Editorial: Populism and International Law: Global South perspectives

Abstract

The rise of populist governments around the world has been a source of concern for international legal scholars. As a result, the field of international law witnesses a range of academic publications analyzing recent populist movements and their impact on international law as we know it. These analyses have focused on different areas of international law and their institutions, such as trade, environment, human rights, labor and migration. Across these different contexts, populism has been equated with authoritarianism, and a fundamental challenge to a liberal international legal order. Further, international law is often approached in a binary/antagonistic fashion, either as a tool to ban populist-driven policies or as an instrument to allow such policies to thrive, and states are seen as part of a binary of either populist and challengers to international law, or democratic and favoring liberal internationalism. This scholarship therefore, while valuable, tends to miss more nuanced accounts of co-production of domestic regime (il)legitimacy and international ordering as part of a continuum that does not fit “either/or” accounts.