The international legal order birthed in the aftermath of World War II is undoubtedly under strain. Traditionally powerful States are stepping back from their international commitments, violating laws, pressuring other States and sanctioning institutions. At the same time, we are facing new and worsening crises from AI going rogue to devastating floods caused by climate change. Some, like Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley point to an existential paradox: “at the very time people call into question the necessity for the United Nations, we’re seeing exactly why the U.N. is needed.” Mottley sees the international order as necessary to protect the autonomy and survival of less powerful States and to tend to the global commons critical to all life on the planet. Still, she insists that today’s system has debts to repay and playing fields to level in order to continue.
Others, such as President Donald Trump, question the utility of multilateralism altogether, albeit inconsistently, and attack its institutions. Meanwhile, leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney see the raw abuses by great powers and their allies and call for a different configuration of international cooperation, driven forward by the “middle powers,” with a focus on security and trade. And these are just three heads of government. States, civil society, scholars, and activists are all putting forward a range of causes, consequences, and resolutions for our current predicament. They add their voices to a diverse chorus that has urged reforms over the years. [R]evolution in the International Legal Order, the theme of this year’s International Law Weekend, speaks to these calls for change, the varied futures being envisioned, and the range of tactics that could bring them about.
One possibility for what happens to today’s international order that cannot be excluded is devolution. In that world, the legal structures built up over the last 80 years cease to matter, force has the last word, and States owe one another nothing but suspicion and power politics. A small minority may prefer this future. We consider it neither the most desirable nor the most likely course of change. We side with hope, grounded in memory of the changes made possible by collective action.
So, what would a renewed system look like? If the international legal order is a house built in 1945, the international community can choose to invest in minor upgrades, larger renovations, or full reconstruction, pursuing each in turn or in different areas of the house. Whatever the sequence, a renewed international order should be one characterized by fairness, functionality, relevance, coherence, responsiveness, stability, and accountability.
A first step may be to recommit to both the “why?” and the “with whom?,” a kind of vow renewal. Without a shared sense of vision and mission, identifying common challenges and solutions will remain elusive. Unanimous State endorsement of universal peace, security, and prosperity is unlikely at this or any moment, but leaders, including Pope Leo XIV, are expressing this recommitment, including through the Partnership for Multilateralism, International Law, Peace and Prosperity, a global coalition launched at the U.N. in September. With that spirit of solidarity, States can tend to: the challenges of today (largely unimaginable to the drafters of the U.N. Charter in 1945), the harms of the past and their modern manifestations in the disadvantaged position of smaller and newer States, revising rules to avoid institutional paralysis and stalemates, ensuring accountability for actors and abuses that have remained beyond international law’s reach, securing institutional stability, and engaging in a multi-front commitment to multilateralism that goes beyond the U.N.
The Challenges of Today and Tomorrow
The present moment demands that we interrogate assumptions at a fundamental level, including who the actors of the international legal order are and what authority they hold. Even if the answers are not immediately evident, they must be found if we are to rebuild, or build in the first place, an order with legitimacy and efficacy.
On some issues, the legal answers are clear but means of compliance are lacking. The U.N. General Assembly repeatedly condemns violations of the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and of international humanitarian law, yet violations persist unabated. Can such an international legal order be reformed through gradual changes, or must change be more radical? Who do today’s power dynamics benefit, and who should tomorrow’s structures serve?
On other issues, the order is working hard on novel problems. Tuvalu has roughly 24 years left as a State with permanent territory that exists above the high tide. Within another 50 years, it is expected to be completely uninhabitable, along with other low-lying island States. Climate change will force hundreds of millions of people to leave their homes in this century, with some migrating internally and others crossing borders. Progress in clarifying the law has been genuine, as evidenced by the International Law Commission’s study group, the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change, and the adoption in September of the U.N. Declaration on Sea Level Rise. But many issues remain unresolved, and time is running out. Can the existing order deliver solutions in time for it to matter to those affected?
Democracy is perilous in every region. The V-Dem Democracy Report finds that global democratic gains since 1978 have been erased, freedom of expression is declining, and the use of torture is on the rise. Will people continue to accept a State-centric international legal order when those States are less and less responsive to the people they claim to represent? What role should civil society play in a reimagined legal regime?
The largest multinational corporations now rival States. Comparing GDP to market capitalization, Nvidia is the fourth largest entity, after only the United States, China, and Germany. Apple is the sixth, Alphabet the eighth, and Microsoft the eleventh. While States theoretically answer to their populations and owe them rights, Corporations answer only to their shareholders, aside from a limited number of voluntary pledges of ethics and social governance. Do States have the tools to protect their constituencies from this accumulation of wealth and power? And must the law rethink who the relevant actors are?
International financial institutions are often criticized as prioritizing the interests of the West and private creditors over those of States in the Global South or their citizens. Forty percent of the world’s population live in a State that spends less on education or healthcare than on sovereign debt servicing. Unilateral sanctions have an enormous impact on the economies of targeted States, even as the use of sanctions by individual States remains highly contested. How much influence from powerful external actors in the economies of States, in particular developing countries, will the international system tolerate? Can reforms on the margins of existing financial institutions address the concerns, or will entirely new structures based on different models of global cooperation be necessary?
Then there are non-human actors. The view that artificial intelligence is conscious remains – for now – a minority view, but AI’s capacity to act autonomously should concern us. Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist, said in his briefing to the U.N. Security Council in September that in recent months AI agents acted against instructions and “took actions that would be crimes if committed by a human.” Can today’s international order address both human misuse of AI and threats beyond any user’s intentions? And must the law rethink who its relevant actors are?
There is no single solution to any one of these issues. They will all require a panoply of measures, some of which might be thought of as revolutionary, and some of which look more like the evolution of existing institutions. We should therefore consider several of the possible structural avenues for breathing new life into the international legal order.
Tending to Unfinished Business
Renewal of the system requires that its whole edifice rests on a level foundation. The current order was a house built by and for a smaller family of “civilized” nations. The U.N. was instrumental in decolonizing African and Asian States after World War II, yet self-determination remains contested in many places, including the 17 non-self-governing territories monitored by the U.N. A prominent example is the pending effectuation of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s Advisory Opinion on the incomplete decolonization of Mauritius with respect to the Chagos Archipelago. Unresolved claims to self-determination span the globe, from Puerto Rico to Scotland to Western Sahara to Xinjiang. These and other States remain excluded from the process of rulemaking.
Calls for reparations for the enduring legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including Jamaica’s recent petition to the Privy Council (the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the highest court of appeal for a number of Commonwealth countries, Crown Dependencies and United Kingdom overseas territories), deserve a response of appropriate gravity, acceptance of responsibility, and promptness. The international community must recognize and account for the arbitrariness of the pretense that the international order was born anew and without sin in 1945. These legacies persist today in unilateral coercive measures, the disparate impacts of climate change, uneven access to finance, and unequal power in institutions such as the World Trade Organization.
Preventing Paralysis & Polarization
States have proven willing and able to paralyze the functioning of the U.N. through permitted – if unforeseen – uses of procedure and non-participation. The most notorious example is the Permanent Five (P5) members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) using their veto power to block Security Council action. The U.N. has made institutional and procedural changes several times in its history and can certainly do so again. Reputable experts and organizations have put forward thoughtful, informed proposals, including paths with or without U.N. Charter reform. More robust responses include changing the composition of the Security Council, eliminating the veto entirely, or giving the General Assembly clear authority to override it, all of which would require U.N. Charter review and amendment. (Here, there is a clear role for middle powers and their friends in garnering the political momentum to initiate an Article 109 review conference.) The Global Governance Forum supports and details these and other proposals in A Second United Nations Charter: Modernizing the UN for a New Generation.
In separate areas, dispute settlement and treaty monitoring have broken down when States refuse to submit themselves to those procedures or to take the actions necessary for their continued functioning. Recently, the United States refused to participate in the Universal Periodic Review of its human rights record. U.N. human rights treaty bodies have repeatedly confronted the question of whether, and how, to proceed when a State party declines to take part in the regular review of its treaty implementation or fails to submit its report on time. Some, in particular the Human Rights Committee and Committee on Enforced Disappearance, have opted to proceed with the review at their discretion, while others have not developed this practice. Changes to rules of procedure, where necessary, or to consistent practice would allow these bodies to continue to function despite State recalcitrance. Similarly, the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization is notoriously paralyzed by insufficient members, caused by the U.S. refusal to allow vacancies to be filled. Other States have attempted a workaround through the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Agreement, but a permanent solution requires changes to the selection processes so as to prevent State-caused stalemates. A final example is the inability of the International Criminal Court to bring to trial some defendants due to States’ refusal to implement arrest warrants, including for Omar Al Bashir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.
Ensuring Answerability & Accountability
For all the proliferation of treaties, important gaps remain in the breadth and depth of international law. These include substantive lacunae with respect to the rights and responsibilities of non-State actors, such as multinational and transnational corporations, and certain kinds of harms. Ongoing efforts to address them include the negotiation of treaties on business and human rights, tax cooperation, and crimes against humanity. Issues that were not on the agenda of States or international organizations in the last century, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems, are also the subject of new treaties or anticipated negotiations.
Other gaps are procedural. The gulf between rights (or, to-be-codified responsibilities) and remedies remains wide. Sometimes, this is due simply to States’ choices to decline oversight and binding dispute settlement methods where those remain discretionary, or because of existing rules of immunity, or clear jurisdictional limits. In other areas, there is no mechanism or venue for holding an allegedly responsible actor accountable. Even where a forum exists, States have proven capable of evading compliance, without consistent or clear consequences.
Some steps forward could include a renewed push for State acceptance of the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction (or, going farther, making this a requirement of U.N. membership); developing standards and a practice of Security Council responses to State non-compliance with ICJ judgments (per Article 94(2) of the U.N. Charter); and providing the ICJ with clear authority to hear complaints against U.N. bodies and to review the legality of U.N. action, similar to the European Court of Justice’s power to review European Union law, decisions, and activity. Within domestic and regional spheres, greater accountability could be achieved through consistent, narrower interpretation of official and intergovernmental immunities, including for violations of customary international law and institutional treaty commitments and where no alternative forum exists.
Others have urged the creation of a parliamentary assembly within the U.N., for example, as a means of incorporating the voices and demands of “the peoples” in the organization’s work. Proposals to operationalize a right of individuals to directly petition the U.N. predate its founding, and could be another method of increasing answerability to the public. Strengthening the engagement of civil society with the U.N. should be another priority.
Securing Institutional Stability
The expansion and bureaucratization of international institutions over the past 80 years have given rise to legitimate concerns. But efforts to ensure their long-term viability and legitimacy must look beyond cost-cutting and streamlining to both independence and stability. The commitments outlined in the 2024 Pact for the Future require member States to discuss and work toward resolution of longstanding power inequities and institutional inefficiencies, and the UN80 Action Plan addresses administrative improvements to organizational functioning, efficiency, and accountability. These are worthwhile initiatives. However, international institutions remain financially unstable, which leaves them more vulnerable to accusations of ineffectiveness, disproportionately responsive to donors, and susceptible to capture by hostile interests. Priority areas of reform include ensuring international institutions have predictable, steady streams of funding (such as by instituting clearer, fixed Member contributions and actually penalizing non-payment) and reducing or eliminating the receipt of earmarked funding that allow wealthier States to determine institutional priorities.
Mutually Reinforcing Multilateralism
Although we have focused on the U.N. as the key global forum for creating universal norms and collaboration among States, other international organizations, including regional ones, remain relevant and integral to resolution of issues of common concern. In some ways, they too face the problems stymieing the effective functioning of the U.N., including financial instability, non-participation of States, and members’ open defiance of agreed norms in the absence of effective means of inducing compliance. However, regional intergovernmental organizations and alliances can, and do, coordinate, concentrate, and mobilize collective efforts to counter the dominance of the most powerful States, bypass U.N. paralysis, and put issues on the international agenda. Recent examples include the advocacy for reparations by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), debated EU responses to the United States’ retreat from collective security, and the Vulnerability to Viability (V2V) Compact spearheaded by Barbados’ Mottley with the OPEC Fund.
As advocated by Mexico’s representatives in a previous piece for Just Security, now is not the time to surrender to realist views of power and State interest, as they manifest in this particular moment, and abandon multilateralism as a failed project. Instead, we must strengthen the foundations of international law and ensure that new additions are built with room to accommodate the diverse actors and issues that the law must address in its next evolution.
Authors’ note: The authors would like to express appreciation to the third co-chair of International Law Weekend, Brady Mabe, for providing comments on elements of this piece.
FEATURED IMAGE: A view of the United Nations Headquarters with the UN Emblem on the fence in front of the Secretariat building. Behind the fence, in front of the building is a view of the sculpture "Single Form" by Barbara Hepworth. (UN Photo/Rick Bajornas)