Abstract

At the turn of the century, it was not hard to see international law as a project of consolidation. Institutions would coordinate, courts would clarify, and globalization would reward predictability. A quarter century later, the picture is more complicated and, in many ways, more honest. International law remains a vocabulary of aspiration, but it is also a field of stress tests. The last twenty-five years have repeatedly asked whether rule-based governance can hold under pressure, and what happens when it cannot. The answers have come in different registers—through security crises, institutional failures, the rise of private power, and the fracturing of mechanisms that once seemed durable. What follows is not a comprehensive account of the last twenty-five years. No single essay could be. It is, instead, a reflection on the moments that have most shaped my own sense of what the field is for and what it is up against. Others might draw the map differently. But these are the pressure points that seem to me to define what the rule of law is being asked to do, and where it has struggled to do it.

Keywords: globalization, international law, private power, concluding remarks