Abstract:
The post-World War II Rules-Based International Order is confronting an existential stress test. This paper diagnoses four structural pathologies in international law: an enforcement gap rooted in consent-based jurisdiction; great-power exceptionalism normalised through P5 veto privilege; systemic double standards that corrode normative credibility; and exploitable grey zones enabled by deliberate legal ambiguity. These pathologies have collectively hollowed out the liberal international legal architecture from within. Institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have descended into procedural gridlock and legitimacy deficits. The author contends that the universal idea of the “Rule of Law” was never truly impartial. It has functioned as a sophisticated mode of legal engineering, in which powerful states deploy it as an instrument of political control rather than as an independent constraint on authority.
This normative fragmentation has created fertile ground for alternative legal governance paradigms. The paper examines the most consequential of these: China’s “Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law.” It argues that China’s challenge to the existing order is architectural in nature. One which is through a concerted set of legal mechanisms, including specially designed extraterritorial domestic legislation, standard-setting embedded in the Belt and Road Initiative, and systematic institutional capture within UN specialised agencies. China is actively projecting its “Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics” globally. In doing so, China is emerging as a norm builder, advancing a sovereignty-first, non-interference framework that is fundamentally at odds with the liberal human rights architecture these institutions were originally designed to uphold.
Against this backdrop, the paper foregrounds the structural underrepresentation of the Global South, as evidenced by disaggregated data on regional distribution within the International Law Commission, the International Criminal Court, and UN leadership bodies, among others. A democratic deficit that further erodes the order’s legitimacy. Nevertheless, the paper argues that the remedy lies not in dismantling the existing framework, but in reforming it from within. It advances targeted recommendations for institutional rebalancing across the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and allied multilateral bodies, contending that without such structural reform, the language of accountability that international law provides, however imperfectly applied, risks being permanently captured by those it was designed to constrain.