International Law in the Current Moment: Radically Different or Much the Same, and Then What?

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The language of ‘crisis‘, ‘collapse‘, ‘destruction‘, ‘dystopia‘, and even ‘death‘ is surrounding the words international law at the moment. For international lawyers, including those involved in publishing international law, this raises the question whether we should be doing something differently and if so what and how.

The question was put to the EJIL advisory and executive boards. As befits a generative board meeting, views differed, even on the question whether the situation of international law in the current moment is so radically different from that in other times. In this mini symposium on EJIL Talk!, we publish views from board members Ardi Imseis, Arnulf Becker Lorca, Idriss Fofana, and Megan Donaldson as an invitation to a broader discussion on this topic.

Do join in by leaving a comment under the post or by submitting your own think piece to the blog, signalling that it is connected to this mini symposium. Submissions will go through the blog’s usual screening process.

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  • death of international law
  • international law in crisis
  • International Law in the Current Moment
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    Comments

    Eitan Diamond says

    November 25, 2025

    Thanks for initiating an important conversation! I might yet try my hand at capturing the gist of what we said in a blog post, but for now readers might be interested in taking a look at a paper called ‘Fireflies Over Gaza: Reimagining the Language of International Law’ in which Orna Ben Naftali, Anna-Christina Schmidl and I tried to strike an optimistic tone while reflecting on this pessimistic moment for international law: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5682346

    Linus Mührel says

    November 26, 2025

    Dear Sarah,
    We published our thoughts on this topic with Verfassungsblog a few weeks ago. Perhaps they can be useful for the discussion on ejil:talk:
    https://verfassungsblog.de/international-law-in-the-face-of-absurdity/
    Linus