Leggi in ItalianoThe title catches the eye immediately. Linda Kinstler’s piece in The Guardian asks whether we are witnessing the death of international law — and the phrasing, unmistakably echoing R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, sets a tone that hovers between genuine alarm and resigned irony.
I read the article with interest, but also with a growing sense that something was being conflated. The crisis Kinstler describes is real: the International Criminal Court struggles to enforce its warrants, the Security Council is paralysed, and powerful states defy international rulings with impunity. These are serious problems. What troubles me is the leap from this — the failure of international criminal justice — to a diagnosis of international law as a whole.
International law is not a monolith. It is a vast and heterogeneous field that encompasses trade, investment, environmental regulation, the law of the sea, aviation, health, space, intellectual property, diplomatic relations, and much more. Many of these regimes are functioning well. Hundreds of bilateral investment treaties are enforced daily. Dispute resolution before ICSID, WTO panels and UNCLOS tribunals continues to shape state behaviour. The Vienna Conventions on diplomatic and consular relations are almost universally respected. International civil aviation works because the Chicago Convention and ICAO regulations make it work, across nearly every country on the planet. These areas may not make headlines, but they form the everyday machinery of international cooperation. If international law were truly dead, this infrastructure would collapse. It has not.
Then there is the historical perspective. Kinstler implies that the current deadlock is unprecedented, but the Cold War tells a different story. For decades the Security Council was frozen by superpower rivalry, and yet some of the most important legal innovations of the twentieth century emerged precisely in that period — the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, UNCLOS, outer space law. If we define law as something that exists only when it is enforced against great powers, then international law has almost never existed. And yet it has survived, and adapted, again and again.
I am also struck by the suggestion that selectivity and power politics represent a corruption of the system. They do not. International law has always operated in the shadow of power. The Nuremberg Trials, often held up as the founding moment of international criminal justice, were a form of victor’s justice with no jurisdiction over Allied crimes. Selectivity is not a recent development; it is a structural feature of a decentralised, consent-based system among sovereign states. Acknowledging this does not invalidate the system — it helps us understand what we are actually working with.
Kinstler herself concedes that ICJ statements may “mean something to future historians.” I think she underestimates the force of that concession. Legal decisions may not stop tanks, but they frame narratives, shape diplomatic discourse and build legitimacy over time. Law operates not only through coercion but also through authority, repetition and internalisation. No one expects constitutional courts to prevent every violation of rights, yet no one argues that constitutional law is dead.
What we are witnessing is not a collapse but a transformation. The question is not whether international law is dying, but what kind of international law is emerging. We live in a post-unipolar world, where China, India and the Global South assert different visions of legal order. What is waning is a particular version of international law — liberal internationalism — not international law itself. The new order may emphasise sovereignty over human rights, but it remains international law. Simply not the one some had grown accustomed to.
International law is reactive by nature: it evolves through crises. The refugee regime followed the Second World War. Environmental law grew out of ecological disasters. The ICC followed Rwanda and the Balkans. Today’s fragmentation may be painful, but it may also be sowing the seeds of something — a more multipolar, more contested, perhaps more equitable system of international legality.
If this is the end of international law as we know it, then perhaps it is time to know it differently.