Philip Allott

About/Bio

Philip Allott is Professor Emeritus of International Public Law at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Recently Published

Anarchy and Anachronism: An Existential Challenge for International Law

The war in Ukraine has opened our eyes to two things that have long been there to be seen.  The post-1945 world order has collapsed into a new world disorder. The utopian dream of inevitable social progress across the human world has revealed itself as an illusion. History has ended, not in improbable optimism but in a sense…

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International Law as True Law: A New Approach to a Perennial Problem

The question of the status of international law as true law has never been a merely theoretical question. The attitude of governments to the question has always been of practical importance. It is now a matter of critical topical concern given the great increase in the number of autocracies in recent years, and of democracies whose governments are…

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A Lateral View of the International System: Responding to the Collapse of Global Government

The human world is beset by unprecedented global problems in a state of unprecedented global disorder. Climate change. Destruction of habitats, exhausting of natural resources, extinction of animal species. Global threats to human health, including plagues and pandemics. War and the threat of war, including new forms, such as cyber war, space war, bacteriological war. Internal wars that…

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