We live in a time of ecological change. Climate change is occurring alongside other interrelated environmental transformations. We are amid the biggest disruption to Earth’s nitrogen cycle in two and a half billion years, and a mass extinction of species for the first time in sixty-six million years. When it comes to climate, the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three and a half million years ago. Change on a scale unprecedented in human history combined with our inability to stem these trends thus far contributes to a sense of being at a tipping point – that unless these challenges are addressed effectively and soon, human life will become irrevocably unpredictable and volatile.

In a world that is equally interconnected and divided, the United Nations is under enormous pressure to unite the international community. The aim of the UN Charter to maintain international peace and security while promoting economic and social advancement of all peoples has been praised as the foundation of global constitutionalism, but unilateralist tendencies have been eroding the spirit of universalism in recent times. In this context, the utopia vested into the UN as an ideal for collective security, world governance, and global solidarity increasingly risks to be falling short of reality.

Who really gets to decide sovereignty claims? Who assumes state sovereignty and who has the right and power to abrogate or limit the said sovereignty rights? Who is the collective “we” in Haskell’s framing that is practicing law-faith: “belief in the rule of law as a neutral process of adjudication [of sovereignty questions]?” Is “we” just a form of “surreptitious conscription,” a politically loaded “attempt to smuggle tribalism through customs?”

International law presumes some common bonds of belief and empathy among all persons. At the level of individual states, which do more for (and to) their citizens than the present international order, even more is required to maintain social harmony and cohesion. A common understanding of a thicker set of constitutional and social commitments is necessary. But what happens when that common understanding breaks down? For example, what if leaders of one party (and their followers) start to consider other parties illegitimate – inherently disqualified from power? Are there certain “tipping points,” or points of no return, when a pluralistic order passes an event horizon toward a black hole of authoritarianism – an unrecoverable decline and collapse of democracy?

The original critique of human rights is well known. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, scholars drew attention to various blind spots in the human rights project. Feminists demonstrated its failure in representing and protecting women, just as parallel limitations were targeted by queer and disabled activists, finding powerful institutional battlegrounds in the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. TWAIL and post-colonial scholars critiqued the colonial imagery of ‘victims, savages and saviors’ that underpinned the movement, and many critiques intersected multiple communities.

Using the notion of tipping point (hereafter ‘the tipping point’) to reflect on the dialectics at work between commitment and critique in international legal thought and practice comes with a fundamental ambivalence. On the one hand, there can only be excitement for the resort to such a new symbolic universe out of which innovative arrangements – and possibly thoughts – can emerge. For sure, the tipping point can prove a terribly enabling tool for international lawyers, even more so since the editors of this book and authors of the following chapters are not bound by the meanings, uses and semantics which the tipping point had been filled with in other disciplines. On the other hand, the use of the tipping point as a central conceptual tool limits what can possibly be thought and said about the dialectics between commitment and critique in international legal thought and practice. After all, the words that compose our language always allocate us a position and constrain our imagination, experience and thinking.

2020 will be remembered by posterity as the year of COVID-19 crisis, which has spread around the entire world starting from China. In such a complex moment of world history, it seems difficult as an international lawyer to conceive possible alternatives to the current legal approach used to tackle issues of health, which, in my understanding, must incorporate considerations on both global health and the individual human right to health, along with the environment. Aggregated data on death rate, scientific information on how contagious the coronavirus is, and the discovery of vaccines are surrounded by an aura of incertitude, and have been the object of a wave of misinformation that this globalized world has fueled, increasing the (understandable) chaos. Yet, the advent of the 2020 pandemic has not come out of the blue.

Relationships among states and substate actors are now interactive and adaptive, but discussions of these relationships often fail to grasp that changed reality. Instead, the language of treaties and international organizations continues to shape most thinking about international law. States and other formal institutions play the primary roles in creating, enacting and giving force to these texts, so they obviously carry some form of authority or decisional weight. As a result, these formal “products” are the natural focus of attention, and they are used as reference points by all involved with the issues they treat.

Contemporary international law is driven by advances in financial and information technology. These twin systems together function as a common linguistic and physical infrastructural layer for the entire planet, transcending national boundaries and cultural divisions. Financial and informational considerations dictate the budgetary and administrative practices of international legal institutions and practitioners, as well as the domestic legal systems upon which they rely. More broadly, the capacities and constraints of “Big Finance” and “Big Tech” shape the contours of legal and policy debates in fields ranging from war and global health, to ecological sustainability and intellectual property. While these debates and the underlying material forces that condition them have always been in flux, there is good reason to believe that we are approaching – or indeed, are in the middle of – an epochal inflection point on the scale of the transition from oral to literate society, or the invention of the printing press.

During spring and summer of 2020, there was an increased emphasis in the United States on racial issues due to the tragic death of African American George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis, Minnesota police force. Protests that began in the United States in more than 140 cities expanded to many other countries in the world, with denunciations of racism in those nations being trumpeted as well. In addition to the refrain “Black Lives Matter” and “I can’t breathe” coming from the global streets, numerous businesses, universities, sports teams, governments, and nongovernmental organizations issued statements pledging antiracist behavior, new programs, and sometimes additional resources.

International law loves stories of liberation. The idea of an emancipatory path humanity is constantly about to undertake and which will eventually lead to peace and prosperity is one that has long fascinated international lawyers too, and still keeps fascinating some. Yet, in the last three decades, international law has also come under the fierce attack of various kind of critiques – from postcolonial scholars to feminist studies and the historiographical ‘turn’ – which in different ways have called for a re-assessment of its ambiguous role in not-so-much emancipatory projects across times and spaces.

The decades of the 1970s and 1980s together constituted a tumultuous period with inflation and unemployment ravaging the global economy. Many countries in the Global South also accumulated massive amounts of foreign debt. High interest rates prevailing at the time exacerbated the debts of a number of poorer countries; and falling export revenues, as global demand for their exports fell during the crisis, made this debt unsustainable. The 1980s were also significant because they constituted a watershed moment with regard to the nature of economic and social policies and their legal underpinnings in conventional thinking.

Labor has seen better days. The early twenty-first century has witnessed a worldwide decline in the power of unions and labor movements generally. “Rights talk” is understandably the last discourse many labor scholars want to revisit. After all, labor rarely receives a fair hearing in the courts. Historically, the “most utopian elements of the labor movement” have avoided judiciaries as anti-democratic sites of agitation. And yet, without arguing for rights beyond workplace bargaining power, unions and labor movements have consistently been defeated by arguments for “negative” individual rights.

The first several decades of the twenty-first century have constituted themselves as a time of great dread. It is an age that appeared to mark both the beginning of a century and the end of an age; an end augured by assaults on the physical and financial manifestations of the power of a worldview that had been dominant since 1945. The physical assault on the Twin Towers in New York marked a challenge to the power of the established order to maintain it. The intangible assault followed the near collapse of the power of the established order to protect and project its wealth.

Things always have more than one beginning. It was one of those slightly cold days for my California blood, but this was northwest England and what would be described by locals as a pleasant afternoon in early 2017. The Manchester International Law Centre had arranged a two-day event, inviting colleagues to talk shop around formal panels and catch up on the latest professional gossip and personal updates over drinks and meals. Walking out from the sessions, Mortimer Sellers mentioned in conversation that the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Interest Group in International Legal Theory runs a series with Cambridge University Press. Maybe Jean and I would be interested to put together a proposal for an edited volume, and if we could land some funding, there might even be an occasion to host a workshop for authors at the ASIL Washington DC headquarters.

In the famous Faust tale, Faust (or Faustus) makes a pact with the devil. Depending on the retelling of the tale, the pact is one in which the scholar Faust trades his soul for unlimited knowledge or some other kind of super-human power. In the seventeenth century Christopher Marlowe retelling, Faustus buys the services of Mephistopheles (a demon of Lucifer’s) for twenty-four years of living in ‘voluptuousness’ with his soul. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles in which the devil serves him on earth and he promises to serve the devil in hell.

In the spring of 2020, globalization came to a halt, seemingly. In view of the spread of a new kind of Coronavirus, countries worldwide closed their borders. Populations were confined to their own states, sometimes their own districts, or their own apartments. Legal regulations were enacted at the state and substate level, and their enforcement was strictly confined. International organizations, the World Health Organization, proved incapable of bringing the world together and fell into crisis; at the time of finalizing this essay, the US President has announced his plan to withdraw from it. Territory mattered again.

Religion was an important stimulus for the emergence of modern international law. It may well be one of the discipline’s most serious challenges. A religion is generally founded on a certainty that it is the one, and only one, true faith. It rejects other paths to God and eternal bliss. What can international law or international lawyers possibly say or do to moderate religious certainties and to quiet religious hostilities that threaten inter-state relations and the international order?