04 November 2026
What Isn’t Organised Crime?
The undeniable danger posed by real criminal organisations justifies offences so elastic that they fit almost any group of people, and whose invocation unlocks consequences bearing no proportion to the conduct. By punishing mere membership, these statutes create what Gerard Lynch called the crime of being a criminal. The vagueness is not a drafting failure. It is by design. A liberal criminal law – understood as one committed to constraining the state’s power to punish – cannot leave that design unanswered. Continue reading >>
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03 November 2026
The Global East and the Promise of Reflexivity
In 1999, David Kennedy famously affirmed that “international law is different in different places”, a reality that practitioners and scholars around the world had already long experienced. From the Global South’s imperial critique and rejection of international law, to a religiously infused international law in the Arab World, or the recent acknowledgement of European international law as a regional law, one can argue that the “local” in international law is central to any inquiry on reflexivity. Continue reading >>
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03 November 2026
Race, Empire, and the Liberal International Order
The complex set of international laws, rules, norms, and institutions that have shaped global governance since the end of World War II is now subject to an unprecedented set of challenges and reconfigurations. They all raise important questions about what the future may hold for this world order. Yet these debates miss a fundamental aspect about the foundations and predicates of the LIO. Continue reading >>
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11 September 2026
Schrödinger’s Breach
On Thursday, 10 September 2026, the oral proceedings regarding Germany’s preliminary objections in the Alleged Breaches of Certain International Obligations in respect of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Nicaragua v. Germany) case concluded. The case already has a complicated history. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that this case has raised some particularly knotty procedural questions. This article attempts to unpack the most important and interesting ones, which were the focus of the oral proceedings. Continue reading >>10 September 2026
Correcting the Map, as We Must, and Yet Still
On 4 September 2026, 164 UN Member States adopted the African-led “Correct the Map” Resolution which seeks to change the Mercator map – the world’s most widely used map – and encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use more equal-area representations of the world instead, such as Equal Earth. Correcting the map is a matter of justice: recognising and contesting inherited ways of seeing, while cultivating other ways of seeing and inhabiting a world in which those inheritances, like empire itself, refuse to disappear. Continue reading >>10 September 2026
“But the Court Is Only a Court”
We should not tolerate a condition in which all eyes are on international law, but precisely when it is needed the most, it remains unenforceable. Keeping calm and carrying on should mean keeping our eyes open not only about what is desirable for the world, but also on what can realize such desires here and now. If we offload that responsibility and bask in our own legal purity, we do that only at our own expense. Continue reading >>
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09 September 2026
Closing Without Closure
In the aftermath of the explosive-drone incident at Leipzig airport, German Foreign Minister Wadephul announced a package of measures against Russia, including the closure of Germany's last remaining Russian consulate-general in Bonn and the termination of the bilateral agreement governing the activity of Russian and German cultural centres – chief among them the “Russian House” in Berlin. Moving forward on the path of definite closure will, however, involve cutting a number of legal Gordian knots. Continue reading >>
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04 September 2026
Thinking Constructively Together
Thank you to Kostia Gorobets and Andrea Carcano for convening this symposium and to all the contributors, who so thoughtfully responded to my piece. Though I cannot do justice in this reply to all the excellent points they raise, I want to draw on a few threads. The sovereigntist theory is bad because it is confused. It defines too narrowly and ultimately misrepresents what international law (in practice) is, what international law (in practice) does, and why international law (as a practice) can be worthwhile. Continue reading >>
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04 September 2026
“All the World’s a Stage”
When I started thinking about my response, I was tempted to do justice to the richness of the arguments. However, I resisted this temptation for a very practical reason. In a short post like this one, my argument would become a bit like the law in Hakimi’s metaphor: a bramble bush reaching out in all directions without a clear authorial voice to keep the story together. A nice metaphor for the life of law, but a bad model for a blog post. Therefore, I decided to do something that Hakimi hopefully pardons: I made a sovereigntist move, singled out one core point from her article and wove my arguments around it. Continue reading >>
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03 September 2026
Translating Authority Into Action
During my academic life, which including my student days, spans almost 50 years, I engaged in trying to solve some of the complex riddles of what we call international law. How to relate international law as a legal system to the society it serves; what actually is the society it serves; and how does it respond to changes in that society? Where Monika Hakimi remains focused on theory, I probably lean more toward the possible impact of this on international law in practice. Continue reading >>
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