And what now? International law in times of chaos

With:

Dr. Maria Varaki - Lecturer in International Law & Director of MA in Peace, Security and International Law

Prof. dr. Gleider Hernández - Professor of Public International Law & Head of the Department of International and European Law, Faculty of Law, KU Leuven

The broad family of international lawyers encompasses many specific vantage points ranging from researcher, teacher, practitioner, government legal adviser, activist, judge/arbitrator, or external critic. All seem confounded of late with the political and legal developments taking place on a near-daily basis. Whether threats of or the actual use of force, ranging to treaty withdrawal/suspension/termination to coercive economic measures, from the denial that international law may even be binding, to the actual planning of alternative institutional fora, chaos reigns. Beyond a measured oscillation between narratives of crisis and warnings that crisis is immanent to the discipline, our praxis is up-ended on a regular basis by sequences of events thought unimaginable. In this intervention, I propose an interactive engagement with the audience as to the force of recent events, sharing reflections and concerns about how we absorb, interpret and process them within our international legal profession. The question of whether the structure of international law is sufficiently resilient to withstand such changes is of course an underlying question.

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Host or Publisher School of Security Studies