Law, power, and the empire of impunity

Abstract

The post-1945 international legal order was never the neutral, universal framework its architects claimed. Built on victor’s justice and designed primarily to regulate conflict among Western powers, it bore structural asymmetries from the start — selectively honoring sovereignty, tolerating colonial violence, and concentrating veto authority in the hands of the strong. What we witness today is not a departure from that order but its logical culmination: a coordinated, transnational assault on the very principle that law should bind the powerful. The United States and Israel — the two leading violators of the United Nations Charter since 1945 — have pioneered a mutually reinforcing culture of impunity rooted in their shared settler-colonial logic, direct legal borrowing, and strategic partnership at international institutions. This project has been advanced across administrations and accelerated under contemporary authoritarian nationalism, which has collapsed the formerly maintained distinction between lawlessness abroad and legality at home. Underlying these political developments is a transformation in global capitalism that has placed unprecedented concentrations of private wealth beyond democratic and legal accountability. Against this landscape, the article identifies the standard repertoire through which law is hollowed out — assault on judicial institutions, evidence manipulation, legal gibberish, terrorist designations, and artificial intelligence enabled information warfare — and examines their concrete consequences, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The article closes by arguing that reform cannot mean restoration of a flawed status quo, and calls on scholars, particularly those in the Global South, to construct a jurisprudence genuinely grounded in equal dignity and reciprocal accountability.