January 7, 2026
New year, new blogpost.
And what start of the year we have had! With US forces carrying out military action into Venezuelan territory and capturing Prime Minister Maduro. And with the American continuous threat to take Greenland, most recently on the basis of alleged security grounds, and few hours later seizing a Russian vessel.
These instances add up to the background of critical events that in recent years have exposed the crisis of the international order that emerged from the ashes of two World Wars and that has guided us all for almost eight decades.
The main argument of this post is that we need a new moral case for international law (the statement that “we cannot take international law for granted” only goes part of the way in saying what I want to say). This post is the produce of reflections that I have nurtured through many months, after pondering the events and the law, after hearing the voices of many colleagues and friends, of real experts in the field (in 2025 I published few blogposts that were exploring deep questions about the nature of international and trying to make sense of critical events taking place around us all).
In the very recent days, thought-provoking voices have been those of Oona Hathaway in the New York Times (“The Great Unraveling has Begun”) and Rob Howse’s analysis for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (“How Should International Law Be Considered in the Case of Venezuela’s Maduro?”), each of which puts forward strong arguments, from different perspectives and with partly different landings. Reading these contributions has ultimately prompted me into collecting these few thoughts.
My argument is not simply about reiterating the existing norms and their legalist interpretations. It is, more radically, about spelling out the deep meaning of, and moral case for, their existence. It is about engaging with them. It is about truly understanding their deep rationale and their origin, and reinstating their current relevance. It is about, if needed, revisiting them.
In times of real or alleged crisis we need to go deep.
And we need to do this together – as an international community.
This means asking explicitly and implicitly hard questions and shaping international relations around these questions and their possible answers.
Why do we have this rule? What is its justification? What interests does it serve ultimately? Why should we follow it? What circumstances may justify its departure? What impact would this cause? What guardrails or safeguards should we all agree to this?
It is through this honest and transparent exercise that deals with the idea and interests underlying the core principles, norms and requirements of international law, currently in crisis, that we can generate a new moral case and justification for international law itself.
But what do I mean by ‘moral’? While shying away from any specific ethical baseline, I simply refer to the definition of standards of right and wrong under the aegis of international law. This can be taken as an act of re-discovery, and re-definition, of the ‘justice foundations’ of the system and its norms.
Obviously, the new national security clout, which utters that any breach of the law is ultimately justified by security concerns, does not help at all. Pleading essential national security interests is the political and legal nuclear argument. It is the most powerful reason one government could put forward to justify its action, whether legal or illegal, and at the same time remove any possible discussion from the table.
With Oscar Wilde, we know that
“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.”
But, although perilous, going beneath the surface and reading symbols is the effort that is really needed.
Otherwise, the simple mouth reiteration of the existing rules endangers becoming a meaningless refrain which is not apt to address the root causes of the default and in and of itself will not lead to the desired compliance.
This exercise should take place at every step of the life of international law, from the university seats, where endless confused students are taught the nuts and bolts of the law, to the corridors and rooms where international law is practiced, shaped and created.
This effort of re-discovery is fundamental to framing relations that, under the plain and simple application of the existing rules, would just be characterised by a black-and-white confrontation between the rule-holders and the rule-breakers. In a significantly charged international environment, adopting just this approach does not bade well. The re-discovery of the rule should thus go hand in hand with its reaffirmation.
We badly need jurists able and willing to carry out this exercise of soul-searching and re-construction.
Mere formalists are more likely to cause harm than remedy the situation.
lucaslaws 