The rhetoric around the complete erosion of international law has recently proliferated mainstream political discourse and scholarship. But, surprisingly the current state of the international legal order or its lack thereof is not unprecedented. Trump’s dismissal, Israel’s impunity and Russia-Ukraine war are some of the more dominant manifestations of the failure of international law. International law fails every day, and its effects are not always macrocosmic. These everyday failures manifest themselves in the ordinary, quotidian structure of the international, foregrounded by its operation in the Third world. TWAIL scholars like B.S. Chimini, Sandhya Pahuja, Antony Anghie have all written about how international law operates and violates the mundane and everyday plane of the Global South, through sites and objects that might at first glance appear unrelated to what is “international.”
TWAIL has established how international law is a working structure of global domination, one that reproduces colonial hierarchies, racialized exclusions, and gendered violence. Taking inspiration from this provocation, this piece argues that a disproportionate focus on macrocosmic events of international law’s “failure”, of viewing them as “distortions” in the everyday functioning of the regime absolve international law of its complicity in actively ordering and sustaining violence on the third world.
In doing so, this article does not want the readers to jettison the regime altogether. Rather this piece engages with the idea of “hope” and “utopia” as a critical methodology that unpacks the daily violence of international law while also creating space for constant engagement with international law. This piece urges the readers to tether to an idea of “hope” in a time where international law from the perspective of the Third World seems to be failing. This hope is not a static, innocent, optimistic belief in the legal system, rather it is a critical engagement employed to unpack the very oppressive, violent realities embedded in its structure, and find “cracks” that make space for resistance, for rebellion and for imagining otherwise.
But what are these everyday failures?
Modern international law is an outgrowth of the Westphalian system and European geopolitics. Thus, International law structurally mimics and at the same time universalizes certain ideals and standards set by the West. This process of universalization is precisely what inflicts and sustains both material and epistemic violence on the third world and its people. Implicit in this process of universalization is international law’s ability to continually “define.” The taxonomy of international legal institutions and the neat bifurcation of what is “law” and what is not is at the heart of international law’s impulse to define. This gives into the very logic of creating an “Other”, differentiating between the “first world” and the “third world,” creating an inside and outside.
To explicate this, I borrow from Sandhya Pahuja’s argument on “post-coloniality of international law” Through what she refers to as “cutting”, international law produces twin definitions of what is “universal” and what is “particular” and these two understandings are posited against each other. Even more insidiously, while cutting and defining, international law simultaneously erases this process of defining and cutting. Therefore, the product of this cutting appears innate to international law, universalized and almost naturally existing. And in this process of universalization, international law creates an alterity, something that is outside legality and something that is “unnatural”. This is how international law operates to exclude and subordinate people on account of their gender, race, religion, poverty, caste and class.
Pahuja’s cutting/erasing metaphor and the consequent universalization lends us a strong foundation to critically examine these putative “universalized” systems that are in fact systematically created by international law. For instance, Pahuja argues that international law is not simply discovering pre-determined categories like “sovereignty, and “nation-states” but rather is also creating it. This is done through consistent definitions. International law defines what is a “nation-state” or what is “sovereignty”, “development” or law, and these legal constructs are then projected onto the global order as if they were universal, pre-political truths.
This way, international law imposes a western episteme and this is exactly where its everyday violence erupts on the TW. When international law defines the nation-state as the primary subject of international law, it also defines the normative conditions under which a state is considered “modern,” “legitimate,” or “developed.” These normative conditions are deeply rooted in Eurocentric political and legal traditions, centralized authority, secular governance, liberal markets and are often violently incompatible with plural legal orders, indigenous forms of sovereignty, and postcolonial political realities.
For instance, hitherto colonized TW nations, the “Other” that fall outside the universalized definitions of international law, in their quest for international recognition, have often been compelled to assimilate into this epistemic order. Haiti’s coerced indemnity to France, Palestine’s prolonged and painful pursuit of legal statehood, and Bangladesh’s dilution of labor protections to conform to linear, capitalist metrics of “development” are all symptomatic of international law’s imposition of a Western episteme. In these instances, sovereignty is performed in ways that align with Eurocentric ideals of legitimacy. The price recognition into the normative order has often been the subordination of socialist welfare frameworks, subversion of autonomy, the erosion of labour rights, and the externalization of environmental harm, all in service of a neoliberal developmental logic that international law both produces and protects.
This epistemic violence, where Western legal concepts like sovereignty, development, and legitimacy are naturalized as global truths is not merely theoretical. The violence of international law lies as much in its material consequences as in its monopolization of what counts as knowledge, method, and reason. Edward Said has already provided a grounded framework in Orientalism that located knowledge production within the politics of power. International law is precisely this knowledge, that is created by the, and for the powerful. It is a regime of representation that defines the Third World in ways that both sustain and legitimize global domination. It determines who can speak, who must be spoken for, and whose histories are rendered visible or erased. By constructing the “developing world” as in need of guidance, intervention, and modernization, international law replicates the hitherto imperialist tendencies of its creators, it is indeed rooted in patriarchy, capitalism and colonization.
And yet, even in the face of such trenchant critique, mounted by people from both outside and inside the discipline, the only conclusion has been for a plea for “reinterpretation of international law” or for complete abandonment from the abolitionist critics. The plea from abandonment has read these “failures of international law as a sign of its exhaustion” But this piece urges the readers to do neither of these. While a naïve faith and attempt at reinterpretation would surely not be enough to unpack the insidious processes latent within international law, a complete abandonment wouldn’t be strategically prudent given the continued relevance of international law from the perspective of the Third World.
While a scathing indictment of international law’s complicity in the oppression and subordination of Third World is important, this indictment should come from within the discipline. This is invoking what Pahuja calls the “dual quality of international law -as it is constitutive of both imperial and counter-imperial tendencies. For instance, TWAIL’s intervention has never been to simply discard international law, but to remain in agonistic relation with it, to inhabit its contradictions while working to destabilize its hegemonic logic. It is precisely because international law is a site of power that it should remain a site of contestation. The project is not one of reinterpretation in the liberal sense, but of transformation, dislocation, and repurposing, to make visible international law’s partialities, and fracture its epistemic authority, and to force it to account for the lives and knowledges it renders marginal.
As such, the refusal to abandon international law is a strategic and critical choice. Remaining within international law’s terrain allows for the possibility to advance counter-hegemonic claims, and to insist on alternative futures that international law was never meant to contain. The mere knowledge of the fact that the so called universalized systems within international law is artificially constructed, makes space for possibilities of plural world order, rooted in heterodoxy. It is precisely in this recognition of international law’s constructedness, its cracks, its frictions, that the possibility of hope begins to take shape, as a method of critical resistance. This hope, in the words of Jonathan Lear is a radical hope, a hope for revival: for coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible. And this call for revival makes space for embracing newer methodologies, for imagining an alternate reality rooted in utopia.
Where does hope lie? Theorising “crack” in international law
But what exactly does it mean to “tether” to hope when the world around you is collapsing? And where exactly does this hope lie? Leonard Cohen’s Anthem captures it quite beautifully, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”, and that is exactly where the hope lies. In other words, no oppressive system is as totalizing as it seems, and there are always fissures or cracks that erupt in the way the system operates. These cracks are where the possibility of emancipation, a semblance of liberation lies. To go back to Pahuja’s provocation, the post-coloniality of international law, in all its colonialist, capitalist and patriarchal undertakings, suffers from what she calls a “critical instability.”
This is the location of a crack. And this is true for any oppressive system. There is always an ephemeral moment, where the absolute, totalizing structure of oppression breaks, and it is through these ruptures and not the complete destruction of the system, a hope of rebellion arises. The exclusion of these marginalized categories and the creation of the “Other” destabilizes the very absolute structure of international law, and rids it of its own universalization. Here, international lawsuffers from a self-constitutive split: there is a generative contradiction at the heart of this project, an instability that international law cannot reconcile.
By producing the “Other” through acts of erasure and exclusion, international law renders its own claims to universality contingent and fractured. The act of defining and simultaneously disavowing the act of definition generates a surplus, of meaning, of identity, of resistance that escapes containment. This is exactly where the fixity of an over-arching universalized structure falls, and there comes a possibility of escape. In other words, it is international law’s self-constitutive split that opens up a possibility to rebel against its oppressive structures.
The knowledge that the creation of the universal and the particular is an artificial project is important to open up the possibility of rebellion. Thus it is crucial to know international law for what it “truly is” and TWAIL does precisely this. A critique of international law that is centred around its artificiality is pertinent to truly recognize it as a perpetrator of violence against the third world nations. Once we recognize that “sovereignty”, “national states,” “democracy” are all artificial category, there arises a possibility to dismiss such categories or to possibly create newer.
But the attempt here is not to replace universal categories with new particular categories, the attempt is to move beyond simply criticising nations for not following international law or highlighting the lack of enforcement as its biggest failure. The moment we blame powerful nations like the US for not “following” international law, we exonerate international law of its complicity in violence, oppression and genocide.
It is thus important to view the international legal order within the larger structure of colonialism and neo-imperialism. To view state violator like the US in opposition and as external threats to international law is to fundamentally misread the architecture of the global legal order. US, Russia or Israel are not acting outside the legal system, but they are acting through it. The impunity it enjoys is not a failure of enforcement. It is the product of a system meticulously designed to privilege certain sovereignties while disciplining others. Thus, when oppression is embedded within the very structure of international law, simply critiquing it for its failure would be a counterfactual exercise.
Embracing new critical methodologies: “utopia” as a form of critique
Keeping this in hindsight, urgent calls for actions for better enforcement of international law will do nothing to change the abysmal state of the international legal order. As Walter Benjamin states , “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” What we understand today as “emergencies” are in fact embedded in the very vocabulary of international law. Environmental cataclysm, inequality, racism all emanate from the neo-liberal, colonial and patriarchal structure of international law, and thus to simply speak of violations by the Global North without interrogating the legal regime that enables those violations is to misplace the critique. It is thus important to scrutinize the material practices through which international law enacts and sustains power and to expose it for what it is actually doing.
So coming back to our initial provocation, where do we locate hope in this context? To locate hope here, is not to wait as passive actors, for international law to work. It is to expose what it is already doing. And to imagine what might emerge when we confront it not as a broken promise, but as a working system of domination. This confrontation opens up the space for alternative imaginaries, ways of being, knowing, and governing that exceed the epistemic and material boundaries of the existing international legal regime. And here I urge the readers to embrace newer methods of critique to reimagine international legal order. Feminist interventions offer a vital methodology of embracing utopia as a form of critique. As Sheri Labenski notes, feminist thinking performs a “disordering of ideas,” unsettling the very foundations of how international law conceptualizes violence, authority, and legitimacy.
Feminist utopias, like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, become powerful tools of legal critique for analysis. In Sultana’s Dream, Ladyland is governed by scientific reason and peaceful cooperation under female leadership, in stark contrast to the masculinist militarism that underpins our current world order. This literary vision displaces the inevitability of the present, asking what international law might look like if it were reimagined from the standpoint of care, sustainability, and gendered peace work. Similarly, documents like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s manifesto called the New International Order (NIO) do not merely call for reform but envision a total reordering of global governance. They reject the state-centric, militarized foundations of the current system and centre instead a politics of non-violence, redistributive justice, and planetary care. These speculative blueprints of international law embody what Kathryn McNeilly calls “the right to daydream”, a political act of imagining otherwise.
These alternative imageries are grounded in the “crack” and the “ruptures” that erupt within the totalising structure of international law. The possibility of dreaming about an alternate reality is not a product of a naïve utopia, rather it is a critical methodology employed in destabilizing the naturalized structures of international law. TWAIL’s politics of hope for instance, lies in foregrounding international law’s complicity in colonial violence and imagining from that recognition an alternate system. As Karin Mickelson argues, TWAIL’s engagement is not merely critical, but imaginative, an insistence that international law can be thought differently if decentred from Eurocentric traditions.
Thus, to locate hope in responding to the power structures within international law is to reclaim imagination and utopia as a method of critique. It is to write, dream, and build beyond the text of treaties and the limits of legal doctrine, to recognize that law, too, is a terrain of struggle, and that in the cracks of its violence, seeds of new futures are already being sown. To return to Cohen’s crack: it is not simply a manifestation of the failure of a totalising structure, it is rather a possibility for rebellion. It is a demand to notice what international law tries hardest to conceal, its instability, its fractures, its unsustainable violence. That is where the work begins. Not in repairing international law, but in reading its failures as signs of its exhaustion. And from those ruins, excavating the many worlds that have survived its violence.
Conclusion:
I began this essay by arguing for a shift in how we conceptualize international law, not as a failed promise, but as a working structure of domination whose logic of violence is often masked by its universal claims. This reframing allows us to move beyond the empty calls for enforcement and compliance, and instead direct our critique towards exposing the foundational exclusions and erasures that sustain international law.
In doing so, borrowing from feminist methodologies, I propose that utopia, as a form of critique, can offer a way out.. The speculative imaginaries invoked by feminist and TWAIL scholars are not naive attempts to ‘fix’ what is broken. They are deliberate political acts that reveal the fractures within international law’s architecture and use those cracks as sites of rebellion, as spaces from which other worlds might be imagined. TWAIL’s enduring relevance lies precisely in its refusal to accept the world as it is. It names the violence of the international legal order while simultaneously insisting that another order is possible. That insistence is not driven by blind optimism but by a gritty, insurgent hope, what Bell Hooks might call a pedagogy of hope. It is a hope that is collective, embodied, and irreducibly political. It is precisely because Third World peoples continue to resist in the face of impossible odds that critique must never be severed from imagination. Because when we imagine differently, we begin to live differently.
To end the piece, I leave the readers with Virginia Woolf’s quote from To the Lighthouse, “The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. It is only in the cracks and fissures of international law, will there be a possibility of daily miracles, of resistance and rebellion, and that is that is where a hope for an alternate future lies.
Ananya Bhargava is a fourth-year law student at Jindal Global Law School
Although I am personally what you termed an abolitionist who has lost all faith in the international legal project, I really enjoyed this paper. I do retain my optimism for change, just not through PIL.