Debates on the future of the international order are often framed in terms of collapse. The post-1945 system, it is argued, is unravelling under the weight of geopolitical fragmentation, renewed great-power rivalry, and institutional paralysis. At the core of this order lies its legal architecture, international law, which many now portray as collapsing alongside with the very order it was meant to uphold. Yet to describe the current moment as one of collapse presupposes that what is being lost was once a coherent and principled regime. Such accounts imply that international law previously restrained violence and preserved order, and that its present failures are a temporary deviation from a linear trajectory of progress.

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This article challenges that narrative. What we confront today is not the disappearance of international legality but its exposure. The present does not signify a collapse of norms; it reveals their enduring entanglement with power and their imperial pedigree. What we see in Ukraine, Gaza, or Taiwan does not mark a new departure but the continuation of patterns long embedded in a system designed to accommodate hierarchy. Aggression is not new to international politics after the UN Charter. Suez in 1956, Turkey in Cyprus in 1974, or the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 all testify to this. Indirect forms, such as economic coercion, likewise reveal that order was never free of aberration. What marks the present is the intensity and normalisation of such practices, so pervasive that exceptions increasingly appear as the rule.

Aggression today is entrenched and increasingly systemic: the annexation of Crimea and its gradual normalisation, Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, Israel’s campaigns in Gaza presented as self-defence, threats of annexation voiced by President Trump towards Greenland and even Canada, the calibrated pressure of China over Taiwan, and recurrent attacks against Iran framed as security imperatives. These practices illustrate not a system in breakdown but one in interregnum, where law persists as a vocabulary that rationalises and integrates violations. Far from an exceptional moment, the interregnum reflects the overstretch of the liberal international order, whose teleological promises of universality and “end of history” masked a hubris that could only unravel. The proliferation of breaches of jus ad bellum and jus in bello is not aberration but continuity: a system that survives by absorbing transgressions, re-articulating justifications, and transforming violations into precedents.

The analytical lens for this argument is the concept of interregnum. Borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, the term denotes a liminal condition in which the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. In international politics, it describes a moment when the language of law endures while its authority is suspended. The interregnum is not a transitional dysfunction but the operative condition of the international order: legality survives not by disciplining power but by rendering it intelligible, even acceptable.

Interregnum and the Ontology of Law

The notion of interregnum illuminates the paradox of the present order. Law appears to endure, yet its authority is severed from enforcement. Gramsci identified the interregnum as an in-between period, marked by morbid symptoms that reveal the fragility of hegemony. Transposed into international law, this condition manifests in the coexistence of solemn prohibitions with their systematic violation. The more international law is invoked, the more its complicity with material asymmetries becomes visible. At the heart of this paradox lies the ontology of law. From Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty, through Austin’s command theory, to Schmitt’s exceptionist decisionism, law has often been understood not as an autonomous system of norms but as an expression of political authority. International law is no exception: its efficacy depends less on intrinsic normativity than on the capacity of institutions and states to enforce compliance. When that capacity falters, law does not vanish but reveals its dependence on power.

Gramsci’s idea of passive revolution clarifies the mechanism. In liminal moments, transformations occur not to transcend existing relations but to stabilise them in new forms. International law does not dissolve in the face of violation; it recalibrates. Breaches are absorbed into evolving doctrines, expanded notions of self-defence, elastic invocations of humanitarian necessity that erode the non-intervention principle, or the paralysis of enforcement bodies that quietly ratifies faits accomplis. What appears as rupture is in fact re-articulation, securing continuity through adaptation. This understanding resists teleological accounts of progress. International law does not advance inexorably toward universality or emancipation. It oscillates between normativity and power, between invocation and erosion. The interregnum is thus not a temporary breakdown but the revelation of law’s dual character: normative in language, political in operation.

Iraq 2003: From Kosovo to the Normalisation of Violation

The 2003 invasion of Iraq is widely recognised as the moment when the foundations of the post-1945 international legal order were most decisively shaken. Yet the juridical genealogy of this rupture can be traced slightly earlier, to the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. Conducted without Security Council authorisation, the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was justified not in terms of legality but of legitimacy. The intervention was defended as a moral imperative to prevent humanitarian catastrophe, even though it lacked grounding in the UN Charter framework. The ensuing debates within the United Nations and the broader........

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