Abstract/Summary

In 2025, we international lawyers – and the legal system in which we operate – are standing at the precipice. That things are beyond bad should not be in doubt. This is not some run-of-the-mill crisis of the kind that international lawyers revel in, as Hilary Charlesworth warned us not to do. This is collapse, or something collapse-adjacent. And we are not alone, here at the precipice. Everyone else is here too. Some don’t think things are as catastrophic as they first seem. Some are delighted with how things are going (though there are few international lawyers among them). Some are despairing (and here the international lawyers are legion). Everyone’s anxious. I, too, am anxious, standing here at the precipice. I see the looming catastrophe, for our world and for our field. The catastrophe is already here. It is in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine. It is in the global decline of democracy and rising authoritarianism, including in the United States, the linchpin of the current international order. The question is how big this catastrophe is going to get, and what will come after it. And that we just don’t know. We can’t know, standing, as we are, here at the precipice. In this essay, I would like to imagine, as an international lawyer, where the international legal system could go as we leave this precipice behind. The world we will live in in ten or twenty years’ time will in many ways be worse than when I write this. The international legal system will be worse with it. But dystopias are not inevitable. Where we go from this precipice, and just how bad things really end up being, is contingent. It depends on what we choose to do, or not do. Anyone who has lived through a dictatorship – and I have lived through three (kind of) – will know that the good guys don’t always win, but the bad guys don’t either. There are forks in the road, decisions and choices that people make. The decisions and choices of international lawyers are far from the most consequential, but they are ours. I have chosen to engage with two books – both written by non-lawyers, for a general, mass market audience – as a starting point for discussing the precipice on which we stand. The first is a classic: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, the first edition of which was published in 1951. The second is of more recent vintage: Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., published in 2024. Arendt’s work has provoked decades of scholarly commentary. She has also, for good reasons, experienced a surge in popularity in recent years, in response to the unravelling of democracy in a substantial number of states. Applebaum’s work is, of course, not canonical in the same way. But, despite their differences, and the seven decades’ gap between them, there are some important commonalities between these two books. Both resulted from an effort by scholars, who are not traditional academics but essayists writing books with a popular appeal, to make sense of the radical transformation of the world around them. Both books were written on a precipice. Both are intensely personal. And both have lessons to impart – for international lawyers and for all citizens – lessons that need to be absorbed.