The influence of international law in a new international order

Abstract

This chapter seeks to find a correlation between the changes that the international order is undergoing and changes on the use -or disuse- of the international legal system. The main argument is that international law gained ground with the prevalence of a rules based order. Multilateralism was the grounds for finding solution to global problems, and international norms were designed with the goals to finding common grounds to solving international issues and maintaining peace and security. While this has not changed, and international norms are still an important part of how states relate with one another, today states seem to find it harder to agree on new instruments, and they do not want to be bound by new international obligations. As a result, states are turning to national law to resolve common international threats, or at least this has been the case with migration. The goal of the present chapter is to explore these changes between the development of the international legal system and the changes within the international order. In particular, these pages will set forth this parallelism in the field of security, providing a new vision of states deal with new security threats today.