International law in crisis

Wednesday 21 January 2026

International law, as it has been understood since 1945, is not a single monument. It is an assemblage: the United Nations Charter’s rules on the use of force, the Geneva Conventions’ restraints on warfare, the post-war human rights treaties, and a growing lattice of specialised regimes, from the law of the sea to international criminal justice. When people say the edifice is “crumbling”, what they usually mean is that its load-bearing beams are being tested in public, by powerful states and armed movements alike, and that enforcement is being revealed as political before it is juridical.

Recent events give this anxiety its force. The South China Sea continues to function as a laboratory for a style of statecraft in which law is not obeyed so much as weaponised: rival legal narratives, aggressive “facts on the water”, and calibrated coercion that stays just below the threshold of open war. A Reuters report published describes China’s recent military “warning off” a Philippine government aircraft near Scarborough Shoal, an incident that is unremarkable only because it is now routine. Meanwhile the Philippines has announced a new gas find near contested waters, framing it explicitly within her exclusive economic zone as understood under the law of the sea, thus turning geological luck into a legal and strategic claim. Even where arbitration and treaty law exist, such as the South China Sea arbitration administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the practical question remains how rules constrain a state that declines to accept a tribunal’s authority in the first place. 

At the same time the international community’s mechanisms for accountability are plainly under strain. The International Criminal Court has built a global architecture of prosecutions that depends, in the final analysis, upon state cooperation for arrests. European Union statements at the United Nations have emphasised that outstanding warrants and poor cooperation remain a central weakness. That weakness becomes structural when major powers respond to unwanted scrutiny not with legal argument, but with coercive measures directed at the Court itself. A United Nations information centre report notes that the ICC has faced intense political pressure, including rounds of United States sanctions since June 2025 aimed at judges and prosecutors. The Court’s own strategic planning for 2026–2029 places improved enforcement of warrants at the heart of its agenda, which is a polite institutional way of admitting that law without arrests becomes rhetoric. 

The International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal judicial organ, illustrates a related paradox. The Court can issue binding provisional measures, and in politically charged disputes it has done so, but it has no police force. The Gaza-related proceedings brought by South Africa, for example, have produced a succession of orders and continuing procedural steps into 2026. Supporters see a reassertion of legal principle; critics see, in the unevenness of compliance, a demonstration that the law’s reach depends on who is being asked to obey it and who is willing to insist.

Against that background, it is tempting to declare that the post-1945 order is collapsing. Yet collapse is too neat a word. What we are seeing is something closer to three simultaneous trends.

First, there is more law than ever. Courts sit, opinions are written, treaties are invoked, and states spend immense energy arguing in legal terms precisely because legal vocabulary still matters. China’s insistence that she is acting lawfully around disputed features is, in a perverse way, evidence that legitimacy still has to be justified in legal dress. 

Secondly, there is more contestation than ever about who gets to speak the law. The most acute disputes now concern not only whether a rule exists, but whether an institution has authority to interpret it, and whether a judgment will be treated as binding in practice. The ICC’s sanctions controversy and the chronic problem of unexecuted arrest warrants are symptoms of this legitimacy struggle. 

Thirdly, there is a widening gap between the law governing force and the political incentives of states. The UN Charter was designed to stigmatise conquest and to channel coercion through collective security. But collective security depends on a functioning Security Council, and the Council’s credibility depends on restraint by its permanent members and their close allies. Where veto politics or great-power rivalry paralyses the Council, states revert to coalitions, unilateralism, and creative legal rationales. That does not abolish the Charter, but it does hollow out her promise.

So is the edifice crumbling? Parts of it are. Not because norms have disappeared, but because enforcement and equal application are increasingly doubted. International law survives on a mixture of habit, reciprocity, reputation, domestic incorporation, and, at the sharp end, coercion. When reputation becomes less costly, reciprocity less predictable, and coercion more selective, the structure weakens.

What, then, can the international community do to shore it up?

1. Make enforcement less optional

The central problem is not the absence of rules; it is the absence of consequences.

• Strengthen cooperation for arrests and surrenders to the International Criminal Court, including through domestic implementing laws, dedicated inter-agency units, and routine conditionality in security assistance.

  
  

• Build practical “arrest diplomacy” coalitions that track travel, assets and networks of indicted individuals. The EU’s warning about outstanding warrants points to a solvable administrative challenge if states choose to treat it as such. 

  
  

• Defend courts from coercion. Sanctions aimed at judges and prosecutors are not merely political theatre; they are an attack on the possibility of neutral adjudication. A credible response requires coordinated diplomatic pushback, legal countermeasures where available, and predictable funding to reduce vulnerability. 

2. Reduce great-power impunity without pretending it can be abolished

The permanent members of the Security Council are not going to surrender the veto. But the costs of its abuse can be increased.

• Adopt and apply veto-restraint commitments in mass-atrocity situations, and treat them as reputational red lines rather than public relations gestures.

  
  

• Use the General Assembly more intelligently when the Council is blocked, including for fact-finding mandates, political condemnation, and collective recommendations that help align state practice.

  
  

• Build regional “rule-of-law security” compacts that anchor behaviour in agreed procedures, much as ASEAN is still trying, slowly, to do through a South China Sea code of conduct negotiation. 

3. Reinforce the law of the sea as a daily operating system, not an occasional tribunal

Maritime confrontations are now one of the most plausible pathways to great-power war. The law can help, but only if it states are given incentives to apply it.

• Expand real-time incident prevention mechanisms: hotlines, joint protocols for unplanned encounters, transparent publication of navigational claims, and third-party monitoring.

  
  

• Support coastal states’ capacity to document incidents, because evidence is the currency of both law and diplomacy. The Reuters account of Scarborough Shoal is one more reminder that documentation and narrative control have become strategic resources. 

  
  

• Treat resource discoveries, like the Philippines’ new gas deposit, as triggers for legal diplomacy rather than escalatory opportunity. Energy security can be advanced through joint development arrangements that bracket sovereignty questions, if politics permits. 

4. Protect humanitarian law from the corrosion of total-war rhetoric

International humanitarian law is sustained by training, doctrine, and internal discipline within armed forces, and by the expectation that violations will be investigated.

• Condition military assistance on credible investigations and transparent disciplinary processes, not as a punitive gesture but as a means of preserving the recipient’s long-term legitimacy.

  
  

• Expand support for humanitarian access monitoring and deconfliction systems, so that compliance is not reduced to competing accusations.

  
  

• Invest in the unglamorous parts of the system: military legal advisors, battlefield evidence preservation, and the capacity of domestic courts to prosecute grave breaches when international mechanisms are blocked.

5. Update the settlement between law and technology

Post-1945 law was built for an age of armies, occupation and paper trails. Today’s conflicts are shaped by drones, cyber operations, surveillance platforms, and information warfare. If law cannot describe the battlefield, she cannot regulate it.

• Develop clearer norms for autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons, targeting support systems, and the responsibility chain where “machine judgement” informs human decision.

  
  

• Clarify thresholds and attribution standards for cyber operations, so that states cannot hide coercion inside ambiguity.

  
  

• Expand the practical use of accountability tools, from open-source intelligence standards to secure chain-of-custody protocols, so that technologically mediated war still produces legally usable evidence.

6. Rebuild legitimacy through consistency

Perhaps the most dangerous fracture is the belief, widely held in many regions, that international law is a language used to discipline the weak while excusing the strong. That belief is fuelled when similar conduct is described differently depending on the actor.

Shoring up the system therefore requires something politically painful: a renewed commitment to apply rules consistently, even when inconvenient, even when it constrains allies, even when the short-term diplomatic cost is high. Without that, no institutional reform will restore credibility.

The post-1945 legal order is not collapsing in the manner of an ancient wall suddenly giving way. It is being undermined like a sea defence: each exceptional justification, each unexecuted warrant, each ignored provisional measure, each “temporary” departure from principle, washes away a little more of the foundation. The good news is that foundations can be reinforced. The bad news is that reinforcement requires states to accept that law is not merely an instrument of policy, but a restraint on policy. If the international community wants the edifice to stand, she will have to choose restraint, institution-building and enforcement over rhetorical attachment to rules that everyone privately assumes will not be applied.