In this, the concluding chapter, it is important to emphasize that there has been no attempt in this chapter or earlier chapters to identify problems and challenges facing international law and international institutions as a whole. Rather, the focus has been on subjects and challenges that arguably are the most important, as well as the most challenging, facing the world community. To be sure, the problems facing treaties and customary international law, the primary sources of traditional international law, discussed in Chapter 1, concern international law as a whole but arise in their most acute form in the substantive fields covered by this study: the maintenance of international peace and security, the law of armed conflict, arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation and safeguards, human rights, and international environmental issues. These are fields that significantly affect vital interests of states and increasingly are of great concern to nonstate actors as well. They are also the fields where states and nonstate actors are most likely to fail to comply with their international law obligations and thus belie Louis Henkin's famous declaration that: “It is probably the case that almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of the time.”

CAUSES OF THE PRESENT MALAISE

In the introduction to this study, it is suggested that the rapidity of change in modern life creates great instability and even chaos in some situations.