International law and the challenge of populism

In the first two months of his second term, US President Donald Trump imposed or increased wide-ranging tariffs on imports from neighbours, allies and rivals, proposed using ‘economic force’ to annex Canada,1 stated that the US would take sovereignty over Greenland, threatened to use the military to resume control of the Panama canal, effectively called for the ethnic cleansing by way of the depopulation of Gaza and placing it directly under US control, announced the cessation of military support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion, and berated Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Oval Office before inferring within a week or so that recommencing support would be conditional on Ukraine accepting a US-brokered peace deal. Since then, the Trump administration’s position on Ukraine has continued to vacillate, and its new tariff policy has been expanded to cover all US trading partners, causing significant uncertainty in markets and supply chains. The US has bombed Iranian nuclear sites and continues to support the Israeli genocide in Gaza by supplying of weapons and providing diplomatic cover (as does the UK and Germany). Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreements (again), the Human Rights Council and the World Health Organisation and has cut 83 per cent of USAID foreign programmes.2 Both Elon Musk (early on a key figure within the second Trump administration) and Steve Bannon (a leading figure in the MAGA movement) have performed Hitler-style salutes at public events (Musk doing so at Trump’s inauguration). Meanwhile in his address to Congress on 4 March 2025, President Trump said that ‘it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency … is the most successful in the history of our nation … what makes it even more impressive is that, do you know who number two is, George Washington.’3 As the chaotic start of Trump’s second presidency demonstrates, writing about populism and its relationship to international law (even in relation to one country) is to take on a subject with constant and dramatic changes. The turbulence is not limited to the US. Even among those Western states whose power underwrote the institutional and rhetorical forms of the liberal international order, populist actors are disrupting politics inside and outside institutions. As at 15 August 2025, far-right populist parties led voter polls in Germany (Alternative for Germany), Britain (Reform UK) and France (National Rally), marking the first time such parties have led polls simultaneously in Europe’s three largest economies.4 Considered another way, right wing populist leaders (or parties) are either in power or have significant electoral support in three of the five permanent members of the Security Council—the exceptions being the authoritarian one-party states of Russia and China. The challenge to the existing, liberal (and neo-liberal) international order seems both extreme and urgent. It would seem to follow from this that it is both urgent and necessary to try to understand the nature of the populist challenge to international law. But how should this be done? Not only are circumstances constantly shifting, but the very forms and effects of populist politics are undergoing constant change. And in this flux, the international system is itself being re-made. Certainly, it is possible to articulate definitions of populism at high levels of abstraction—either encompassing or distinguishing between ‘right’ and ‘left’ variants.5 But once we define populism at such high levels of abstraction it becomes very difficult to accurately situate the nature and effects of their specific forms. Nor is it easy, or perhaps even possible, to distinguish the role that ‘populism’ plays from the role played by other elements of the present political, economic and social conjuncture, and the continuities it has with earlier forms of politics and international legal and institutional arrangements. Our approach in this symposium, and in the several workshops which led to it, has been to avoid the attempt to define both ‘populism’ and ‘international law’ as though they were stable categories, such that the challenge posed by the former to the latter could be analysed in a straightforward way. But at the same time, we do not deny the usefulness of thinking about different dimensions of the forces and forms that can loosely be grouped under the label ‘populism’ and how they relate to specific aspects within the field of international law. To avoid the word ‘populism’ because of its tendency to over-describe and under-determine would be also to miss something particular and significant about the contemporary situation. In particular, it would leave us ill-equipped to engage with much of the framing and elements of current events and debates. Accordingly, the approach of this symposium is to take specific examples or instances which illuminate different dimensions of the relationship between populism and international law. It is to deliberately adopt a methodology of incompleteness and contingency, where the task of the reader remains to draw out connections between these instances and then further out into the broader debates with which they are engaged. It is through the work of the reader that the symposium will play the role we intend for it—a contribution to the ongoing task of thinking through our contemporary predicament. The issue begins with Eve Darian-Smith’s short reflection on the relationship between international law and populist attacks on academic freedom—most recently exemplified by the suppression of pro-Palestine student activism by both governments and university administrators around the world. Darian-Smith locates this suppression within a ‘global attack on academic freedom’ and ‘critical thinking’ emerging out of the ‘rise of antidemocratic governance and a global drift towards authoritarianism since the 2010s’.6 Leading with the example of the pro-Palestine protests and the role of university administrators is telling because it shows that the problem of the assault on free enquiry now extends beyond right-wing extremists to include the centre-left and institutions typically thought to be part of the liberal ‘resistance’. In Darian-Smith’s account, international legal protections for academic freedom as they currently exist in human rights instruments are inadequate to respond to this challenge because of their piecemeal and individualistic character. They also place too much reliance for their protection on university administrators—exposing a fundamental weakness particularly when the sources of funding (both public and private) are the same as the sources of oppression. Seeking to draw lessons from traditions of anti-authoritarian struggle and new conceptions of academic freedom emerging in Latin America and the Global South more generally, Darian-Smith’s reflection focuses attention on the importance of developing collective, solidaristic conceptions of academic freedom both within and outside international human rights law which are transnational and cross-institutional. Jothie Rajah’s article takes on another ‘freedom’, that of religion, and investigates the role played by a certain right-wing populist conception of religious freedom in a peculiar genre of legislation in the US exemplified by the International Religious Freedom Act 1998 (IRFA). Rajah shows how this legislation simultaneously does the usual work of creating powers, obligations and governance mechanisms, while also performing a ‘melodramatic’ role in which it casts ‘foreign nations as evil’ and codes its own mission (and that of the US) as heroic.7 Central to both aspects is its international dimension—in particular the assertion of global jurisdiction in the name of human rights. The legislation works as much through its form as its content—giving voice to a range of political myths which now combine as key features of a variety of populisms within the US, including ‘American exceptionalism, Right/conservative and religious-Right populism, and post-Cold War evangelical populism.’8 Rajah traces how the IRFA weaves longstanding traditions of US politics from Wilson to Reagan, together with certain elements of international law, while carefully showing how they draw their power precisely from their irreducibility to the simple binaries offered up on the surface of their melodramatic formulations. Through the IRFA, populism is shown to be both a deeply rooted and deeply contradictory feature of US domestic politics and its international extraversion. Understanding the power of this legislative form and the contradictions it mobilises is revealed as an essential first step in responding to the challenges posed by populist politics and US imperialism. Connections between international legal concepts and right-wing populism are also explored by Sanja Dragić. Dragić analyses how fear of what were called ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Eastern Europe have produced a form of authoritarian backlash against civil society organisations which is now being taken up by populist governments across the world. Dragić shows how in the authoritarian-populist imaginary, civil society organisations are elitist agents of foreign influence which exist and operate to change legitimate governments and undermine the true interests of the people. This framing, she argues, is in part made possible by the way international legal instruments in the post-Cold War era conceived of civil society as primarily composed of Western-funded NGOs which occupied a space between the individual, the state and the market, and stabilised that relationship. Such NGOs were understood to perform both political and public service-delivery functions within Western countries, and to promote human rights, social movements and environmental protection elsewhere. Within this broad vision, international human rights law had a role to play in protecting the freedom of NGOs to source and apply that funding without undue interference from the governments of states in which they operated. Dragić shows how this structure of thinking about civil society is common to both international human rights law and right-wing populists, and, in particular, how the dependence of NGOs on foreign funding feeds into the narrative of foreign interference which authoritarian leaders use to crackdown on local political organisations. International opposition to the repression of civil society by authoritarian governments further plays into the rhetoric of those governments by relying entirely on the discourse and moral authority of human rights. Escaping this cycle depends, as so much else does, on revitalising and establishing different visions and forms of collective politics. A different vision of populism and of the relationship between states and civil society actors is the subject of Claerwen O’Hara and Valeria Vázquez Guevara’s article on the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). O’Hara and Vázquez Guevara detail the rise of ALBA as an international coalition operating within international fora and institutions and drawing on an explicitly left-wing populist, transnational set of rhetorical and political commitments. The authors explore the way that using a regional coalition of states to give effect to a transnational populism with internationalist ambitions in the name of the ‘people(s) of the earth’ gives rise to various contradictions and compromises. Nonetheless, for O’Hara and Vázquez Guevara, ‘ALBA shows how the adoption of a populist register can provide an alternative way of both belonging to, and resisting, the international legal order.’9 An important dimension of this was the explicit incorporation of local communities, organisations and social movements into its governance structure. As was (or is, if ALBA’s twilight existence continues) its vision to transform the rules of the international political economy and contribute towards the formation of an anti-imperial international law. For O’Hara and Vázquez Guevara, ALBA’s success is perhaps not best measured against how far it advanced its stated goals, but in the model it offers, and the chance it took, to create space and deploy tactics in service of a larger strategy to challenge the unequal and environmentally hazardous international status quo. Transnational populist coalitions operating within international organisations and fora are not just a feature of left populism, as Anthony Pahnke’s article demonstrates. Pahnke analyses how right-wing ‘pro-family’ organisations including Family Watch International (FWI), the International Organization of the Family (IOF) and the Center for the Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) create transnational networks and mobilise international institutions (including UN human rights fora) to promote their agendas. Countering the common perception of right-wing populists as ‘insular, nationalist, and antagonistic to international law and institutions’,10 Pahnke shows how the engagement of these groups with international law and institutions helps advance their activities and influence. Pahnke’s analysis provides one example of the mechanisms by which right-wing populism takes on its global character—not simply through the religious, ideological or personal alignments of populist leaders—but also through the work of groups and actors at all levels. That work simultaneously opposes and mobilises the language of international human rights law—seeking to insert right-wing concepts into international debates, drawing support and learning lessons from the experience of different groups in different countries, and accelerating their impact through antagonistic engagements with rivals and alignments with friendly institutions and groups (including broader right-wing media institutions). Pahnke’s article not only helps us understand the role international law and institutions play in facilitating right-wing populist politics, but also how the left can, as Stuart Hall argued, learn from the populist right’s ability to mobilise and transform liberal concepts and institutions. Stuart Hall’s work on authoritarian populism is a key focus of Richard Joyce and James Martel’s article, which draws out connections between populist politics in the US and UK and Karl Marx’s famous essay on the rise of Louis Napoleon in nineteenth century France. Joyce and Martel argue that Marx’s essay highlights an important dynamic between populist constituencies, populist leaders, the state and the market at a very early stage of capitalism’s modern development. In that dynamic, populist leaders develop and draw on populist constituencies’ anger at the impacts of capitalism, promising that by taking control of the state they will be able to discipline the market and effect redistribution. But as Marx shows, that promise is hollow, and the resulting dynamics work to centralise authority of the state and increase the power of the market. The article then draws on Stuart Hall’s account of Thatcherism, in which contradictory strands of free-market ideology and authoritarian governance were woven together to garner support from a disaffected working class for neoliberal reform. In its final section, the article explores the contemporary implications of a politics formed out of such contradictions now manifesting in the populist reactionary politics of Trump and Brexit. Joyce and Martel argue that even as that politics becomes increasingly volatile and apparently threatening to the international institutional and economic order and even to individual capitalist interests, this volatility continues to work towards the intensification of state and market power and, in turn, the disaffection that their failures to address popular concerns produce. In so doing, the authors suggest that we cannot expect the causes and effects of contemporary crises to produce their own solution. The symposium closes with an interview conducted by Richard Joyce and Sundhya Pahuja with leading Palestinian international law scholar Nahed Samour on the relationship between populism, international law, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Conducted in May 2024, just as the International Court of Justice issued the last of its series of provisional measures decisions in the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel) case, and updated shortly afterwards to take account of the same court’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem in July 2024, the interview reflects on the promises and dangers of reliance on international law in countering extreme violence—especially ongoing colonial violence, the role and responsibilities of international law scholars in times of crisis, and the role of reactionary populism in the actions taken by Israel and its supporters in the US, Germany and elsewhere. We have taken the editorial decision not to update the interview in the period since. It stands as an account of the conjuncture of the genocide, international law, and populism at that time. That the genocide continues more than a year after the interview was conducted, and that Samour’s insights continue to issue an urgent challenge, places renewed demands on our responsibility as scholars of international law, politics, and populism. The articles in this symposium were presented at a series of workshops funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant on ‘International Law and the Challenge of Populism’ (DP 200103469) between May and July 2023 in New York, San Francisco, London, and Melbourne. The collaborators on that project are Dr Richard Joyce, Professor Sundhya Pahuja, Professor Andrew Benjamin, Professor James Martel, and Dr Kojo Koram. Dr Rose Parfitt was instrumental in the initial design of the project and its early stages. Our thanks to Professor Vasuki Nesiah at the Gallatin School, New York University for her support of the New York workshop and to Professor Peter Goodrich for hosting the event at Cardozo Law School. Our thanks also to Dr Vidya Kumar for hosting the London workshop at SOAS, University of London, and to the Department of Political Science at San Franscisco State University and the Faculty of Law at Monash University for hosting the San Francisco and Melbourne workshops. The organisation of the events would not have been possible without the energy and dedication of Ms Elisabeth Lopez Desvars. We are grateful to all the presenters and participants in those workshops for their generous engagement with the papers and to the editors and referees at the London Review of International Law who have been patient and supportive in equal measure.

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