The Role of International Law in the Rise of Populism
Wednesday 9th August, 2023
IILAH welcomed Professor Peter Danchin, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, and Professor Jolyon Ford, ANU College of Law, to present in a seminar on ‘The Role of International Law in the Rise of Populism’. The seminar was introduced by IILAH Director Professor Margaret Young and chaired by IILAH Program Director Dr Alice Palmer.
Building on arguments advanced in a jointly-authored essay, “The Pandemic Paradox in International Law,” 114 AJIL 598 (2020) examining a series of paradoxes that rendered the international legal order’s mechanisms for collective action powerless when most needed to fight COVID19, this seminar explored some of the key theoretical implications of the ongoing perceived populist assault on, disengagement from and unravelling of the modern internationalist vision of multilateral cooperation and global governance. Much international legal scholarship today seeks to diagnose the populist antagonism towards international law and warn about the fundamental challenges it poses to the collective action required to respond to global threats. What this work tends to overlook, however, is the role that dramatic shifts in international legal normativity and conceptions of global governance have themselves played over the last half-century in helping to create the conditions for the rise of populism. A critical analysis of contemporary understandings of the sources of legal normativity, of competing notions of collective identity and political community, and of the rise of managerial regimes of knowledge in international law reveals that within each of these spheres of contestation lie the seeds of the international legal order’s reimagination and recreation.
This seminar was part of a 2022-26 Australian Research Council Discovery project on “Reconceiving Engagement with International Law in a Populist Era” that seeks to address the fundamental problem of how to reconceive engagement by states with the international legal order in the face of a sustained populist backlash. The chief investigators are Professors Jeremy Farrall and Jolyon Ford and Associate Professor Imogen Saunders from ANU College of Law and partner investigators Peter Danchin from the University of Maryland and Shruti Rana from Indiana University.