Leggi in ItalianoAt a moment when international law is routinely described as ineffective, selective, or even obsolete, Not Dead Yet – International Law in an Age of Uncertainty offers a deliberately counter-intuitive intervention — one that, as a scholar of international law, I find both timely and necessary.
The report, prepared by Lex International with Federica Du Pasquier at the helm and contributions from Beatrice Fihn and Magnus Løvold, enters a debate I know well: whether the international legal order is resilient or in decline. Its intellectual genealogy runs through the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges and a high-level roundtable in Geneva in 2025. It is not a celebratory account of international law, nor a naïve defence of existing institutions, but a strategically framed argument: international law has already reshaped the international system in profound ways, and its current crisis is less a failure of norms than a failure of political commitment.
In this sense, Not Dead Yet is as much a diagnosis as a call to action. Its central question — whether states are willing to invest in international law as a core component of security and foreign policy, rather than treating it as a disposable constraint — is one I find myself returning to in my own work. Whether one agrees with all of its conclusions or not, the report is best read as an invitation to take international law seriously again, not as moral rhetoric, but as a contested and fragile instrument of global governance.
That said, several points warrant a more critical reading. The thesis concerning the transformation of the international system after 1945 is consistent with a significant body of scholarship — Fazal and Zacher come to mind — but the “95%” figure on the disappearance of territorial conquest is sensitive to the operational definition of “conquest” and to the dataset employed. It works as an indicator of a general trend, not as a precise measurement. The fact that no UN member state has disappeared through conquest does not imply the absence of serious violations of territorial integrity; rather, it points to greater institutional resilience. The distinction matters, and the report blurs it somewhat.
A similar issue arises in the section on international courts. The report correctly shows that functional alternatives to war exist, but the examples chosen — Nicaragua, Cameroon/Nigeria, Cambodia/Thailand — belong to contexts in which at least one party had incentives to comply. This is a selection bias that weakens the argument. The enforcement problem, which the report acknowledges, is in fact central rather than peripheral: without credible coercive mechanisms, international law remains heavily dependent on the political will of states. This is a structural limitation, not a marginal objection.
On the limitation of wartime practices, the argument is plausible but needs qualification. The normative stigmatisation of chemical weapons or landmines has empirically documented effects, but it coexists with recurring violations — one need only look at Syria. More honestly, one could say that international humanitarian law has increased the reputational and political costs of certain conduct rather than eliminating it. This is a non-trivial achievement, but it differs from the generalised compliance that the report seems to suggest in certain passages.
The comparison between law and diplomacy on one side and military force on the other is perhaps the most contentious part. The references to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen are defensible in terms of problematic outcomes, but the counterfactual is always difficult to establish when discussing military interventions. The JCPOA case provides stronger evidence of diplomatic effectiveness, though even here the report tends to assume that the military alternative is necessarily worse without modelling intermediate scenarios. The International Law Index, for its part, is interesting as public opinion data, but should not be confused with an indicator of state behaviour: the gap between citizens’ normative preferences and government decision-making is structural in international relations.
The report’s strongest claim, in my view, is not that international law “always works,” but that it systematically reduces uncertainty and coordination costs compared to a purely anarchic system. This is a realist-institutionalist approach: law is not an alternative to power politics, but a mechanism that enhances stability and predictability. And it is, perhaps, the best reason to keep investing in it — not out of idealism, but out of calculation.
