The Degradation of the International Legal Order?: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics

Drawing on a sophisticated and critical philosophical and political methodology, The Degradation of the International Legal Order? provides a diagnosis of the present impasse of international law and international relations since the Iraq invasion and occupation. International law found itself in a divided world prior to 1989, but those divisions have been transfigured in less than two decades. Bill Bowring traces the paradoxes of the simultaneous revival of liberal-Kantian conceptions of international law, the unexpected collapse of the USSR, and the rise of ethno-nationalism. The author argues for "revolutionary conservatism" - the radical defence of the real achievements of the UN system - and for a substantive account of human rights.