*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

The war in Ukraine has emerged as a focal point in the accelerating disintegration of the post-1945 international order. Far beyond a regional conflict, the war crystallises an intensifying tension between the normative architecture of international law and the strategic imperatives of global hegemony. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine — a manifest violation of the prohibition of the use of force and a breach of peremptory legal norms — marked a watershed moment in the erosion of normative constraint in international relations. As peace proposals are negotiated without the substantive participation of Ukraine, and as legal principles are selectively invoked or ignored, a critical question arises: does international law still possess the normative force to constrain power, or has it been reduced to a vocabulary of legitimation for the geopolitics of the strong?

Ukraine has become a paradigmatic illustration of how legal norms are increasingly instrumentalised within a shifting landscape of geopolitical realignment. What is frequently framed as a “crisis” in the international legal order is perhaps more accurately conceived not as a temporary breakdown or exceptional deviation from normative stability, but as a manifestation of enduring structural tensions at the heart of global governance — tensions between legality and strategic interest, formal commitments and uneven enforcement, the universalist promise of international norms and the asymmetries through which they are enacted. The language of crisis, often deployed to suggest a return to a prior normativity, obscures the deeper tensions within international rule of law: its simultaneous claim to universality and its subjection to asymmetrical power structures, its emancipatory aspirations and its use as a tool of justification for dominant interests. What is at stake is not merely the resolution of a particular conflict, but the viability of international legality as a mode of ordering power in a world increasingly defined by fragmentation.

This structural fragility becomes particularly evident in the case of Ukraine, where foundational principles of the post-war legal order—most notably the prohibition of the threat or use of force—have been strategically reinterpreted. Codified in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, this prohibition constitutes a peremptory norm universally recognised as binding and non-derogable. It was unequivocally violated by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022, marking........

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