International law is not contingent upon flawless compliance but emerges from the interplay of institutional coherence, collective recognition and structured mechanisms of accountability.
Muhammad Siddique
Ali Pirzada
Published December 17, 2025
IMAGES/DAWN
In recent years, the legitimacy of international law as a licit system has become a matter of profound scholarly interrogation and diplomatic preoccupation. This inquiry transcends the merely semantic or pedantic; instead, it excavates the very architecture of global order, shaping how nations comport themselves, how disputes are adjudicated, and how justice, stability, and predictability may be sustained across an ever-interdependent planet.
This is underscored by contemporary crises such as the genocide in Gaza and the Indus Water Treaty, both cases illustrating how international law functions as a stabilising framework and normative guidance even in contexts characterised by stark power asymmetries and conflict.
The fact is rather straightforward: international law is not contingent upon flawless compliance, but rather emerges from the interplay of institutional coherence, collective recognition, and structured mechanisms of accountability.
Law or wistful aspiration?
Critics, particularly those beholden to English legal theorist John Austin’s Command Theory of Law, argue that international law cannot properly be considered law. Their charge is beguilingly simple: states flout their obligations with disconcerting regularity, and enforcement mechanisms appear weak, inconsistent, or entirely spectral.
In Austin’s schema, law is nothing more than a sovereign’s command buttressed by tangible sanctions. Remove coercive force, and law dissolves into wistful aspiration. Viewed through this tapered prism, international law becomes a mere compendium of norms, perennially hostage to the oscillations of national self-interest, geopolitical realpolitik, and the caprices of power.
Such critiques, though intellectually stimulating, crumble under more rigorous scrutiny. Two rebuttals prove decisive. First, the illusion of perfect compliance is a profoundly flawed metric for assessing legal validity because even the most sophisticated domestic legal systems are replete with breaches, infractions, and unresolved disputes that do not, for a moment, impugn the legitimacy of the law itself. If obedience were the lodestar of legal existence, few, if any, legal orders would endure.
Second, Austinian critics import criteria appropriate to hierarchical, coercive domestic structures into the unique, horizontal, and consensual realm of international relations. International law operates among sovereign equals who recognise no global Leviathan. To judge it by domestic parameters is to commit a categorical error. The legitimacy of any legal system inheres not in immaculate obedience but in the presence of an internally coherent constellation of norms, institutions, and authoritative procedures.
British legal professional and philosopher H. L. A. Hart, in his seminal work The Concept of Law, provides the most illuminating framework for apprehending this legitimacy. He repudiated the reduction of law to crude coercion and conceived law as an intricate tapestry woven from primary and secondary rules. Primary rules impose duties and confer powers, guiding conduct and maintaining social order. They exhibit three characteristics: engender an insistent demand for conformity, be indispensable to the maintenance of societal life, and require individuals or states to subordinate parochial preferences to collective imperatives.
Secondary rules imbue a legal system with coherence, adaptability, and authority. The Rule of Recognition furnishes the criteria of legal validity. The Rule of Change offers mechanisms for amendment and evolution. The Rule of Adjudication provides authoritative procedures for dispute resolution.
Together, these rules comprise a functioning legal order founded not upon brute force but upon structural sophistication and institutional legitimacy. Absent these secondary rules, law is a formless nebula, incapable of guiding conduct or resolving disputes.
‘Systematic ordering of social life’
Through this Hartian lens, international law unmistakably presents the hallmarks of a mature legal system. Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice functions as an international rule of recognition, identifying treaties, customary norms, general principles, and subsidiary jurisprudence as authoritative sources.
Treaty-making procedures, customary formation, and UN Security Council deliberations operate as rules of change, facilitating the perpetual evolution of international norms. The International Court of Justice, regional courts, and arbitral bodies furnish reliable mechanisms of adjudication. These institutions exercise authority not through coercive diktat but through the persuasive force of reason, legitimacy, and collective expectation.
Primary sources of international law readily satisfy Hart’s criteria of obligation. Consider the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which codifies a finely calibrated system of privileges, immunities, and behavioural standards for diplomats, reinforced not by coercion but by reciprocity. No state wishes to endanger the safety of its own emissaries abroad.
Thus, compliance flows from enlightened self-interest and the recognition that diplomatic intercourse is the lifeblood of international comity. Crucially, these obligations often compel states to restrain short-term impulses. The immunity provisions in Article 31 oblige states to place the dignity of a legal order above the allure of expedient retribution.
Customary international law provides further illustration. Norms such as the prohibition of torture, elevated to jus cogens — a body of peremptory norms in international law from which no derogation is permitted — bind all states. In Prosecutor v. Furundžija, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia affirmed this status.
Such norms generate moral suasion, institutional authority, and global opprobrium against breaches. They embody a universal conscience that no state can legitimately contravene.
General principles recognised by civilised nations serve as stabilising forces when treaties fall silent or custom proves ambiguous. Principles such as estoppel, equity, and good faith preserve coherence, integrity, and reason. The Argentina-Chile Frontier Arbitration vividly demonstrates estoppel’s ability to anchor states to their prior undertakings, forestalling chaotic inconsistency.
Judicial decisions and scholarly interpretations, though subsidiary under Article 59, wield immense interpretative influence. They refine the law’s contours, crystallise its principles, and guide state behaviour. Their authority is derived not from coercion but from erudition, logic, and the institutional legitimacy of international courts and tribunals.
When apprehended holistically, international law emerges as a sophisticated union of primary and secondary rules. Austinian critiques, fixated on coercion, overlook this deeper structural and normative architecture.
Hart teaches that the essence of law resides not in the immediacy of its sanctions but in the systematic ordering of social life, the predictability it engenders, and the institutional mechanisms it employs to resolve disputes.
Procedural and moral anchor
Case in point: the Indus Waters Treaty. Operational for over six decades, it demonstrates the endurance of legal norms despite intermittent political turbulence. India’s unilateral suspension of the treaty in April 2025 challenged the immediate authority of the legal order but did not annul its binding force.
From a Hartian perspective, the treaty’s legitimacy derives not from immediate obedience but from the robustness of its primary and secondary rules: the institutional architecture underpinning dispute resolution, the sustained collective recognition by the parties, and the adjudicative mechanisms, including recourse to the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
These structural features ensure that the treaty continues to exert normative influence, compelling compliance through reasoned expectation and procedural authority rather than through coercion.
Similarly, the catastrophe in Gaza illustrates the resilience of international law under extreme conditions. Peremptory norms: prohibiting genocide, torture, and crimes against humanity operate as primary rules, binding states. The legitimacy of these norms is reinforced by secondary rules embodied in tribunals, fact-finding commissions, and the International Court of Justice, which provide structured avenues for recognition, adjudication, and accountability.
Even where direct enforcement is limited, these mechanisms sustain the authority of the legal order, asserting claims to justice and normative compliance.
In November last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first leader of a “western-style” democracy to have an arrest warrant issued in his name by the International Criminal Court. The three-judge panel said it had found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu “bears criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.
Bibi, of course, was not arrested because Israel is not a member of the ICC. However, the order did, in theory, limit his movement, as any of the court’s 124 national members could arrest him on their territory. This explains why the Israeli premier chose to skip an event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, or why his plane avoided the French airspace on the way to the 80th United Nations General Assembly session in September.
But more than that, what the warrant did was establish that there was someone out there seeing, noting and keeping a record of the grave crimes Netanyahu’s government committed. And that there was someone who would try, at least, to hold him accountable for it, even if on paper.
In both instances — the Indus Water Treaty and Israeli assault on Gaza — international law serves as a procedural and moral anchor, maintaining authority through institutional integrity, collective commitment, and the internal logic of the legal system, rather than relying solely on coercive power. The enduring challenge lies in the continuous engagement of states; the effectiveness and legitimacy of international law remain contingent on their sustained recognition, highlighting that its authority is fundamentally procedural, consensual, and structurally grounded rather than purely coercive.
This understanding gives rise to urgent and arresting questions. If law is something more than the shadow of force, what then is the true source of legitimate authority in an otherwise anarchic world? If justice aspires beyond coercion, can a global community genuinely exist without recognising the binding nature of shared norms? And if states willingly partake in the benefits of legal order, can they, with any honesty, disclaim the obligations that sustain it?
These questions, echoing through the long arc of international jurisprudence, challenge states to acknowledge that legitimacy does not originate from compulsion alone but from procedural integrity, collective consent, and a shared commitment to the governance of reason.
To deny this legitimacy is to imperil justice itself, to unravel the threads of accountability, and to erode the fragile architecture upon which the international system rests. To affirm it is to accept that humanity, despite its frailties, is capable of rising above the tyranny of unrestrained power through the ennobling discipline of law.
The choice between law and might
The question has never been whether international law is flawless. Perfection is an illusion to which no human institution can credibly aspire.
The real question is whether we are prepared to embrace international law as indispensable: the essential foundation of global justice, shared responsibility, and a world in which reasoned norms constrain unfettered force.
Even with all its imperfections, the international legal order we possess today offers something infinitely more valuable than the void. It provides a platform on which accountability can be demanded, a vocabulary through which injustice can be named, and a structure through which the powerful can, at least in principle, be held to account.
In moments of profound crisis, such a framework becomes not an academic abstraction but a lifeline. Without it, we would stand before atrocity with empty hands and no legal ground on which to challenge those who perpetrate grave violations.
With it, imperfect though it may be, humanity retains a foothold: a means to contest impunity, to invoke norms against barbarity, and to insist that even in the darkest hours there exists a higher standard to which the world must answer.
The choice is stark yet simple. We can reject the system for its inadequacies and be left with nothing, or we can uphold it as the best and indeed the only civilisational instrument we possess to express our collective yearning for order, dignity, and justice.
The future of global society depends on recognising that in the contest between law and might, it is only through the persistent affirmation of law’s legitimacy that humanity can hope to transcend the brutal logic of force.
Header image: Protesters hold a Palestinian flag as they gather outside the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as judges rule on emergency measures against Israel following accusations by South Africa that the Israeli military operation in Gaza is a state-led genocide, in The Hague, Netherlands. — Reuters/File
The author presently serves as a research associate at the United Nations Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Pakistan. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the ministry. He tweets @msapirzada
In recent years, the legitimacy of international law as a licit system has become a matter of profound scholarly interrogation and diplomatic preoccupation. This inquiry transcends the merely semantic or pedantic; instead, it excavates the very architecture of global order, shaping how nations comport themselves, how disputes are adjudicated, and how justice, stability, and predictability may be sustained across an ever-interdependent planet.
This is underscored by contemporary crises such as the genocide in Gaza and the Indus Water Treaty, both cases illustrating how international law functions as a stabilising framework and normative guidance even in contexts characterised by stark power asymmetries and conflict.
The fact is rather straightforward: international law is not contingent upon flawless compliance, but rather emerges from the interplay of institutional coherence, collective recognition, and structured mechanisms of accountability.
Law or wistful aspiration?
Critics, particularly those beholden to English legal theorist John Austin’s Command Theory of Law, argue that international law cannot properly be considered law. Their charge is beguilingly simple: states flout their obligations with disconcerting regularity, and enforcement mechanisms appear weak, inconsistent, or entirely spectral.
In Austin’s schema, law is nothing more than a sovereign’s command buttressed by tangible sanctions. Remove coercive force, and law dissolves into wistful aspiration. Viewed through this tapered prism, international law becomes a mere compendium of norms, perennially hostage to the oscillations of national self-interest, geopolitical realpolitik, and the caprices of power.
Such critiques, though intellectually stimulating, crumble under more rigorous scrutiny. Two rebuttals prove decisive. First, the illusion of perfect compliance is a profoundly flawed metric for assessing legal validity because even the most sophisticated domestic legal systems are replete with breaches, infractions, and unresolved disputes that do not, for a moment, impugn the legitimacy of the law itself. If obedience were the lodestar of legal existence, few, if any, legal orders would endure.
Second, Austinian critics import criteria appropriate to hierarchical, coercive domestic structures into the unique, horizontal, and consensual realm of international relations. International law operates among sovereign equals who recognise no global Leviathan. To judge it by domestic parameters is to commit a categorical error. The legitimacy of any legal system inheres not in immaculate obedience but in the presence of an internally coherent constellation of norms, institutions, and authoritative procedures.
British legal professional and philosopher H. L. A. Hart, in his seminal work The Concept of Law, provides the most illuminating framework for apprehending this legitimacy. He repudiated the reduction of law to crude coercion and conceived law as an intricate tapestry woven from primary and secondary rules. Primary rules impose duties and confer powers, guiding conduct and maintaining social order. They exhibit three characteristics: engender an insistent demand for conformity, be indispensable to the maintenance of societal life, and require individuals or states to subordinate parochial preferences to collective imperatives.
Secondary rules imbue a legal system with coherence, adaptability, and authority. The Rule of Recognition furnishes the criteria of legal validity. The Rule of Change offers mechanisms for amendment and evolution. The Rule of Adjudication provides authoritative procedures for dispute resolution.
Together, these rules comprise a functioning legal order founded not upon brute force but upon structural sophistication and institutional legitimacy. Absent these secondary rules, law is a formless nebula, incapable of guiding conduct or resolving disputes.
‘Systematic ordering of social life’
Through this Hartian lens, international law unmistakably presents the hallmarks of a mature legal system. Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice functions as an international rule of recognition, identifying treaties, customary norms, general principles, and subsidiary jurisprudence as authoritative sources.
Treaty-making procedures, customary formation, and UN Security Council deliberations operate as rules of change, facilitating the perpetual evolution of international norms. The International Court of Justice, regional courts, and arbitral bodies furnish reliable mechanisms of adjudication. These institutions exercise authority not through coercive diktat but through the persuasive force of reason, legitimacy, and collective expectation.
Primary sources of international law readily satisfy Hart’s criteria of obligation. Consider the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which codifies a finely calibrated system of privileges, immunities, and behavioural standards for diplomats, reinforced not by coercion but by reciprocity. No state wishes to endanger the safety of its own emissaries abroad.
Thus, compliance flows from enlightened self-interest and the recognition that diplomatic intercourse is the lifeblood of international comity. Crucially, these obligations often compel states to restrain short-term impulses. The immunity provisions in Article 31 oblige states to place the dignity of a legal order above the allure of expedient retribution.
Customary international law provides further illustration. Norms such as the prohibition of torture, elevated to jus cogens — a body of peremptory norms in international law from which no derogation is permitted — bind all states. In Prosecutor v. Furundžija, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia affirmed this status.
Such norms generate moral suasion, institutional authority, and global opprobrium against breaches. They embody a universal conscience that no state can legitimately contravene.
General principles recognised by civilised nations serve as stabilising forces when treaties fall silent or custom proves ambiguous. Principles such as estoppel, equity, and good faith preserve coherence, integrity, and reason. The Argentina-Chile Frontier Arbitration vividly demonstrates estoppel’s ability to anchor states to their prior undertakings, forestalling chaotic inconsistency.
Judicial decisions and scholarly interpretations, though subsidiary under Article 59, wield immense interpretative influence. They refine the law’s contours, crystallise its principles, and guide state behaviour. Their authority is derived not from coercion but from erudition, logic, and the institutional legitimacy of international courts and tribunals.
When apprehended holistically, international law emerges as a sophisticated union of primary and secondary rules. Austinian critiques, fixated on coercion, overlook this deeper structural and normative architecture.
Hart teaches that the essence of law resides not in the immediacy of its sanctions but in the systematic ordering of social life, the predictability it engenders, and the institutional mechanisms it employs to resolve disputes.
Procedural and moral anchor
Case in point: the Indus Waters Treaty. Operational for over six decades, it demonstrates the endurance of legal norms despite intermittent political turbulence. India’s unilateral suspension of the treaty in April 2025 challenged the immediate authority of the legal order but did not annul its binding force.
From a Hartian perspective, the treaty’s legitimacy derives not from immediate obedience but from the robustness of its primary and secondary rules: the institutional architecture underpinning dispute resolution, the sustained collective recognition by the parties, and the adjudicative mechanisms, including recourse to the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
These structural features ensure that the treaty continues to exert normative influence, compelling compliance through reasoned expectation and procedural authority rather than through coercion.
Similarly, the catastrophe in Gaza illustrates the resilience of international law under extreme conditions. Peremptory norms: prohibiting genocide, torture, and crimes against humanity operate as primary rules, binding states. The legitimacy of these norms is reinforced by secondary rules embodied in tribunals, fact-finding commissions, and the International Court of Justice, which provide structured avenues for recognition, adjudication, and accountability.
Even where direct enforcement is limited, these mechanisms sustain the authority of the legal order, asserting claims to justice and normative compliance.
In November last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first leader of a “western-style” democracy to have an arrest warrant issued in his name by the International Criminal Court. The three-judge panel said it had found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu “bears criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.
Bibi, of course, was not arrested because Israel is not a member of the ICC. However, the order did, in theory, limit his movement, as any of the court’s 124 national members could arrest him on their territory. This explains why the Israeli premier chose to skip an event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, or why his plane avoided the French airspace on the way to the 80th United Nations General Assembly session in September.
But more than that, what the warrant did was establish that there was someone out there seeing, noting and keeping a record of the grave crimes Netanyahu’s government committed. And that there was someone who would try, at least, to hold him accountable for it, even if on paper.
In both instances — the Indus Water Treaty and Israeli assault on Gaza — international law serves as a procedural and moral anchor, maintaining authority through institutional integrity, collective commitment, and the internal logic of the legal system, rather than relying solely on coercive power. The enduring challenge lies in the continuous engagement of states; the effectiveness and legitimacy of international law remain contingent on their sustained recognition, highlighting that its authority is fundamentally procedural, consensual, and structurally grounded rather than purely coercive.
This understanding gives rise to urgent and arresting questions. If law is something more than the shadow of force, what then is the true source of legitimate authority in an otherwise anarchic world? If justice aspires beyond coercion, can a global community genuinely exist without recognising the binding nature of shared norms? And if states willingly partake in the benefits of legal order, can they, with any honesty, disclaim the obligations that sustain it?
These questions, echoing through the long arc of international jurisprudence, challenge states to acknowledge that legitimacy does not originate from compulsion alone but from procedural integrity, collective consent, and a shared commitment to the governance of reason.
To deny this legitimacy is to imperil justice itself, to unravel the threads of accountability, and to erode the fragile architecture upon which the international system rests. To affirm it is to accept that humanity, despite its frailties, is capable of rising above the tyranny of unrestrained power through the ennobling discipline of law.
The choice between law and might
The question has never been whether international law is flawless. Perfection is an illusion to which no human institution can credibly aspire.
The real question is whether we are prepared to embrace international law as indispensable: the essential foundation of global justice, shared responsibility, and a world in which reasoned norms constrain unfettered force.
Even with all its imperfections, the international legal order we possess today offers something infinitely more valuable than the void. It provides a platform on which accountability can be demanded, a vocabulary through which injustice can be named, and a structure through which the powerful can, at least in principle, be held to account.
In moments of profound crisis, such a framework becomes not an academic abstraction but a lifeline. Without it, we would stand before atrocity with empty hands and no legal ground on which to challenge those who perpetrate grave violations.
With it, imperfect though it may be, humanity retains a foothold: a means to contest impunity, to invoke norms against barbarity, and to insist that even in the darkest hours there exists a higher standard to which the world must answer.
The choice is stark yet simple. We can reject the system for its inadequacies and be left with nothing, or we can uphold it as the best and indeed the only civilisational instrument we possess to express our collective yearning for order, dignity, and justice.
The future of global society depends on recognising that in the contest between law and might, it is only through the persistent affirmation of law’s legitimacy that humanity can hope to transcend the brutal logic of force.
Header image: Protesters hold a Palestinian flag as they gather outside the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as judges rule on emergency measures against Israel following accusations by South Africa that the Israeli military operation in Gaza is a state-led genocide, in The Hague, Netherlands. — Reuters/File
The author presently serves as a research associate at the United Nations Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Pakistan. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the ministry. He tweets @msapirzada
