Episode 41: Reading Recommendations

In a matter of months, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has faced its prosecutor's removal for serious misconduct; Chad, Venezuela and Naoero (transcript of address to General Assembly cf written statement) announcing their intention to withdraw from it; and the United States publicly committing to use all means to ‘dismantle’ the ICC ‘brick by brick, if necessary’, referring to the court as a ‘rogue institution’. On 9 October 2026, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court as an institution. In this episode, Leena Grover (Chair of Public International Law, University of St Gallen) explores how the ICC and other courts, states, and civil society can meet this moment and brace for the future. The episode draws together exchanges recorded separately with Ambassador Christian Wenaweser (former President of the Assembly of States Parties to the ICC, 2008–2011); and with Larissa van den Herik (Leiden University) and Asad Kiyani (University of Victoria). For links to materials and readings relevant to the discussion, visit https://www.ejiltalk.org/ejil-the-podcast-page/.

The number and extent of today’s armed conflicts, and the crisis of compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL), are well-recognized. In his annual report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, the UN Secretary-General has underscored how “[i]nconsistent standards, assertions of exceptional circumstances and hollow calls for compliance [have] undermined respect for international humanitarian law”. Similarly, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has acknowledged that the problem is not only about a lack of compliance, but active disregard for IHL. At the same time, the ICRC has recently come to the end of a long cycle of work revising its commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which sets out key protections for civilians in armed conflict and under occupation. This episode focuses today on what feels like a stark gulf between the intricate work on the commentary – looking closely at individual articles of a 75-year-old Convention – and the larger sense of a growing and highly complex crisis of compliance in IHL.Joining us for this episode are three experts in IHL: Marnie Lloydd (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington), Abhimanyu George Jain (ICRC), and Yousuf Syed Khan (Legal Action Worldwide).For additional relevant materials, please see the EJIL:Talk! blog post announcing this episode or the landing page of EJIL: The Podcast.

The international nuclear realm is under severe strain. Since the 1960s, the international community has constructed a dense web of laws to govern nuclear matters. However, over the past decade, a wave of nuclear weapons activity has sparked concerns that we have entered a new nuclear age. This episode takes a hard look at the international legal issues surrounding this instability in the international nuclear order: whether the network of laws addressing nuclear non-proliferation, control and disarmament is capable of responding to the current challenges, as well as the possibility that it may itself be contributing to the dynamics unfolding in this new nuclear era. Anna Hood (Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland) is joined by Dan Joyner(University of Alabama) and Annelise Riles (Northwestern University).For links to events, materials and institutional mechanisms touched on in the discussion, visit https://www.ejiltalk.org/ejil-the-podcast-page/

The war in the Middle East has plunged the world into yet another crisis. Days are paced by minute-by-minute updates: at first, tragic reports of civilian deaths and incendiary threats from US President Donald Trump, now fragile peace negotiations between the United States and Iran. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has spiked oil prices and placed strategic energy chokepoints at the centre of international debate. But beyond the immediacy of events, this moment offers a window onto something deeper: the international political economy that both shapes this conflict and is reshaped by it. This episode of EJIL: The Podcast! takes the recent energy crisis triggered by the war in the Middle East as its point of departure, zooming in on how international law organises the global energy economy at the centre of this war and zooming out to ask what role it plays in the deeper structural shift now underway. From the old geopolitics of oil and gas, this episode traces a path to a new geopolitics of energy — and perhaps, as one of our guests puts it, from climate law to international energy law.In this episode, Justina Uriburu (University of Manchester) is joined by Jorge Viñuales (Harold Samuel Chair of Law and Environmental Policy at the University of Cambridge) and Sergio Puig (Chair in International Economic Law at the European University Institute and Evo DeConcini Professor of Law at the University of Arizona).

The situation in Sudan is often described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Going by the numbers, it could well be more than 150,000 people have died. More than 12 million people have been displaced. More than 21 million people are in a situation of acute food insecurity. But this framing of a humanitarian crisis, or worse, a humanitarian tragedy, seems to deplete the situation of agency, as if the situation is unfortunate, collateral damage of something that is inevitable. This framing stands in contrast to that of other situations of intense violence, for instance, Ukraine, Palestine, Myanmar and Iran, which are increasingly discussed not merely in terms of the humanitarian situation, but also in the language of international law, self determination, aggression, genocide. What does international law have to say about the situation in Sudan and how could it be used to halt the violence and promote justice, broadly defined? What role is there for the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice, African Union, local courts or other institutions? How should we think about tensions between peace and justice, after decades of neither? Sarah Nouwen is joined by Kholood Khair (Confluence Advisory, formerly based in Khartoum), Mohaned Elnour (Sudanese human rights lawyer in exile) and Ambassador Namira Negm (Director of the African Migration Observatory). For links to events, materials and institutional mechanisms touched on in the discussion, visit https://www.ejiltalk.org/ejil-the-podcast-page/.

One feature of the turn to history in international law has been the adoption of ‘national’ traditions (here using ‘national’ very loosely) as a lens through which to explore a broader picture. This focus on national traditions has converged with rich work styled as comparative international law, exploring how international law operates as a fragile common language even as governments deploy its grammar and vocabulary in quite different ways. In this episode we take up the question of whether there is a distinctive Russian approach to or use of international law. This takes us to reflections on the terrain from which we judge this, particularly today. What are the comparators and from which perspective are we taking a view? It also takes us to the stakes of thinking in terms of these long-range continuities in national legal styles in the first place. How does that shape our perspective on the broader system and how it might develop in future? Megan Donaldson is joined by Lauri Mälksoo (University of Tartu), Erika de Wet (University of Graz) and the political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (Director of the Russia Institute, King’s College London).Scholarship discussed in the episode includes Lauri Mälksoo’s recent book, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Imperial Continuity in International Law (2025); and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity (2020) and The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus (2023). Erika de Wet expands on themes in ‘Is the future for collective security regional? Assessing current challenges to regional and sub-regional security frameworks in Africa’, forthcoming Japanese Yearbook of International Law (2026).

Panelists Michelle Ratton Sanchez and Nicolás M. Perrone share reading recommendations on some of the themes in Ep 41: Thinking through Rupture in International Economic Law: Views from Latin America

In January 2026, the Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney gave a widely noted speech at the World Economic Forum, in which he described the current period we're living through as a rupture in the world order. How should we be thinking about rupture – and continuity – in relation to the contemporary international economic order? What is happening to international law, the purposes to which it is being put, its centrality as a technology of governing over distance, its status as a carrier for aspirations to multilateralism and universalism? Are we in fact living through a period of rupture or merely the loss of faith of a hegemon in its own international legal tools? This episode tackles these questions, and more, focussing particularly on how Latin America is experiencing and reacting to this moment of crisis – or, perhaps, of opportunity. Andrew Lang (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) is joined by Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin (FGV Sao Paulo School of Law, Brazil) and Nicolás M. Perrone (Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile). For more on the scholarship and reading recommendations of panelists, see accompanying post on EJIL:Talk!.

Palestine and the Palestinians are often the subjects of conversations in the news, on blogs and in judicial opinions, but not present in conversations themselves. The issues are treated episodically in connection with dramatic events or judicial processes or UN resolutions, and these can entrench an atomization of attention into the atrocities committed in the Israeli-occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, restrict visibility of historical continuities and miss more gradual and pervasive developments. One difficulty with international courts, which have been particularly prominent recently, is that the proceedings are long and often so far removed from the people they affect that they can miss complex human dimensions. Discussions about sovereignty, statehood, security, borders, violations of conventions and the interpretation of UN resolutions might not capture what is happening on the ground. Each of these areas could fill a podcast in its own right, but this episode tries to bring out a sense of the range of legal questions concerning the past, present and future of Palestine. Victor Kattan (Nottingham; also adviser to Britain Owes Palestine campaign) is joined by Mona Rishmawi (inter alia, visiting professor at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights) and Sonia Boulos (Antonio de Nebrija University, Spain). For materials referred to, see EJIL:Talk!

In this episode, Philippa Webb and Marko Milanovic are joined by Nicolas Angelet and Oona Hathaway to discuss the legality of the US strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the additional threats made by the United States against Venezuela, which include a possible land invasion. The hosts and their guests then turn to the recent UNRWA advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, discussing some of the interesting questions that it raises, including the inviolability of UN premises during armed conflict. In doing so, they also reflect on the downward spiral of the international legal order.