ESSAY ON THE DEATH OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract

This essay critically addresses what it considers the death of international law. It is the end of an international law that has historically been one of domination as a result of the crisis of restructuring that the world political economy, its normative matrix, is going through.  In the face of this, its most recent hegemon, the United States, violently resists its decline, and resorts to a hybrid and total war. But the decline is not only theirs but that of an entire civilisational, capitalist and historically West-centred order. In a period characterised by these rupturing tendencies, conflicts take on a different nature. The legal form is covered by a problematic condition. It is increasingly detached from fictio juris. International law thus loses its effectiveness, both as an idea and as a practice. And it has lost all ability to cover up the order of battle on which it is based. It has thus passed from the strictly legal form to the form of political-strategic acts with conjunctural efficacy in accordance with the balance of power between the forces in conflict. In the face of this, international law emerges as a front of struggle, from which the global South seeks a more just and equitable restructuring of the world economic, political and legal order.

Keywords

Legal form; Fictio juris; Transition period; Normative facts; Political-strategic form