Is international law truly ‘law’?

In recent years, the legitimacy of international law as a licit system has become a matter of profound scholarly interrogation and diplomatic preoccupation. This inquiry transcends the merely semantic or pedantic; instead, it excavates the very architecture of global order, shaping how nations comport themselves, how disputes are adjudicated, and how justice, stability, and predictability may be sustained across an ever-interdependent planet.

This is underscored by contemporary crises such as the genocide in Gaza and the Indus Water Treaty, both cases illustrating how international law functions as a stabilising framework and normative guidance even in contexts characterised by stark power asymmetries and conflict.

The fact is rather straightforward: international law is not contingent upon flawless compliance, but rather emerges from the interplay of institutional coherence, collective recognition, and structured mechanisms of accountability.

Critics, particularly those beholden to English legal theorist John Austin’s Command Theory of Law, argue that international law cannot properly be considered law. Their charge is beguilingly simple: states flout their obligations with disconcerting regularity, and enforcement mechanisms appear weak, inconsistent, or entirely spectral.

In Austin’s schema, law is nothing more than a sovereign’s command buttressed by tangible sanctions. Remove coercive force, and law dissolves into wistful aspiration. Viewed through this tapered prism, international law becomes a mere compendium of norms, perennially hostage to the oscillations of national self-interest, geopolitical realpolitik, and the caprices of power.

Such critiques, though intellectually stimulating, crumble under more rigorous scrutiny. Two rebuttals prove decisive. First, the illusion of perfect compliance is a profoundly flawed metric for assessing legal validity because even the most sophisticated domestic legal systems are replete with breaches, infractions, and unresolved disputes that do not, for a moment, impugn the legitimacy of the law itself. If obedience were the lodestar of legal existence, few, if any, legal orders would endure.

Second, Austinian critics import criteria appropriate to hierarchical, coercive domestic structures into the unique, horizontal, and consensual realm of international relations. International law operates among sovereign equals who recognise no global Leviathan. To judge it by domestic parameters is to commit a categorical error. The legitimacy of any legal system inheres not in immaculate obedience but in the presence of an internally coherent constellation of norms, institutions, and authoritative procedures.

British legal professional and philosopher H. L. A. Hart, in his seminal work The Concept of Law, provides the most illuminating framework for apprehending this legitimacy. He repudiated the reduction of law to crude coercion and conceived law as an intricate tapestry woven from primary and secondary rules. Primary rules impose duties and confer powers, guiding conduct and maintaining social order. They exhibit three characteristics: engender an insistent demand for conformity, be indispensable to the maintenance of societal life, and require individuals or states to subordinate parochial preferences to collective imperatives.

Secondary rules imbue a legal system with coherence, adaptability, and authority. The Rule of Recognition furnishes the criteria of legal validity. The

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