The origins and implications of the current backlash to international legal norms and institutions are arguably the most pressing and perplexing issues in international law today. We appear to be at a moment when the modern internationalist vision of multilateral cooperation and global governance is widely understood to be under assault and unraveling, and when ideas of supranational organization and post-national sovereignty are increasingly resisted.

The causes of the backlash are of course infinitely complex and multifaceted, but international lawyers tell a broadly familiar story. Following the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the global financial crisis in 2008, and the attendant effects of years of neoconservative American foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, a populist backlash has emerged that opposes not only global governance conceptions of international law, but also key pillars of the post-World War II UN Charter “liberal” regime of sovereign equality and collective security.

For critical international legal theorists, these currents can be traced to contradictions internal to the normative structure of international law itself and, in particular, the dramatic shift in understandings of sovereignty under conditions of technological globalization. Some argue that these developments in fact portend a deeper, existential crisis of values that goes well beyond the academic tendency to explain the entirety of backlash phenomena solely in terms of economic factors and material well-being.

So these then are the key questions and themes facing the field: Are we in fact backsliding from a rules-based international order to a more lawless world? Is there an existential crisis of values driving resentment against the liberal international order? Has the rules-based international order, perhaps counterintuitively, itself served to incubate authoritarian populism and illiberal democracy?