Every decade someone announces the death of international law. The current wave of obituary writing is louder than most and not without cause. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was, on any honest reading of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, an act of armed aggression dressed in the thinnest conceivable legal justification. China constructed artificial reefs and military installations across the South China Sea, lost the 2016 arbitral award in Republic of the Philippines v. People’s Republic of China before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and simply declined to acknowledge the tribunal’s jurisdiction  a response that, had it been attempted by a litigant before a domestic court, would have attracted a finding of contempt. The ICC issued warrants for sitting heads of government, and liberal democracies that once championed the Court spent considerable diplomatic energy debating, publicly, whether they intended to honour those warrants.

Realists watching all of this conclude, not unreasonably, that international law is nothing more than dressed-up politics. States comply when it suits them. They defect when it does not. The powerful write the rules and break them first. That critique deserves engagement, not dismissal  but it proves considerably less than its proponents claim.

The same objection can be level at any legal system dependent on executive enforcement. American federal courts routinely issue injunctions that police departments ignore with impunity. Indian civil courts carry backlogs so severe that a remedy granted a decade after the cause of action has, in many cases, no practical content. British financial regulators have historically imposed fines on institutions while leaving the individuals who directed the misconduct untouched. Non-compliance does not negate the existence of law. It raises a question about effectiveness  which is a different question, and one that deserves a different answer.

Strip away international law and the morden infrastructure of cross-border life collapses with it. Aircraft navigate shared airspace under protocols that make collision avoidance automatic, not contingent on goodwill. Ships pass through international straits on rights that derive from customary law and UNCLOS, not from negotiation at each transit. Diplomatic bags pass through customs uninspected in every capital. Vaccines cross borders. Postal arrangements function. None of this makes headlines  compliance is the norm and violation is the news, and that asymmetry systematically distorts the public assessment of how international law actually performs.

I. The Historical Architecture: From Westphalia to San Francisco

The standard account locates the origins of modern international law in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and crystallize what became the foundational premise of the system: states are sovereign, and in law, equal. Hugo Grotius had anticipated the philosophical scaffolding in De Jure Belli ac Pacis twenty-three years earlier. His central argument was radical for its time and remains the philosophical backbone of the discipline: natural law, grounded in human reason rather than divine command, can impose binding obligations on sovereigns without any global enforcement mechanism. Legal obligation between states could exist and be meaningful even in the absence of a world court or world government.

The nineteenth century transformed philosophy into treaty practice. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 attempted to regulate great power conduct through agreed institutional frameworks. The Geneva Convention of 1864 established, for the first time, that wounded soldiers and medical personnel possessed legally protected status irrespective of nationality. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 extended that logic to the conduct of hostilities themselves. And the Alabama Claims arbitration of 1872  in which the United States successfully pursued compensation from Britain for permitting Confederate naval vessels to be built in British shipyards  demonstrated something genuinely significant: great powers could submit their most sensitive disputes to a neutral arbitral process and abide by the result. Britain paid. The mechanism worked.

The catastrophes of the twentieth century compelled institutional ambition on a different scale. The League of Nations failed  not because international legal cooperation is inherently impossible, but because political will was absent and enforcement mechanisms were structurally inadequate. The United States Senate rejected the Covenant. The lesson was absorbed and acted upon.

The architecture constructed at San Francisco in 1945 was the deliberate product of that reckoning. The UN Charter, the ICJ, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, UNCLOS, the NPT, the WTO Agreement, and ultimately the Rome Statute  together these constitute an institutional edifice without historical precedent. None of it eliminated armed conflict. None of it was designed to. What it accomplished was the alteration of the terms on which states interact  ensuring that violence, economic coercion, and political domination were no longer the only languages available to sovereigns dealing with one another.

II. Sources: The Architecture of Obligation

Before passing judgment on whether international law functions, one must be precise about what it is. Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice  the closest thing to a constitutional catalogue of sources in international law  identifies four: international conventions and treaties, customary international law, general principles of law recognize by civilized nations, and, as subsidiary means, judicial decisions and the writings of qualified publicists.

The treaty layer is vast and largely invisible to public discourse. Over 60,000 multilateral and bilateral treaties are registered with the UN Secretariat, governing arrangements from nuclear non-proliferation to postal services. The Universal Postal Union has operated continuously since 1874  longer than the existence of most states that are currently UN members. The obligation is not aspirational. Pacta sunt servanda  the principle that agreements must be honoured  is codified in Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and is itself a rule of customary international law that binds even non-parties.

Customary international law is, in some respects, more powerful precisely because it requires no signature. It arises from two elements operating in conjunction: consistent state practice (usus combined with the belief, held by the states engaging in that practice, that it reflects a legal rather than merely political obligation  opinion juris sive necessitatis. The prohibition on torture, the inviolability of diplomatic premises, the principle of innocent passage through territorial straits: none of these depend on a ratified convention. They bind even reluctant states. A government that withdraws from a treaty does not thereby escape all international obligation. The customary floor persists.

The jus cogens category goes further still. Peremptory norms from which no derogation is permissible, even by treaty, operate erga omnes  against all states and enforceable by all states. The prohibition on genocide, on slavery, on aggression carries this character. The ICJ recognize the significance of obligations erga omnes in Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Limited (Belgium v Spain) in 1970, establishing that certain obligations are owed to the international community as a whole and that all states have a legal interest in their observance.

General principles of law  proportionality, estoppel, good faith, the prohibition on unjust enrichment  fill the gaps that treaty and custom inevitably leave. They prevent the system from lapsing into silence when circumstances outpace the treaty-drafters, which in an era of artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, and engineered pathogens is a condition of near-constant relevance.

The structural point bears emphasis: international law is not a single instrument that can be renounced by a single act. It is a layered system. Withdrawing from a treaty does not dissolve customary obligations. Rejecting an arbitral award does not extinguish the underlying norm. The resilience of the system is built into its architecture  and that resilience is more significant than its critics typically acknowledge.

III. Where International Law Delivers

A. Trade and investment  

The legal framework governing international commerce is, measured by economic impact, the most consequential body of international law in contemporary operation. The WTO, with 166 member states accounting for approximately 98% of world trade, has processed over 600 disputes through its Dispute Settlement Body since 1995, with compliance running at roughly 80-85%. When the Appellate Body found that United States safeguard tariffs on steel imports violated the Agreement on Safeguards, that finding constrained the trade policy of the most powerful economy in the world. That is not a symbolic outcome. It is real constraint on a real sovereign.

Bilateral Investment Treaties  numbering over 3,000 in force globally  go further. They grant foreign investors the right to invoke international arbitral jurisdiction directly against host states, bypassing domestic courts entirely and subjecting regulatory decisions to international scrutiny. India experienced this at first hand. A series of adverse arbitral awards prompted renegotiation of the Model BIT in 2016 and the termination of a substantial number of earlier treaties. The tension between international investment protection standards and the democratic regulatory prerogative is not abstract. It is a live question about who governs, by what authority, and in whose interest — and international law is the forum in which that question is contested.

2. Human  right 

The pre 1945 position was stark:-  How a sovereign state treated its own nationals was, in law, its own affair. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals ended that. They established that individuals including heads of state and senior military commanders  bear personal criminal responsibility under international law for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The ex post facto criticism directed at those proceedings has not aged well; the crimes prosecuted were recognisable as such under existing customary law, whatever the limitations of the positive treaty framework.

The Rome Statute institutionalised that principle through the ICC. The enforcement record is incomplete  the Court depends entirely on state cooperation for arrest and surrender, and states have been, to put it charitably, inconsistent in providing it. But the existence of a warrant changes something in the political environment. The warrants against Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor of Liberia constrained their movements and ultimately preceded their appearance before international judicial bodies. The warrant against Omar al-Bashir of Sudan was never enforced during his period in power, but it narrowed his diplomatic space and shaped the calculations of successor governments in ways that a purely bilateral diplomatic framework would not have. The warrants issued in connection with the Gaza conflict are too recent for their trajectory to be assessed  but they constitute a legal record that will outlast the immediate controversy.

3. International Environmental law 

Climate change has simultaneously demonstrated the necessity and exposed the inadequacy of international environmental law. The UNFCCC framework  from Rio in 1992 through Kyoto in 1997 to Paris in 2015  represents a sustained institutional effort to coordinate state behaviour on a collective action problem of civilisational scale. The Paris Agreement’s departure from legally binding quantified targets toward nationally determined contributions, subject to transparency and review mechanisms, was not a retreat from ambition. It was a lesson drawn directly from Kyoto: binding targets without genuine political buy-in produce non-participation, which is a worse outcome than voluntary commitment with accountability.

The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities  running through the UNFCCC framework and reflecting the historical distribution of atmospheric carbon loading is not a concession to developing state obstruction. It is a recognition that legal obligation cannot be divorced from historical fact. India has been among the most consistent and legally sophisticated proponents of that principle in multilateral negotiations, insisting on equity in climate finance, technology transfer, and loss-and-damage mechanisms. The gap between what international environmental law requires and what it has delivered remains enormous. But the framework provides both the vocabulary and the institutional forum within which that demand can be legitimately advanced.

4. The law armed conflits

The laws of armed conflict represent international law functioning under the most adverse conditions conceivable  parties who are, definitionally, attempting to kill each other. The Hague Regulations, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977 establish core obligations that are not dependent on reciprocity: the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, the requirement of proportionality in attack, the prohibition on torture, the protection of the wounded, medical personnel, and prisoners of war.

Compliance is imperfect. But the performance is not uniform, and the variance matters enormously. Military establishments that care about professional reputation  and most do, because professional reputation affects operational partnerships and the willingness of other states to share intelligence and conduct joint operations  train seriously in international humanitarian law, conduct post-incident legal reviews, and take external scrutiny into operational calculation. The Israeli Supreme Court has adjudicated the legality of targeted killing operations. The United States military operates an extensive Judge Advocate General system embedded in operational commands. British forces deploy legal advisors into deployed headquarters. The standard is not being met perfectly it plainly is not. But the standard is operative, and operative standards constrain behaviour even when imperfectly observed.

E.international law conflits

The ICTY convicted 90 individuals  heads of state, military commanders, civilian officials  for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed in the former Yugoslavia. The ICTR convicted 61 persons for the Rwandan genocide, establishing among other things the doctrine of command responsibility as applied to civilian leaders who possessed authority to prevent atrocities and failed to exercise it. The factual record, evidentiary standards, and substantive jurisprudence generated by those tribunals became the foundation on which the ICC now builds. The system is imperfect. It is also real, and its existence changes the risk calculus for those who would commit atrocities in the expectation of permanent impunity.

IV. Where the System Falls Short: The Genuine Criticisms

Defending the relevance of international law does not require minimising its structural failures. It requires engaging with them honestly, and the failures are serious.

The enforcement deficit is not a malfunction it is a feature of the institutional design. The Security Council may authorise coercive action under Chapter VII, but the veto paralyses it wherever great power interests conflict, which is precisely where enforcement is most urgently needed. Russia can shield itself and its allies from Council action. The United States has cast over forty vetoes on resolutions concerning Israel. This is not an accident. The permanent membership and the veto were designed to ensure great power participation; the price is a system structurally incapable of enforcing its most fundamental norms against those with the greatest capacity to violate them.

The hegemon problem is specifically acute. The United States has operated the world’s most powerful navy on the freedom of navigation principles that UNCLOS codifies without having ratified the Convention. It withdrew from the Rome Statute and, under the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, threatened sanctions against ICC officials who investigated US personnel. The legal memorandum produced to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq were rejected by the overwhelming preponderance of international legal opinion. A state that treats international law as binding on others but optional for itself imposes a credibility cost on the entire system that cannot be papered over by institutional rhetoric.

The structural inequality critique deserves more than a footnote response. The post-1945 institutional architecture was constructed predominantly by Western powers at a historical moment when most of Asia and Africa remained under colonial administration. The privileges encoded in that architecture permanent Security Council membership, weighted IMF voting, the historical emission advantages baked into climate change negotiations  were not accidents of administrative convenience. They reflect and perpetuate a distribution of global power that international law has frequently legitimised rather than corrected. Scholars from B.S. Chimni to Antony Anghie have developed this critique rigorously, and it cannot be answered simply by pointing to the existence of the institutions. The relevant question is who controls them, for whose benefit, and on whose terms.

The Responsibility to Protect illustrates the selective application problem with particular clarity. Endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005, R2P holds that sovereignty is not a shield against external response when a state commits mass atrocities against its own population. It was invoked in Libya in 2011 and used to authorise a military intervention that went considerably further than the mandate it had been given. It was effectively ignored in Syria as the civilian death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Selective enforcement of humanitarian norms does not strengthen those norms. It transforms them into justifications for intervention when great power interests align, and renders them unavailable when they do not.

V. India and International Law: Strategic Engagement, Not Naive Deference

India’s relationship with international law is more internally coherent than surface-level commentary suggests  though it is not without genuine tension.

India abstained on the March 2022 UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That invasion violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter in terms that admit of no serious legal dispute. India’s abstention was a political calculation, not a principled rejection of the prohibition on aggression, and it reflected considerations  longstanding defence relationships, energy dependency, the principle of strategic autonomy  that are comprehensible even where they are contestable. But the same India simultaneously invokes UNCLOS to resist Chinese maritime assertiveness in the Indian Ocean, relies on WTO dispute settlement to protect domestic industries from discriminatory trade practices, and presses its case for Security Council reform on the ground that permanent membership reflecting the geopolitical reality of 1945 is structurally indefensible in 2026.

That position is not hypocrisy. It is instrumentalism  the deployment of international law as a tool of statecraft rather than a deontological commitment. That is, broadly speaking, how great powers and aspiring great powers have always related to the system. What it does foreclose, however, is the logical option of simultaneously arguing that international institutions deserve India’s greater participation and that those institutions are structurally irrelevant. The bid for a permanent Security Council seat, for greater voting weight in the IMF, for a stronger voice in climate negotiations, presupposes a world in which those institutions carry real authority. The case for reform is necessarily an argument for international law’s continuing relevance.

The UNCLOS situation is instructive in its complexity. India ratified in 1995 and relies on the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone regime to assert sovereign rights against Chinese encroachment in the Indian Ocean region. It simultaneously draws criticism for straight baseline claims along its coastline that independent assessments suggest depart from UNCLOS standards. The tension illustrates a general truth: the relationship between powerful states and international law is invariably one of selective reliance, strategic interpretation, and partial compliance. That is not an argument against international law. It is a description of how law functions in a world of competing sovereigns, and it is a description that applies, without exception, to every state in the international system.

VI. A Stressed Architecture: The Road Ahead

The post-1945 international legal order is under structural stress of a severity it has not experienced since the early Cold War. Multipolarity has returned not as a diplomatic preference but as a geopolitical fact. China, Russia, India, and a cluster of middle powers are pursuing interests that do not align with the Western-led rules-based order, and they have both the capacity and the inclination to say so openly. The WTO Appellate Body ceased to function effectively in 2019 following sustained United States obstruction of judicial appointments. The Security Council is functionally paralysed on matters of great-power disagreement. Cyberspace, artificial intelligence, outer space, and biotechnology are partially ungoverned, and the pace of technological change is systematically outrunning the institutional capacity to negotiate treaty frameworks before crises make governance questions existential.

Against that, the interdependencies that drive demand for international legal coordination are not receding  they are intensifying. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated both the inadequacy of the WHO’s International Health Regulations as presently constituted and the impossibility of any purely national response to a transnational biological event. Countries that behaved as if pandemic trajectories could be managed within their borders had that illusion corrected rapidly and at considerable cost. Financial markets, supply chains, climate systems, and public health are all deeply transnational in ways that make unilateral regulatory solutions progressively less effective.

Legal legitimacy continues to function as a resource that states actively compete to claim, even where compliance breaks down. Russia produced extensive legal memorandom attempting to justify its conduct in Ukraine. China advances sophisticated UNCLOS arguments even while rejecting tribunal jurisdiction over specific disputes. This pattern  of states arguing for exceptional application of norms rather than openly repudiating the norms themselves — is significant in a way that pure realist theory struggles to explain. It preserves the authority of the norm at the cost of the consistency of its application. That is an unsatisfactory arrangement. It is also evidence that states recognize the value of legal justification as a political resource worth acquiring.

The fragmentation of international adjudication  across the ICJ, ITLOS, the ICC, WTO dispute settlement panels, ICSID, and regional human rights courts  has attracted criticism for producing inconsistent jurisprudence across overlapping subject-matter domains. The concern is legitimate in part. But fragmentation also reflects institutional differentiation: specialised legal sub-systems have developed their own procedural frameworks, substantive doctrines, and institutional expertise suited to their particular domains. That is less a symptom of breakdown than a sign of the system’s maturation into something architecturally more complex than its founders anticipated.

Conclusion: Relevant, Imperfect, and Indispensable

International law is relevant. Not because it is consistently enforced  it plainly is not. Not because powerful states comply when compliance is costly  they frequently do not. Not because its institutions operate like domestic legal systems  structurally, they cannot.

It is relevant because the counterfactual is intolerable. A world in which the rights of states and individuals extend no further than their capacity for self-enforcement is not merely unjust it is pathologically unstable. Readers who find that claim abstract should consult the historical record of the period between 1914 and 1945, during which the effective absence of international legal constraints on sovereign conduct produced consequences that no serious person could regard as acceptable.

A world without the Geneva Conventions is not a world in which wars happen to be fought more humanely by instinct. It is a world in which the atrocities of the early twentieth century become the norm rather than the violation. A world without UNCLOS is not a world of amicably shared oceans. It is a world in which the most powerful naval forces simply dictate terms. A world without WTO dispute settlement is not free trade. It is trade war managed by raw economic leverage, with outcomes determined entirely by relative market power.

The honest assessment requires holding two things simultaneously: clear acknowledgment of the failures  the enforcement gaps, the capture by dominant interests, the structural inequities that the post-colonial critique correctly identifies  alongside recognition that the normative, institutional, and procedural framework of international law shapes state behaviour in ways that reduce uncertainty, lower the transaction costs of cooperation, and preserve at minimum the vocabulary within which wrongs can be named, contested, and, sometimes, corrected.

The argument is not for defending the existing architecture in its present form. It is for reforming it honestly: building enforcement mechanisms less contingent on great-power veto; correcting structural asymmetries that perpetuate the advantages of historical dominance; developing legal frameworks for emerging technological domains before crises render the absence of governance catastrophic; and extending accountability to powerful actors states, corporations, individuals who currently operate with effective impunity.

At its best, international law is neither a guarantee of justice nor a substitute for political will. It is something more modest and more durable than either: an institutional project through which states, however imperfectly and selectively, acknowledge that power must answer to principle. Its relevance lies not in what it has so far achieved but in what its absence would cost and in the persistent, never-sufficient human effort to make that accountability real.

Key Sources

•  Republic of the Philippines v. People’s Republic of China (PCA Case No. 2013-19) Award (2016)

•  Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave (2nd edn, Columbia University Press, 1979)

•  Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

•  Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence (6th edn, Cambridge University Press, 2017)

•  Antonio Cassese, International Law (2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 2005)

•  Malcolm Shaw, International Law (9th edn, Cambridge University Press, 2021)

•  Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

∙  Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Limited (Belgium v. Spain), ICJ Rep. 3.

∙  Republic of the Philippines v. People’s Republic of China, (PCA Case No. 2013-19), Award (2016).

International Treaties and Instruments

• United Nations Charter, 1945.
• Statute of the International Court of Justice, 1945, art. 38.
• Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, arts. 26 and 53.
• UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982.
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998.

• Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625).
• Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave  (Columbia University Press, New York, 2nd edn., 1979).
• Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001).
• Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence  (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 6th edn., 2017).
• Antonio Cassese, International Law  (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2nd edn., 2005).
• Malcolm Shaw, International Law  (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 9th edn., 2021).
• Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law  (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005).

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Author: Priyanshu Yadav

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