Peters: International Law and its Scholarship in the Time of Monsters

Anne Peters (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) has posted International Law and its Scholarship in the Time of Monsters. Here's the abstract:

In only three years, the international legal order suffered three shocks: Ukraine, Gaza, and Trump. These function as a looking glass that focalises pre-exiting more or less latently smouldering key challenges: north─south inequality; global warming and the mass extinction of species; and the dark side of digitalisation.

In combination, the abuse of the language of international law by Putin, the stretching of the rules of armed conflict by Israel, and the side-lining of international law by Trump risk to stall even the modest function of international as a language of international relations.A snapshot of the ongoing shift of the international legal order shows that it is not being reduced to an international law of co-existence, is not reverting to Westphalia (Eastphalia), is not becoming a concert of three (or two and a half) great powers, and is not mainly a decline of the West. Rather, the international legal order is reverting to a private law writ large; with geopolitics bending international legal principles, and with more authoritarian features. The biggest risk is closing down international law which means a loss even of its ideological function as an occasional hamstring of imperial power.

In this period of transition scholars should insist on bringing the legal perspective to bear on ongoing conflicts. They should not leave the legal turf to others, respond to the high-jacking of critical approaches by criminal leaders, combine an external with an internal critique of international law which also means renewing the international legal benchmarks. They should build bridges to practice and across the diverse methodological camps. Finally, scholars are well advised to espouse multiperspectivism in order to contribute to a grass-root universality of international law.

This will require not only rationalist reasoning but an engagement with emotions. The real “monsters” unleashed in this period of transition are the negative emotions of billions of individuals fomented and instrumentalised by socio-pathic leaders. The monsters are out of the bottle, but they can be tamed once they are better understood.