Context:

• Recurring conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and West Asia have revived an old debate: is international law losing its relevance?
• Critics point to the failure of international institutions to stop these wars as proof that legal norms no longer restrain state behaviour.
• This article argues that such a conclusion is premature, and that international law continues to function quietly even as headline conflicts suggest otherwise.

Why Wars Do Not Disprove International Law?

• Even states accused of violating international law rarely say the law itself is meaningless.
• Instead, they justify their actions using the very vocabulary of international law — the UN Charter, sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-defence and humanitarian law.
• This tendency to seek legal justification, rather than reject legality altogether, shows that the framework still commands authority.
• UN Secretary-General António Guterres captured this in July 2026 when he told the International Law Commission that international law is under pressure but will prevail.
• Scholars offered a useful explanation for this behaviour: states often comply with international law not out of fear of punishment, but because of the pull created by the treaty regimes they belong to.
  • Compliance is thus less about coercion and more about embedded expectations.

The Quiet, Unnoticed Successes

• Compliance rarely makes news, while violations dominate it. Yet ordinary international life depends on legal cooperation working smoothly:
  • Aircraft cross borders safely because of international aviation regulations;
  • Ships sail the seas under international maritime law;
  • Diplomacy, trade and travel function through thousands of routine legal obligations;
  • Individuals rely on international law daily — passports, consular assistance, air travel and refugee protection are all governed by it.
• Even amid conflict, states keep negotiating new multilateral agreements — the High Seas Treaty, pandemic preparedness efforts and the UN Convention against Cybercrime are recent examples of continued faith in a rules-based system.

Relevance for India and the Global South

• Peace itself is built through legal instruments — ceasefires, peace agreements and negotiated settlements all rest on legal commitments.
• India's Indus Waters Treaty shows that legal frameworks can sustain engagement between states even during political discord.
• For India and the wider Global South, international law matters because it offers smaller and developing states a way to protect their interests through negotiation rather than raw power.
• Shared global challenges — climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks and economic instability — cannot be solved unilaterally and require cooperation rooted in agreed rules.

Acknowledging the Flaws

• International law was never a perfect system. It has long coexisted with power politics and has been criticised for reflecting unequal structures, including the limitations of the UN Security Council.
• But imperfection is not the same as irrelevance — no legal system guarantees full compliance.
• Its real value lies in providing standards against which state conduct can be judged.
• Historically, crises have driven the adaptation of international law, not its collapse.

Conclusion

• International law is strained but not extinguished.
• Its true strength lies not in preventing every violation, but in remaining the shared language states use to justify, contest and eventually resolve their conduct — a framework still indispensable for a just, cooperative world order.