Contemporary International Law ♦ Article 65 Va. J. Int’l L. 185 (2025)

International Law and the Rise of Populism

PETER G. DANCHIN, JEREMY FARRALL, JOLYON FORD, SHRUTI RANA & IMOGEN SAUNDERS

Contemporary legal scholarship seeks to diagnose populist antagonism towards national and international law and warn about the challenges it poses to the cooperation needed to respond to global threats. What this scholarship overlooks, however, is the role that major shifts in international legal normativity and conceptions of global governance have themselves played in incubating the conditions for the rise of populism. Against the prevailing literature, this Article argues that the key to unlocking this puzzle is recognition that populism, rather than constituting an external social pathology, is a mode of politics arising internal to the intellectual history and practice of liberal constitutional democracy. The Article argues that populism is grounded in an account of political authority and legal normativity that stands in deep tension with an opposing account of law as immanent moral order and which understands legal normativity not ultimately as a matter of sovereign will but of universal reason.