imperial designs under the Trump regime in Washington is notable not because it has invented new forms of domination, but because it has dispensed with the traditional liberal rhetoric that once accompanied them. Where earlier empires cloaked themselves in development, humanitarianism, or the rule of law, this iteration speaks openly of seizure, exclusion, and coercion. The mask has slipped – and international law is now revealed as either incapable or unwilling to respond.

This unraveling is mirrored in the institutional architecture of global governance. The United Nations Security Council has become a theatre of paralysis, its veto power functioning less as a mechanism of collective security than as a shield for impunity. The General Assembly issues resolutions whose moral force grows as their practical effect diminishes. The World Trade Organization, once the crown jewel of legal globalization, stands hollowed out, its dispute settlement system deliberately sabotaged. Across the UN system, agencies face funding crises, political blackmail, and open attack. UNRWA has been physically targeted and politically delegitimized for fulfilling its mandate. Judges of the International Criminal Court have been sanctioned for daring to apply the law to the powerful. A UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, has been subjected to unprecedented pressure including sanctions for naming what international law prohibits.

Yet to understand this moment solely as a departure from an otherwise functional legal order would be a mistake. The crisis of international law did not begin in Gaza, Ukraine, or Washington. These events have made the crisis more visible and acute, but its roots run far deeper. The problem is not that international law has recently failed to live up to its ideals; it is that its structure and logic have always been aligned with hegemonic power. From its colonial origins to its modern doctrines of sovereignty, intervention, and trade, international law has consistently operated in the interests of dominant states and classes, while insulating them from the equal application of its norms.

This is not an incidental flaw; it is constitutive. International law proclaims universality while institutionalizing exception. It promises equality while organizing hierarchy. It promises to curb anarchy but sanctions it under the color of law. It criminalizes aggression and atrocity, yet renders enforcement contingent on political convenience. The powerful are not merely more likely to violate the law; they are more likely to define what counts as law in the first place. The result is a system in which legality functions less as a constraint on power than as one of its techniques.

False Choices for a Failing Legal Order

Faced with this reality, the discipline stands at a crossroads. One path leads toward what Gerry Simpson has described as an “international law of sentimentality” – a law of moral outrage, expressive resolutions, and symbolic condemnation. This is the law that speaks eloquently of values while accepting its own irrelevance to material outcomes. It is the law of hashtags, emergency statements at Davos, and solemn anniversaries, offering affect in place of transformation. Sentimentality may soothe consciences, but it leaves structures intact.

Yet another path leads alternatively to what might be called an international law of atrophy. This is a law that clings to inherited institutions and norms even as they decay, mistaking endurance for vitality. It invests hope in procedural fixes, institutional reform – such as that of the Security Council – or a rebalanced geopolitics, often under the banner of multipolarity. But multipolarity, absent a transformation of underlying power relations, risks becoming merely a new configuration of empire. Replacing a world dominated by one or two superpowers with a condominium of hegemonic states and classes does not democratize international law; it multiplies the sites of domination.

The danger of the atrophy model is that it treats international law as a patient to be stabilized rather than a structure to be reimagined. It asks how to preserve authority without confronting whose authority has mattered, and at whose expense. In doing so, it risks reproducing the very exclusions that have brought the discipline to its current impasse.

International Law from Below

The alternative to sentimentality is not cynicism, but a radical reorientation of where and how we locate international law. Critical work in international law has urged us to see international law not as a closed system of rules emanating from Geneva or New York, but as something embedded in everyday life, contested, as a site of struggle, and one that amplifies counter-hegemonic power (see, e.g., here, here, and here). On this view, international law is a language of other worlds – a Weltanschauung that operates across the registers of the planet, human and non-human, living and non-living. It is present in struggles over land, water, labor, migration, and survival, long before it is codified in treaties or adjudicated in courts. It recognizes that the struggle for international law is about more than rules, as Judge Rosalyn Higgins noted long ago, which opens the door for what else besides rules must international law be about.

Indeed, what is needed is an international law from below. As I have argued for many years, such a law cannot be bestowed by elites or engineered solely through institutional reform. It can only emerge from counter-hegemonic practices – through social movements, indigenous resistance, labor struggles, environmental defense, and everyday transformations of power and rights within and across States, including at urban and local levels. This is not a romanticization of informality, but a recognition that law’s legitimacy flows from lived experience, not abstract universality.

An international law from below would not abandon norms against genocide, occupation, or exploitation. It would insist that these norms be grounded in the realities of those who bear their consequences. It would treat Gaza not as a test case for doctrinal debate, but as a demand for structural accountability. It would see Ukraine not only through the lens of sovereignty, but through the global political economy of war and development. It would confront sanctions regimes as forms of violence, and colonial revivals as the logical outcome of a system that never truly decolonized.

The crisis of international law is therefore not simply a moment of breakdown; it is a moment of choice. We can cling to the ruins of a legal order that has always privileged the powerful, or we can participate in the slow, contested work of building something else. Crisis has always defined international law. The question now is whether the discipline can survive its own contradictions – or whether it will be transformed by those who refuse to accept that legality must always serve empire.

Mapping Article 13: Academic and Scientific Freedom under the EU Charter (forthcoming)
Vasiliki Kosta & Marie Müller-Elmau (eds.)

Academic freedom is under pressure. Though protected by Article 13 of the EU Charter, academic freedom in the context of EU law received very little attention in both scholarship jurisprudence. This edited volume puts Article 13 of the EU Charter in the spotlight and reflects its potential in light of past and present threats to academic freedom.