Executive Summary
Contemporary debates on the use of force are too often framed around the wrong question: what does international law say, and who violated it? While legally relevant, this framing offers only a surface-level diagnosis. Violations are not evidence of the absence of law; rather, they are an expected possibility within any legal order. The more analytically useful questions concern how and why international law works, under what political conditions it succeeds, when it fails, and what kinds of order it actually produces.
This policy brief advances the argument that the so-called “rule-based international order” in the field of the use of force has never existed as a fully coherent and enforceable legal order in the supranational sense. Instead, the legal framework has always evolved through a dynamic interaction between law as an ideal and law as application, mediated by political authority, institutional design, and power asymmetries. Rather than collapsing, the system is undergoing a process of transformation that reflects the way it was historically constructed.
The brief develops a spectrum-based framework that conceptualizes applicable international law in three forms: permission, regulation, and restriction. This framework helps explain why the prohibition on the unilateral use of force appears simultaneously robust in principle and fragile in practice. The UN Charter system represents the strongest attempt to move the use of force from a permissive to a restrictive legal space. Yet built-in exceptions, especially self-defense and Security Council paralysis, repeatedly reopen spaces of permission that states exploit through legal justification, pretext, and strategic reinterpretation.
Using cases including Iraq (1990–91), Kosovo (1999), Libya (2011), post-9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq, Israeli preemptive strike doctrines, Turkish operations in Syria, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the brief demonstrates that contemporary controversies do not signal the death of law. They reveal the persistent political conditions under which law oscillates between restriction and permission.
The policy implication is clear: strengthening the legal framework on the use of force requires less rhetorical attachment to an imagined rule-based order and more institutional attention to decision-making bottlenecks, accountability gaps, and the abuse of justificatory doctrines.
Introduction
A recurring puzzle in contemporary international affairs is why the rules governing the use of force—particularly the prohibition of unilateral force—appear unable to prevent repeated crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and elsewhere. Public and academic debates often respond with familiar questions: What does international law prescribe? Who violated which rule? What sanctions follow?
These are understandable questions, but they are not the most analytically productive ones. They assume that the primary function of international law is to prevent violations through immediate compliance and sanction. When violations occur repeatedly, the superficial conclusion is that there is either no meaningful international law in this field or that law merely serves the interests of the powerful.
This policy brief rejects both conclusions. The more appropriate inquiry is functional and political: under what circumstances does international law on the use of force work, why does it work in some contexts, why does it fail in others, and what kinds of political and institutional arrangements determine these outcomes? Once these questions are asked, the focus shifts from legal text alone to the interplay between law, power, institutions, legitimacy, and enforcement.
The core claim defended here is that the field of the use of force has never been governed by a genuine rule-based order in the strong sense associated with supranational authority. Instead, it is governed by a hybrid legal-political architecture that continuously shifts among permission, regulation, and restriction. The apparent failures of the system are therefore better understood as manifestations of its design features rather than evidence of its disappearance.
International Law as an Ideal and as Application
A central conceptual distinction is necessary at the outset: international law may be understood both as an ideal and as an application, and the analytical failure to separate these two dimensions often lies at the heart of confusion in contemporary debates on the use of force. As an ideal, international law refers to the normative imagination of global order—the realm of principles, moral aspirations, doctrinal refinement, and scholarly innovation through which legal possibility is first conceived. It is in this form that jurists, philosophers, epistemic communities, and norm entrepreneurs articulate what international society ought to become. As an application, however, international law refers to the translation of those aspirations into institutional practice, state consent, procedural mechanisms, and enforceable standards that operate within the constraints of political authority. The distance between these two forms is not a sign of weakness but a constitutive feature of how international law evolves: ideals generate direction, while application subjects those ideals to bargaining, institutional design, and power realities. Any serious assessment of the legal framework on the use of force must therefore begin by recognizing that the normative ambition of law and its political operationalization are distinct yet constantly interacting layers of the same legal order.
International Law as an Ideal
As an ideal, international law signifies far more than the positive rules currently recognized by states; it embodies the normative, intellectual, and aspirational horizon of global legal order. In this dimension, law exists first as a project of imagination, critique, and moral reasoning before it is translated into institutional practice. Its formative sources are therefore not limited to treaty negotiations or state consent, but extend to scholarly interventions, judicial interpretation, transnational advocacy networks, epistemic communities, civil society mobilization, and the work of norm entrepreneurs who articulate new legal possibilities in response to emerging forms of violence, injustice, or political transformation. Within this idealized register, international law functions as a vocabulary through which the international community imagines what global order ought to look like, rather than merely describing what it presently is.
A significant number of the most transformative developments in the history of international law first appeared in precisely this ideal form, often long before they received formal political endorsement. The progressive refinement of international humanitarian law, for example, emerged through sustained moral and legal reflection on the limits of violence and the protection of non-combatants, gradually evolving from customary restraints and doctrinal debates into codified treaty obligations. Similarly, the recognition and eventual codification of genocide as an autonomous international crime began as an intellectual and ethical response to the inadequacy of existing legal categories to capture the destruction of protected human groups, illustrating how conceptual innovation often precedes institutional acceptance. The global movement toward banning anti-personnel landmines followed a comparable trajectory: what began as a humanitarian and advocacy-driven normative campaign ultimately reshaped state preferences and crystallized into binding legal commitments. The establishment of the International Criminal Court likewise reflects the transformation of a longstanding normative aspiration—the idea that individuals, including state leaders, should be held criminally accountable for atrocity crimes—into a permanent institutional architecture. More recently, the doctrine of the responsibility to protect demonstrates how international legal thought can seek to reconcile sovereignty with the imperative of human protection, first as a moral proposition and later as an emerging normative framework within multilateral diplomacy.
Seen from this perspective, international law begins not as an immediately operational framework but as a normative project that contests existing political realities and proposes alternative standards of legitimacy. Its ideal dimension thus performs a constitutive role: it generates the concepts, moral vocabularies, and legal imaginations that may later inform formal rules, institutions, and enforcement mechanisms. This is why the ideal and the applied dimensions of international law should not be understood as separate realms, but rather as successive stages within a broader process of norm evolution, where legal ideas are first conceived, debated, and legitimized before entering the domain of practical governance.
International Law as Application
The second form through which international law should be understood is law as application, namely the stage at which normative aspirations are translated into institutionalized rules, procedures, interpretive doctrines, and decision-making practices capable of guiding conduct in the real world. If law as ideal represents the imaginative and normative horizon of global order, law as application constitutes its entry into the realm of governance, where abstract principles must be rendered administrable, interpretable, and enforceable. At this point, legal ideas are no longer sustained merely by moral force or scholarly persuasion; they are embedded within organizations, codified through formal instruments, and operationalized by bureaucratic, judicial, and diplomatic processes. Institutions such as the International Law Commission, the United Nations, regional organizations, treaty bodies, arbitral mechanisms, and international or hybrid courts play a central role in this transformation by converting normative projects into applicable legal standards that can regulate state conduct, structure expectations, and provide frameworks for adjudication.
This stage is where politics becomes decisive in an especially visible way. While the intellectual architecture of legal norms may originate in scholarship, judicial innovation, or transnational advocacy, their life as operative law depends on actors endowed with political authority—above all, states. States decide whether to consent to treaty obligations, how to transpose international commitments into domestic legal systems, which interpretive pathways to privilege, and under what circumstances implementation may be delayed, narrowed, or strategically resisted. Even where norms appear formally settled, their meaning is often continuously renegotiated through state practice, diplomatic contestation, reservations, selective compliance, and institutional bargaining. As a result, the application of international law cannot be separated from the distribution of power, the logic of strategic interests, and the broader structures of legitimacy within which legal institutions function. In this sense, implementation and enforcement are not merely technical phases following legal creation; they are themselves deeply political arenas in which the content and reach of law are often redefined.
This distinction between law as ideal and law as application is analytically significant because many contemporary critiques of international law collapse the two dimensions into one and thereby misdiagnose the nature of legal weakness. A frequent tendency in both scholarly and policy debates is to assess the practical performance of international legal institutions against the highest moral aspirations embedded in the ideal form of law. When actual outcomes fall short—as they often do in contexts of war, atrocity, occupation, or geopolitical rivalry—the resulting discrepancy is interpreted as evidence of legal failure, hypocrisy, or even systemic collapse. Yet such conclusions often overlook the structural reality that the transition from normative ambition to applied governance necessarily involves mediation through political feasibility, institutional design, and uneven state commitment.
The gap between the two forms, therefore, should not be read as proof of the breakdown of international law. Rather, it reflects the constitutive tension between normative ambition and political possibility, a tension that has accompanied international law throughout its historical evolution. The very existence of this gap is, paradoxically, evidence that law retains an aspirational surplus beyond immediate politics: it continues to articulate standards that exceed current power realities while simultaneously seeking channels for institutional realization. Understanding this dynamic is essential for resisting overly declinist narratives that mistake implementation deficits for legal irrelevance. International law’s resilience lies precisely in its ability to move continuously between ideal and application, preserving normative direction even when political realization remains partial, contested, or delayed.
The Spectrum: International Law as Permission, Regulation, and Restriction
Before examining the concrete forms through which international law operates in practice, it is necessary to situate the relationship between law and politics along a broader analytical spectrum. This spectrum captures the varying degrees to which legal norms are either enabled or constrained by political authority. At one extreme lies absolute anarchy, a condition in which no effective political authority exists to sustain common rules, coordinate expectations, or enforce compliance, leaving law vulnerable to fragmentation and lawlessness. At the opposite extreme stands omnipotent political power, where authority becomes so dominant that it absorbs the autonomy of law itself, reducing legal norms to mere instruments of power and leaving little meaningful room for law to discipline or constrain conduct. The practical life of international law unfolds not at either pole, but within the broad and contested space between them. It is within this intermediate terrain—where normative commitments interact with political interests, institutional capacities, and struggles over legitimacy—that applicable international law assumes three distinct forms, each reflecting a different configuration of legal authority and political power.
Applicable International Law as Permission
The first and politically widest form of applicable international law may be understood as law as permission. This refers to the broad legal and political space in which conduct is not expressly prohibited, not authoritatively clarified, or not effectively supervised by institutional mechanisms. In such contexts, the absence of a clear legal restriction does not produce neutrality; rather, it creates a permissive field in which political actors can transform uncertainty into justification. What remains under-regulated becomes politically usable and, in turn, legally defensible through interpretation, doctrinal extension, or strategic framing. The operative logic here is not that the conduct is unquestionably lawful, but that the legal order leaves sufficient ambiguity for states to present their actions as compatible with the system’s foundational rules.
In the historical evolution of the use-of-force regime, this permissive space was once considerably wider. Under the classical sovereignty model that prevailed before the consolidation of the modern Charter framework, war itself remained largely within the discretionary authority of sovereign states. The recourse to force was treated as an accepted instrument of statecraft, with law focusing more on the formalities of declaration and conduct than on prohibition as such. In that sense, classical international law contained a vast sphere of legal permission surrounding war-making authority. The post-1945 order dramatically narrowed this field through Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and the collective security architecture, yet the permissive logic has not disappeared. Instead, it has re-emerged in more sophisticated form whenever states exploit textual ambiguity, institutional paralysis, doctrinal contestation, or exceptionalist interpretations of self-defense and humanitarian necessity.
Contemporary examples illustrate how this permissive space functions. The 1999 Kosovo intervention is perhaps the most frequently cited case: lacking explicit Security Council authorization, NATO states justified the operation through an emerging humanitarian rationale that was neither clearly accepted nor definitively prohibited by the existing framework. The legal ambiguity surrounding unilateral humanitarian intervention created a zone of arguable permissibility in which force could be defended as exceptional rather than unlawful. Similarly, post-2014 uses of force in Syria by several states relied on expansive readings of collective self-defence against non-state actors operating across borders, especially where the territorial state was described as “unable or unwilling” to address the threat itself. Because this doctrine remains contested rather than authoritatively settled, it exemplifies how ambiguity sustains a legally permissive environment for unilateral force.
This form is analytically crucial because it helps explain one of the defining paradoxes of the contemporary international order: states continue to justify unilateral force while simultaneously affirming fidelity to the Charter system. They do not usually reject the legal order outright; instead, they act through its interpretive margins. Law as permission therefore reveals how legal ambiguity can itself become a resource of power. Rather than operating outside law, states frequently operate through the zones where law is silent, indeterminate, or politically unenforceable. This is precisely why the persistence of unilateral force should not always be read as evidence of legal breakdown. In many cases, it reflects the enduring existence of a permissive legal space within applicable international law—one that allows political actors to convert uncertainty into legitimacy claims while preserving formal allegiance to the normative structure of the system.
Applicable International Law as Regulation
Regulation occupies the middle ground between permissibility and prohibition. Unlike legal prohibition, which seeks to foreclose conduct through explicit restriction, regulation does not necessarily deny action outright. Instead, it introduces shared expectations, recognized procedures, and institutionalized practices that shape how conduct is carried out, justified, reviewed, and contested. The effect is not to eliminate political discretion but to channel it through normative and procedural frameworks that make state behavior intelligible to others. In this sense, regulation does not remove power politics from international relations; rather, it socializes power within an environment of recognized rules, expectations, and forums of accountability.
At this level, the international system moves beyond the image of a purely anarchic order composed of formally equal but otherwise unconstrained sovereigns. It begins to resemble an international society, in the classical sense, where sovereignty remains central but is embedded within practices of diplomacy, custom, and institutional interaction. Sovereignty here is not diminished so much as rendered relational: states retain autonomy, yet they are expected to exercise that autonomy through procedures that acknowledge the presence, interests, and judgments of others. Diplomatic engagement, for example, becomes not merely a political convenience but a regulatory expectation that frames how crises are communicated, escalated, or de-escalated. Similarly, customary norms provide patterned expectations even where treaty law is silent, allowing repeated practice and opinio juris to generate a stabilizing effect without imposing categorical bans.
The most significant dimension of this regulatory space, however, lies in global governance. This is where international law functions not simply as a set of rules but as an architecture of coordinated decision-making, oversight, and legitimation. Global governance broadens regulation beyond state-to-state interaction by involving international organizations, specialized agencies, monitoring bodies, regional institutions, and sometimes even non-state actors in the management of international order. The importance of this layer is that it transforms law into an ongoing process of administration and collective management. Rather than asking only whether conduct is lawful in the abstract, global governance asks through what procedures decisions are made, who is authorized to participate, what standards of review apply, and how legitimacy is publicly constructed.
This is especially visible in the use-of-force regime, where the United Nations system exemplifies law as regulation. Security Council authorization under Chapter VII does not always operate as a strict prohibition-exception model; rather, it often functions as a regulatory mechanism that organizes collective expectations around the legitimate use of force. The Council’s resolutions create procedures for threat assessment, burden-sharing, reporting obligations, temporal limitations, and post-intervention mandates. Even when consensus is politically difficult, the very requirement that states seek authorization, present evidence, negotiate language, and justify objectives demonstrates the regulatory logic at work. The system thus disciplines unilateral impulses by relocating questions of force into a governance framework centered on deliberation and institutional endorsement.
A useful example is the 1991 Gulf War, where the use of force against Iraq was not merely “allowed” but was embedded within a collective security process involving Security Council resolutions, coalition mandates, and reporting structures. The legitimacy of the operation derived not only from its legal basis but from the fact that it was processed through the institutions of global governance. More contemporary examples include Council-authorized missions in Libya in 2011 or multinational anti-piracy operations off the Horn of Africa, where force was regulated through mandates, scope limitations, and periodic review. In each case, the legal significance lies less in absolute permission than in the procedural and institutional frameworks that rendered force governable.
This regulatory sphere also gives rise to procedural legitimacy, which is increasingly central to contemporary international law. States today often seek legitimacy not solely by invoking substantive legal rules but by demonstrating compliance with accepted procedures: consultation with allies, notification to international bodies, publication of legal justifications, or participation in multilateral deliberation. Such practices matter because they signal conformity with the norms of international society even when substantive agreement remains contested. In this sense, procedural legitimacy has become one of the most powerful currencies of global governance, often shaping how actions are judged politically and legally long after the event itself.
Accordingly, law as regulation should be understood as the sphere in which international legality operates through management rather than outright denial. It is the space where sovereignty is preserved but organized, where diplomacy and custom translate power into predictable interaction, and where global governance institutions convert dispersed authority into collective oversight. Especially in the use-of-force field, this mode of legality reveals that international law often works less by forbidding action than by governing the conditions under which action becomes acceptable, reviewable, and institutionally legitimate.
Applicable International Law as Restriction
Restriction represents the strongest and most authoritative form of international legality. If permission marks the sphere of political usability and regulation structures conduct through procedures, restriction is the point at which law speaks in the clearest prohibitive voice. Here, norms do not merely guide or channel behavior; they define boundaries that actors are expected not to cross. Conduct is either expressly prohibited or tightly limited, and the expectation of compliance is correspondingly much stronger. Most importantly, breaches are not left entirely to political improvisation. Even where enforcement remains uneven, the institutional and normative consequences of violation are at least predefined, allowing the international community to identify transgression in legally intelligible terms. In this sense, restriction is where international law most closely approximates the classic domestic image of law as constraint.
The clearest illustration in the use-of-force regime is the prohibition on the unilateral threat or use of force contained in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which requires all members to refrain from force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. This provision remains the cornerstone of the post-1945 legal order because it transforms war from a historically available sovereign prerogative into an exceptionally limited legal possibility. Unlike the older international system in which war could function as an accepted instrument of policy, the Charter framework begins from the opposite presumption: force is unlawful unless it falls within a recognized exception, most notably self-defense or Security Council authorization. Restriction therefore reverses the classical logic of sovereignty by making abstention from force—not freedom to use it—the baseline norm.
Yet the analytical significance of restriction lies not only in the clarity of the rule but in the global governance structures that sustain its authority. Restrictive norms are strongest when they are embedded within supervisory institutions capable of defining breaches, coordinating responses, and preserving the credibility of the rule over time. This is where global governance becomes indispensable. The prohibition in Article 2(4) derives much of its practical force from the broader United Nations architecture: the Security Council’s authority to determine threats to peace, the General Assembly’s role in normative consolidation, the International Court of Justice’s interpretive jurisprudence, sanctions committees, fact-finding bodies, and regional organizations that reinforce collective expectations. Restriction, in other words, is never simply a textual prohibition; it is a governance ecosystem that translates legal clarity into institutional consequence.
This institutional dimension is crucial because restrictive law remains deeply dependent on political conditions. The existence of a strong rule does not automatically produce strong compliance. Restriction is most effective where supervisory institutions are representative enough to command broad acceptance, legitimate enough to generate voluntary compliance, and capable enough to respond to violations in a timely and coherent manner. Where these elements are absent, even the clearest prohibitions may erode into selective application. The legal norm remains formally intact, but its practical authority becomes contingent on the willingness and capacity of institutions to react.
The Security Council offers a powerful example of both the strength and fragility of restriction. On the one hand, it gives the prohibition on force a collective enforcement mechanism through sanctions, peace enforcement mandates, and determinations of aggression. On the other hand, when geopolitical divisions among permanent members prevent action, the restrictive norm can remain legally clear while institutionally weakened. The 2003 Iraq War is especially instructive in this regard. The legal controversy surrounding the absence of clear Security Council authorization did not diminish the strength of Article 2(4) as a restrictive norm; rather, it demonstrated how even the strongest legal rules depend on institutional legitimacy and political cohesion within global governance bodies for their practical force. The breach was legible as a legal problem precisely because the restrictive framework was so clear, yet the inability of supervisory institutions to respond decisively revealed the conditional nature of enforcement.
A similar point can be made in relation to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where the legal prohibition was unequivocal, and institutional reactions—General Assembly resolutions, sanctions regimes, proceedings before the International Court of Justice, and coordinated responses by regional bodies—illustrated the continued vitality of restrictive law even under severe geopolitical stress. What this example shows is that global governance can partially compensate for paralysis in one institution by redistributing supervisory functions across multiple sites of authority. Restriction therefore survives not only through singular enforcement organs but through a pluralized governance network of legal, diplomatic, judicial, and economic responses.
Procedural legitimacy remains central here as well, though in a different form than under regulation. In the restrictive sphere, legitimacy derives from the credibility of breach determination and response mechanisms. The more representative and procedurally fair the institutions of supervision appear, the more authoritative the restrictive norm becomes. Conversely, selective enforcement can undermine even the clearest prohibition by making legal restraint appear contingent on power rather than principle.
Accordingly, applicable international law as restriction should be understood as the point at which legality most fully aspires to constraint through prohibition backed by governance capacity. It is the strongest legal form not simply because it says “no,” but because it links that prohibition to an institutional order designed to identify, process, and respond to violations. In the use-of-force field especially, the durability of restrictive law depends on the quality of global governance: the representativeness of institutions, the legitimacy of their procedures, and their ability to transform normative clarity into collective reaction. The stronger these governance mechanisms are, the more effective restriction becomes as the highest form of international legal authority.
Understanding the Myth of the Rule-Based International Order
The phrase “rule-based international order” has acquired enormous rhetorical and analytical prominence in contemporary diplomatic, legal, and scholarly discourse. Yet its explanatory value depends fundamentally on how the notion of order is understood. In debates surrounding the use of force, the term is frequently employed in descriptive, normative, and aspirational senses simultaneously, with insufficient attention to the distinction between what the legal system prescribes, what institutions can operationalize, and what political actors are willing to sustain in practice. This conceptual slippage often produces inflated expectations about the nature of international legality and, consequently, distorted judgments about its failures.
The preceding discussion has suggested that international law operates through a movement from ideal to application, and that once in application it assumes varying forms across a spectrum shaped by the relationship between law and political authority. Within that spectrum, the most robust expression of applicable law is restriction, where conduct is clearly limited, supervisory expectations are institutionally articulated, and reactions to breach are at least normatively specified. It is precisely through reference to the varying outcomes of applicable law—and most importantly to this restrictive form—that the contemporary discourse on the so-called rule-based international order can be more accurately understood.
A recurring misunderstanding in both policy and academic communities is the tendency to interpret every major violation of the use-of-force regime as proof that the international order is either collapsing or was never meaningful to begin with. Such conclusions rest on an assumption that a genuine legal order must resemble a centralized domestic system characterized by automatic enforcement and uniform coercive capacity. Yet the legal framework governing force has never functioned in this manner. Its structure has always been layered, uneven, and politically mediated, deriving its authority less from centralized compulsion than from norm density, institutional routinization, justificatory discourse, and the delegitimization of openly unlawful force.
For this reason, the idea of a rule-based international order is best treated not as evidence of an already consolidated global constitutional system, but as a heuristic for assessing degrees of legalization, institutionalization, and enforceability across different issue areas. In the domain of force, the concept is particularly vulnerable to overstatement because it is often invoked as though a fully centralized legal order with automatic sanctions already exists. This assumption is misleading. A legal order in the strong sense requires more than the mere presence of norms; it depends on the extent to which those norms generate cumulative outputs of restriction, supervision, and reaction. It is through these outputs—rather than through rhetorical invocation alone—that the real strength and limits of the contemporary rule-based international order can be meaningfully assessed.
Norms
The most common, ordinary, and foundational outcome of applicable international law is the production of norms. At this level, international law operates through the generation of shared expectations regarding appropriate conduct among states, expectations that emerge from mutual consent, repeated practice, and the gradual internalization of legal obligation. These norms may be expressed through a variety of legal forms, including treaties, customary international law, general principles, institutional declarations, standards, and even forms of soft law that, while formally non-binding, nevertheless shape state behavior. What unites these diverse expressions is their capacity to create a baseline framework of legal expectation within which states organize conduct, justify choices, and evaluate the actions of others.
Unlike domestic legal systems, where compliance is frequently associated with centralized enforcement, the normative layer of international law rests primarily on consent-based legitimacy and socialized expectations of lawful behavior. States participate in treaty-making, sustain consistent patterns of practice, and acknowledge certain standards as legally relevant not only because they are compelled to do so, but because such participation serves reciprocal interests, stabilizes expectations, and contributes to long-term legitimacy within the international community. In the customary realm, this sense of obligation is technically captured through opinio juris, namely the belief that a particular practice is followed out of legal duty rather than mere convenience. This element is crucial because it demonstrates that even in the absence of centralized institutions, international law generates a distinct legal consciousness among states: compliance is not simply strategic, but often articulated and defended in explicitly juridical terms.
The mechanisms sustaining this normative layer are therefore diffuse yet powerful. Reciprocity encourages states to comply because legal predictability increases the likelihood that others will do the same. Legitimacy reinforces adherence by embedding compliance within broader expectations of responsible membership in international society. Reputational costs make overt deviation politically expensive, particularly for states that seek leadership roles or normative credibility. Finally, long-term strategic interests often align with compliance, as stable legal frameworks reduce uncertainty and lower the costs of repeated interaction. These mechanisms do not require a centralized sovereign to be effective; rather, they operate through the social and political ecology of interstate relations.
At the same time, norms vary significantly in strength. Some remain thin and contested, generating only weak or issue-specific expectations. Others become deeply embedded, enjoying broad recognition across legal systems, diplomatic practice, and judicial reasoning. The prohibition of genocide, the principle of pacta sunt servanda, diplomatic immunity, or the baseline rules of treaty interpretation are examples of norms that have acquired a particularly high degree of authority and compliance. Their strength derives from repeated affirmation across treaties, state practice, jurisprudence, and political discourse, producing a denser sense of legal obligation than more fragmented or emerging standards.
Yet even strong norms, when left without supervisory or institutional backing, generate only the most basic layer of international legal order. Their existence establishes a normative environment, but not yet a robust legal order in the stronger sense discussed in the subsequent sections. Without mechanisms capable of monitoring compliance, clarifying ambiguities, authoritatively interpreting obligations, or organizing collective responses to breach, the order produced by norms remains fundamentally decentralized. It is legal in the sense that obligations are recognized and articulated, but its operational force depends heavily on voluntary adherence, political reputation, and reciprocal expectations. For this reason, norms should be understood as the indispensable first layer of international law: they provide the vocabulary of obligation and the ordinary grammar of compliance, yet by themselves they constitute only the minimal architecture of legal order, one that requires additional layers of supervision and restriction before it approaches a more fully institutionalized rule-based structure.
Decisions
A stronger and more operational form of applicable international law emerges when norms are reinforced by institutional decisions. If norms constitute the ordinary and most decentralized layer of legal order, decisions represent the point at which those norms are translated into authoritative findings, interpretive rulings, supervisory observations, and case-specific determinations by institutions endowed with recognized competence. Courts, treaty-monitoring committees, supervisory bodies, arbitral panels, and specialized regime authorities all contribute to this layer. Their role is not necessarily to create wholly new law, but to clarify, specify, monitor, and apply existing norms in concrete disputes or compliance processes. In this sense, decisions preserve continuity with the normative layer while substantially increasing its legal density and practical effect.
The similarity with norms lies in their common foundation: both derive their authority from state consent and accepted legal obligation. Just as treaties and customary rules depend on mutual recognition among states, institutional decisions are possible only because states have previously consented—through treaty clauses, optional protocols, jurisdictional declarations, or organizational membership—to procedures capable of authoritatively assessing conduct. Yet the crucial difference is that the decision layer introduces institutionalized interpretation and individualized scrutiny. While norms generate general expectations of compliance, decisions transform those expectations into specific judgments about whether obligations have been fulfilled, breached, or require remedial action in a given context. This additional layer significantly strengthens the legal order because it narrows ambiguity and raises the reputational and political costs of non-compliance.
Human rights regimes offer some of the clearest illustrations of this stronger form. Regional human rights courts such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights move beyond the mere existence of treaty norms by issuing binding decisions in individual cases, determining whether states have violated protected rights and often prescribing forms of remedy. These institutions do not replace the underlying normative framework of human rights treaties; rather, they make those norms more operational by embedding them in an adjudicative structure.
A particularly significant example in your framework is the International Court of Justice in relation to the Genocide Convention. Here, the legal order becomes stronger not simply because genocide is prohibited as a norm, but because Article IX creates a compromissory basis for the Court’s jurisdiction over disputes concerning the Convention’s interpretation, application, or fulfilment. This means that once the jurisdictional conditions are met, the Court can move from abstract normativity to authoritative judicial decision, including provisional measures and final judgments on state responsibility. In this respect, the prohibition of genocide exists at the normative level, but the ICJ’s ability to issue decisions gives that norm a much more robust institutional expression.
The same logic applies in the field of international criminal law through the International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute transforms broad atrocity norms—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression—into a system of individualized prosecutorial and judicial decisions. The ICC’s contribution is not merely symbolic: it converts the normative prohibition of mass atrocity into investigations, arrest warrants, admissibility rulings, and criminal judgments directed at specific individuals. This decisional layer sharply differentiates operative law from a purely normative environment, because it links obligations to personal accountability and judicial consequences.
Beyond courts, treaty-based supervisory committees also exemplify this second layer of legal order. Specialized bodies attached to human rights conventions, such as the United Nations Committee Against Torture, monitor periodic state reports, assess compliance patterns, and issue concluding observations, views, and recommendations regarding treaty implementation. In the torture context, such bodies provide ongoing scrutiny over detention practices, extradition risks, non-refoulement obligations, and allegations of ill-treatment. Although their outputs are often less coercive than judicial rulings, they still represent a stronger form than norms alone because they subject state conduct to regularized institutional review and authoritative legal interpretation.
This decisional layer is therefore best understood as the intermediate architecture of a rule-based international order. It remains anchored in the consensual normative framework described in the previous section, but it deepens that framework by introducing institutions capable of speaking authoritatively about compliance in specific cases. The resulting legal order is stronger than norms because it reduces indeterminacy and creates identifiable records of breach, justification, and remedy. At the same time, it remains distinct from the strongest layer of international legality, since decisions may still lack reliable coercive enforcement unless coupled with broader mechanisms of supervision, sanctions, or collective response. For this reason, decisions occupy a pivotal middle ground: they transform law from shared expectation into institutionally articulated judgment, thereby marking the transition from basic normativity to more fully structured legal order.
Order
A true legal order represents the most advanced outcome of restrictive international law. It emerges not merely from the existence of strong norms, nor even from the accumulation of authoritative decisions, but from the institutional consolidation of both into a durable structure of compliance, interpretation, and enforcement. In this strongest sense, order is produced when norms supply the substantive standards of conduct, decisions provide authoritative clarification and case-specific application, and both are embedded within institutions capable of generating relatively predictable compliance across time and across members. What distinguishes order from the preceding layers is therefore the presence of an authority structure that can transform legal expectations into routinized political behavior.
This is why a genuine legal order in the international sphere requires inclusive and representative institutions endowed with quasi-supranational or supranational features. Such institutions do not simply monitor compliance; they socialize actors into repeated legal practice, attach tangible consequences to deviation, and create interpretive hierarchies through courts, commissions, councils, and supervisory mechanisms. In this sense, order is not a synonym for the mere presence of rules. It is the condition in which rules and decisions become sufficiently institutionalized to shape political conduct even in moments of contestation.
The European Union remains the clearest example of this form. Its legal order is constituted by layered norms (the Treaties, regulations, directives, and general principles), authoritative decisions (particularly through the Court of Justice of the European Union), and strong compliance mechanisms backed by direct effect, supremacy, infringement procedures, and material sanctions. These elements together create a self-reinforcing structure in which law penetrates domestic legal systems and compels adjustment by member states. Here, norms and decisions are not isolated layers; they are constitutive elements of an order that possesses autonomous legal authority.
The Council of Europe provides a second, though somewhat softer, example. The European Convention on Human Rights supplies the normative layer, while the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights provides the decision-making layer. What elevates this regime toward the level of order is the supervisory role of the Committee of Ministers, the routinized expectation of implementation, and the embedding of Convention standards into domestic constitutional practice. Although it lacks the full supranational reach of the EU, it still demonstrates how restrictive law can mature into a quasi-order through the interaction of norms, judgments, and institutional follow-up.
Comparable dynamics can also be observed in other regional and functional regimes. The World Trade Organization dispute settlement system, despite its current political strains, historically approximated a legal order by combining treaty norms with binding panel and Appellate Body decisions and by institutionalizing compliance review through retaliation mechanisms. Likewise, the Inter-American human rights system exhibits order-like qualities where the American Convention, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the political supervision of the OAS collectively transform norms and decisions into sustained regional legal expectations.
Against this benchmark, the global framework on the use of force does not fully satisfy the conditions of order. It undoubtedly contains a strong restrictive norm in the prohibition of unilateral force, and it also possesses a decision-making layer through the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and selective collective responses. Yet it lacks the supranational authority, automaticity, and uniform compliance mechanisms necessary to stabilize these layers into a genuine legal order. Enforcement remains contingent on political convergence among major powers, and interpretive authority is repeatedly decentralized through self-defense claims and institutional paralysis.
A further defining characteristic of structural legal order is that, once consolidated, it tends to generate additional layers of restriction that progressively narrow the space of permission while simultaneously interacting with regulatory forms of law. In other words, order is not static. It deepens legalization by transforming broad normative commitments into increasingly specific obligations, procedural duties, review mechanisms, and graduated sanctions. The result is a dynamic tightening of legal space: what may once have been left to political discretion under permission becomes regulated, and what was previously only regulated may evolve into restriction backed by authoritative enforcement.
This is particularly visible in the examples discussed above. Within the European Union, foundational treaty norms have over time produced secondary legislation, compliance timetables, infringement pathways, financial penalties, and suspension mechanisms under Article 7 TEU. These developments illustrate how structural order strengthens itself by defining in advance the consequences of deviation. Violations are not merely criticized rhetorically; they trigger formal procedures, judicial review, and potentially material punishment. In this sense, the order continuously reduces the range of lawful political maneuver available to member states in areas already brought under common authority.
A similar pattern is evident in the Council of Europe and the European human rights regime. Here, the interaction between Convention norms, ECtHR judgments, and Committee of Ministers supervision gradually narrows domestic discretion by converting abstract rights obligations into concrete implementation duties. Repeated violations are catalogued, monitored, publicly condemned, and, in more severe cases, linked to intensified political pressure, enhanced supervision, or suspension-related consequences. The normative effect is cumulative: each decision further restricts the permissive interpretive space previously available to states.
The same structural logic can be observed in the WTO’s historically robust dispute settlement order, where treaty obligations evolved into detailed procedural disciplines and retaliation-based compliance incentives. What begins as regulation through negotiated commitments becomes restriction once the system defines authorized countermeasures, retaliation ceilings, and review procedures. Likewise, in the Inter-American system, repeated judicial findings and political follow-up increasingly reduce the room for domestic governments to invoke sovereignty as a permissive shield against human rights obligations.
These examples demonstrate that order does not simply rest upon norms and decisions as static constitutive elements; it reproduces itself by generating stronger restrictions, clearer punishment mechanisms, and routinized condemnation of violations. Sanctions are defined, punishment pathways are institutionalized, and breaches become legally and politically costly. The narrowing of permission is therefore one of the clearest indicators that a genuine legal order is present.
For this reason, the phrase “rule-based international order,” while politically powerful, remains analytically imprecise in the use-of-force domain. The more fruitful academic inquiry is not whether order exists in absolute terms, but what degree of order is produced under specific political conditions, how norms and decisions are consolidated into authority structures, and how rapidly restrictive legal space can revert into permissive interpretive space under institutional stress. For an academic audience, the more fruitful inquiry is therefore not whether order exists in absolute terms, but what degree of order is produced under what political conditions, and how quickly restrictive legal space can revert into permissive interpretive space under institutional stress.
Legal Framework on the Use of Force: Is There an Order?
Historically, the use of force moved through all three legal forms. It has evolved from a largely permissive and decentralized practice, where resort to armed force was treated as an inherent attribute of sovereignty, to a progressively constrained legal domain shaped by collective security aspirations and institutional oversight, and finally toward a contemporary framework defined by dense normative restriction anchored in the UN Charter system. This historical trajectory is not merely linear but reflects shifting conceptions of international order itself—from power-based coexistence, to rule-embedded coordination, to an increasingly articulated claim of a rule-governed prohibition on unilateral violence.
Against this background, the central question is whether the contemporary law on the use of force constitutes a genuinely rule-based international order, or whether it remains structurally contingent on political authorization, selective enforcement, and uneven institutional capacity. While Article 2(4) of the UN Charter establishes a formal prohibition on the use of force, and the collective security system of the United Nations provides a clear institutional architecture for enforcement, the operational reality of this regime raises persistent doubts about the completeness and autonomy of the legal order in this domain. The law on the use of force thus occupies a particularly revealing position within international law: it is at once one of its most clearly codified regimes and one of its most politically contested.
From Permission to Regulation
For much of recorded international history, the use of force belonged squarely to the sphere of permission. War was not an exceptional or legally constrained act, but rather a recognized and often legitimate instrument of statecraft. Sovereignty, in its classical sense, entailed not only territorial authority and political independence, but also the discretion to determine when and how to resort to armed force. In this setting, war was frequently conceived as an extension of foreign policy by other means—a view later famously articulated by Carl von Clausewitz—and did not require prior authorization from any higher authority. States, as the primary and effectively sole actors of the international system, operated within a permissive legal environment in which the recourse to force was neither categorically prohibited nor institutionally supervised.
This permissive order, however, was not devoid of structure. While law did not meaningfully restrict the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum), certain normative and practical considerations—such as just war traditions, diplomatic conventions, and evolving expectations of conduct—provided limited forms of guidance. Yet these remained insufficient to prevent recurring large-scale conflicts, particularly in the absence of centralized enforcement or binding legal prohibitions.
By the nineteenth century, the destabilizing consequences of unrestrained warfare prompted the emergence of more explicitly regulatory approaches. The balance of power doctrine sought to prevent the dominance of any single state by maintaining a relative equilibrium among major powers. This logic found institutional expression in the Concert of Europe, established in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna. The Concert system introduced a form of collective political management, whereby the great powers engaged in regular consultation and coordination to preserve stability and contain conflicts before they escalated into general war.
Importantly, this shift did not transform the legal status of war from permission to prohibition. Rather, it overlaid the permissive legal framework with a layer of political regulation. War remained lawful, but its use became increasingly subject to strategic calculation within a managed international order. The Concert of Europe, which contributed to a relatively prolonged period of major-power peace throughout much of the nineteenth century, illustrates how regulatory mechanisms could mitigate the excesses of a permissive system without fundamentally altering its legal character.
In this sense, the transition from permission to regulation represents a critical intermediate phase in the evolution of the law on the use of force. It reflects an awareness of the systemic risks inherent in unrestrained sovereignty, while stopping short of imposing binding legal constraints. The permissive foundation of the earlier order thus persisted, even as emerging practices of coordination and balance began to shape the conditions under which force was exercised.
The regulatory impulse that emerged in the nineteenth century did not disappear with the collapse of the Concert of Europe; rather, it was reformulated and intensified in the aftermath of the World War I. The unprecedented scale of destruction generated a renewed determination to move beyond mere political management of war toward a more structured—if still incomplete—legal constraint on the use of force. Yet this period is best understood not as a decisive break, but as an ambitious and ultimately fragile transition from regulation toward restriction.
The establishment of the League of Nations marked the first serious attempt to embed limitations on the use of force within an institutionalized legal framework. The Covenant of the League did not categorically prohibit war, but it sought to condition and delay recourse to it. Member states were required to submit disputes to arbitration, judicial settlement, or inquiry by the Council before resorting to force, and to observe waiting periods intended to create space for diplomatic resolution. In this sense, the League introduced elements of restriction into what had previously been a largely permissive and politically regulated domain.
However, the League’s framework suffered from critical structural weaknesses. Its effectiveness depended heavily on the political will of its members, particularly the major powers, and it lacked robust enforcement mechanisms. The absence of key actors at crucial moments, coupled with divergent strategic interests, undermined the credibility of collective security. As a result, the League’s restrictive aspirations remained normatively significant but practically limited, ultimately failing to prevent renewed large-scale conflict.
Parallel to the League system, more targeted legal and diplomatic instruments sought to further regulate the use of force, often within more confined or selective frameworks. The Locarno Treaties exemplify this trend. These agreements, centered on Western Europe, aimed to guarantee borders and renounce the use of force among specific states, particularly between Germany, France, and Belgium. While they contributed to a temporary stabilization of relations and fostered a sense of reconciliation, their geographically and politically limited scope revealed a fragmented approach to the regulation of war—one that applied primarily to willing and strategically aligned stakeholders.
A more ambitious, yet similarly constrained, effort emerged with the Kellogg–Briand Pact. This pact famously declared the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, signaling a significant normative shift toward the delegitimization of aggressive force. However, despite its broad formal participation, the pact lacked enforcement provisions and clear definitions, rendering it largely aspirational. States retained considerable interpretive flexibility, particularly through recourse to self-defense claims, which limited its practical impact.
Taken together, the interwar developments reflect an important but incomplete movement toward restriction. They illustrate a growing recognition that the permissive and loosely regulated use of force posed systemic risks, and that more formalized legal constraints were necessary. At the same time, the reliance on partial consensus, selective participation, and weak enforcement mechanisms meant that these initiatives did not fully displace the underlying permissive logic. Instead, they produced a layered and uneven legal landscape—one in which the aspiration for a rule-based order in the use of force remained evident, but not yet realized.
The UN Charter and Restriction
The UN Charter marked the strongest shift toward restriction. Building on the incomplete and ultimately fragile interwar experiments, the post-1945 legal framework sought to resolve what had long been an underlying puzzle of the international system: the security dilemma. If states, acting under conditions of uncertainty and self-help, retained unrestricted discretion to use force, mutual insecurity would persist and recurrent conflict would remain structurally embedded. The Charter system responded by advancing a bold legal premise—the stabilization of international order through the prohibition of unilateral force.
At the center of this transformation lies the United Nations Security Council, conceived as the institutional mechanism through which decisions on the legitimate use of force would be collectively authorized. This represented a decisive move away from both the permissive logic of classical sovereignty and the loosely coordinated regulatory practices of earlier periods. The general rule is clear: under Article 2(4) of the Charter, the unilateral use of force is prohibited. In principle, states are no longer entitled to resort to war as an instrument of policy; instead, the authority to determine threats to peace and to mandate enforcement action is centralized within the Security Council.
This framework constitutes the legal high point of restrictive international law. Unlike previous arrangements, it articulates a comprehensive normative prohibition, coupled with an institutional structure designed to operationalize collective security. The aim is not merely to manage or delay conflict, but to transform the legal status of force itself—from a discretionary right into a constrained and exceptional measure, subject to collective judgment.
Yet the Charter system does not eliminate all forms of permission or regulation. Rather, it embeds them within a predominantly restrictive order. Most notably, the inherent right of self-defense, recognized in Article 51, preserves a narrowly defined space in which states may lawfully resort to force without prior authorization, albeit under conditions of necessity and proportionality and subject to subsequent Security Council oversight. Similarly, the Council’s own practices often reflect elements of political negotiation and strategic balancing, echoing earlier regulatory logics within a more formalized legal framework.
These embedded flexibilities reveal a persistent tension at the heart of the Charter regime. While the prohibition on the use of force represents a clear normative commitment to a rule-based international order, its implementation remains contingent on political consensus among major powers and the effective functioning of collective security mechanisms. As such, the contemporary legal framework simultaneously embodies restriction, incorporates regulated exceptions, and, in practice, occasionally reopens spaces of de facto permission. This layered structure underscores both the ambition and the limits of the Charter system in fully resolving the problem it was designed to address.
Security Council Authorization: Regulation
The prohibition of the use of force under the Charter does not operate in isolation; it is complemented by an institutional mechanism designed to interpret, apply, and, where necessary, operationalize that prohibition. This marks a transition from restriction as a general rule to regulation as an institutional practice. At the center of this regulatory framework stands the United Nations Security Council, which is empowered under the Charter to determine when peace is threatened and to authorize collective responses.
The Charter explicitly vests the Council with the authority to identify threats and prescribe measures. Under Article 39, the Security Council “shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and decide what measures shall be taken to maintain or restore international peace and security. This provision is foundational: it grants the Council interpretive discretion over the scope and meaning of threats, allowing it to adapt the legal framework to evolving circumstances. In doing so, the Council does not merely apply pre-existing rules; it actively shapes their content in practice.
Once such a determination is made, Articles 41 and 42 provide the Council with a range of response options. Article 41 authorizes non-forceful measures, including economic sanctions, diplomatic restrictions, and other forms of coercion short of armed force. Should these prove inadequate, Article 42 permits the Council to take action “by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary” to restore peace and security. These provisions collectively establish a graduated system of enforcement, in which the use of force is not eliminated but is instead centralized and conditional upon collective authorization.
This institutional arrangement reflects a distinctly regulatory logic. The law does not merely prohibit force; it channels legitimate force through structured decision-making processes. The Security Council thus performs a dual function: it interprets the scope of the prohibition and determines when exceptions, in the form of collective enforcement, are warranted. In this sense, the Council transforms the abstract norm of prohibition into an operational system of collective security—one that seeks to replace unilateral uses of force with coordinated, institutionally sanctioned action.
The result is a framework that may be understood as a form of collective defense, albeit one that differs from traditional alliance-based models. Rather than permitting states to act independently in pursuit of their security interests, the Charter system places primary responsibility in the hands of a centralized authority. At the same time, the effectiveness of this regulatory framework remains closely tied to the political dynamics within the Council itself, particularly the alignment—or divergence—of its permanent members. As such, while the Charter establishes a clear legal pathway for the authorization and use of force, its practical operation continues to reflect the interplay between legal norms and geopolitical realities.
Article 51 Self-Defense: Permission Within Restriction
Despite the Charter’s ambition to centralize authority over the use of force and mitigate the structural pressures of the security dilemma, that dilemma was never fully resolved. States continue to operate in an environment of uncertainty, where reliance on collective mechanisms—however formally robust—may not always provide timely or effective protection. It is within this context that the framework of self-defense emerges as a necessary, yet inherently problematic, component of the legal order.
Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves the “inherent right” of self-defense in the event of an armed attack. This provision was not an oversight, but a deliberate and pragmatic concession. Without it, states would be legally incapacitated in the face of aggression, forced to await collective authorization that might be delayed or blocked. Self-defense thus functions as a mandatory exception to the general prohibition on the use of force, ensuring that the legal framework remains responsive to the realities of international insecurity.
At the same time, self-defense represents the most significant re-entry point for permission within an otherwise restrictive system. Unlike Security Council authorization, which is centralized and collective, the exercise of self-defense is fundamentally decentralized. States retain primary authority to assess the conditions under which force may be used. This includes determining whether an armed attack has occurred, whether the use of force is necessary, whether it is proportionate, and, in more contested formulations, whether a threat is sufficiently imminent to justify anticipatory action.
This decentralized structure creates a legally recognized permissive space within the Charter regime. While the doctrine is formally constrained by requirements such as necessity and proportionality, as well as the obligation to report measures taken to the United Nations Security Council, these constraints are largely interpreted and applied by states themselves in the first instance. As a result, the boundary between lawful self-defense and unlawful use of force is often subject to contestation.
The implications are significant. What was intended as a narrowly tailored exception to preserve the basic security of states simultaneously introduces a structural loophole with considerable potential for abuse. Expansive interpretations of what constitutes an “armed attack,” flexible readings of imminence, and elastic applications of necessity and proportionality have, at times, enabled states to justify uses of force that sit uneasily with the Charter’s restrictive logic. In this sense, self-defense embodies a persistent tension within the legal framework: it is indispensable for maintaining the system’s credibility in conditions of insecurity, yet it also reopens the very permissive dynamics that the prohibition on the use of force sought to overcome.
Accordingly, the law of self-defense illustrates both the resilience and the fragility of the rule-based order in this domain. It confirms that, even at its most restrictive, the legal framework cannot fully eliminate the role of unilateral judgment in matters of force. Instead, it accommodates that reality—at the cost of reintroducing ambiguity and contestation into the heart of the system.
Finding Exceptions to the Exception to Unilateral Use of Force: How the Self-Defense Framework Is Abused to Justify Acts of Aggression
The self-defense regime, originally conceived as a narrowly tailored exception within a restrictive legal order, has in practice generated its own set of exceptions—effectively recreating a sphere of permission within the Charter framework. This transformation is neither accidental nor isolated; rather, it reflects sustained efforts by states to expand the interpretive boundaries of Article 51 in response to evolving threat perceptions and strategic interests.
One of the most consequential developments in this regard has been the increasing reliance on doctrines of preemptive—or more accurately, preventive—self-defense. While classical interpretations of self-defense, often associated with the Caroline Affair, emphasized immediacy and necessity in the face of an imminent attack, contemporary practice has significantly relaxed these requirements. The distinction between “imminent” and “potential” threats has blurred, enabling states to justify the use of force not only in response to an ongoing or clearly impending attack, but also against speculative or long-term risks. This doctrinal shift effectively widens the permissive space within the legal framework, allowing unilateral determinations of threat to substitute for collective authorization.
A prominent illustration of this expansion is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The intervention was justified, inter alia, on the basis of alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and their potential use. Although framed in the language of self-defense and global security, the absence of an actual or imminent armed attack—and the subsequent failure to substantiate the WMD claims—exposed the elasticity of the doctrine. Here, self-defense was not merely interpreted broadly; it was effectively reconfigured to accommodate a preventive logic that sits uneasily with the Charter’s restrictive intent.
A parallel and equally significant avenue of expansion has emerged through the evolving concept of terrorism. In the post-Cold War and especially post-9/11 context, states have increasingly invoked self-defense in response to non-state actors operating across borders. While the recognition that large-scale terrorist attacks may trigger the right of self-defense marked an important doctrinal development, the absence of a universally agreed definition of terrorism has introduced considerable ambiguity. Broad and sometimes indeterminate characterizations of terrorist threats have enabled states to frame a wide range of actors and situations within the ambit of self-defense.
This elasticity has, in turn, facilitated a “fit-in-all” justification: a legal narrative capable of accommodating diverse uses of force under the umbrella of counterterrorism. Military operations against loosely defined networks, anticipatory strikes against suspected threats, and prolonged campaigns in foreign territories have all been justified through expansive readings of self-defense. In many instances, the thresholds of necessity, proportionality, and imminence have been interpreted with considerable flexibility, reinforcing the permissive character of the framework.
Crucially, this evolution has not occurred in a legal vacuum. The response—or lack thereof—of the broader international community has played a significant role in consolidating these practices. While certain instances have generated criticism, sustained and unified opposition has often been absent. The failure to consistently challenge expansive or questionable invocations of self-defense has contributed to a form of tacit recognition, if not outright acceptance. Over time, this has lent a degree of legitimacy to practices that deviate from the Charter’s original restrictive design.
The pattern that emerges from state practice suggests that the evolution of self-defense cannot be understood solely as a matter of legal interpretation; it is equally a function of strategic behavior shaped by realpolitik considerations. Faced with persistent uncertainty and uneven confidence in collective security mechanisms, states have increasingly acted on unilateral assessments of risk, privileging national security calculations over strict adherence to the Charter’s restrictive framework. In doing so, they have not simply operated within the margins of the law, but have actively stretched and, at times, reconstituted those margins.
A central feature of this dynamic is the instrumental use of legal justification. The language of self-defense has become a strategic resource through which states frame and legitimize actions that might otherwise be regarded as unlawful. Rather than openly contesting the prohibition on the use of force, states tend to invoke it while simultaneously expanding its exceptions. This practice reflects a form of “interpretive opportunism,” whereby legal norms are not rejected but selectively reinterpreted to align with perceived security imperatives. The result is a gradual normalization of broader and more flexible readings of self-defense, often without formal amendment or explicit doctrinal consensus.
The role of terrorism in this process has been particularly significant. As a category, terrorism is both politically potent and legally indeterminate, allowing states considerable latitude in defining threats and identifying targets. By situating a wide array of security challenges within the counterterrorism paradigm, states have been able to invoke self-defense in contexts that extend far beyond its original scope. This has included operations against non-state actors in foreign territories, anticipatory uses of force based on intelligence assessments, and prolonged military engagements justified as ongoing defensive measures. In many cases, the absence of clear temporal, geographic, or operational limits has further blurred the distinction between defense and coercive intervention.
At the same time, the institutional framework designed to discipline such practices has proven uneven in its response. The United Nations Security Council, while formally positioned as the central authority in matters of peace and security, has often been constrained by political divisions among its permanent members. This has limited its capacity to consistently assess, endorse, or reject claims of self-defense, thereby leaving significant interpretive space in the hands of individual states. In the absence of authoritative and timely institutional clarification, state practice itself begins to shape the contours of the law.
Over time, these developments have contributed to a subtle but consequential shift in the legal landscape. What was intended as a tightly confined exception has been progressively transformed through practice into a more elastic and permissive doctrine. The cumulative effect of repeated unilateral actions, justified under expansive readings of self-defense and met with limited resistance, has been the erosion of the restrictive core of the Charter regime. In this sense, the sphere of restriction has not been formally displaced, but it has been functionally diluted by the emergence of a parallel sphere of permission.
This transformation underscores a broader tension within the international legal order. While the Charter framework aspires to constrain the use of force through clear rules and centralized authority, its effectiveness ultimately depends on the willingness of states to internalize and uphold those constraints. Where strategic imperatives dominate and institutional responses remain fragmented, legal norms risk becoming vehicles of justification rather than instruments of limitation. The evolution of self-defense thus illustrates how, in practice, the boundaries between restriction and permission are not fixed, but are continuously renegotiated through the interplay of law, politics, and power.
In sum, what was initially conceived as a carefully circumscribed exception has been progressively reshaped into a source of renewed permission. Through doctrines such as preemptive self-defense, the strategic invocation of ambiguous threats, and the expansive framing of terrorism, states have effectively generated “exceptions to the exception.” This dynamic underscores a central paradox of the legal framework on the use of force: even at its most restrictive, it contains within it the seeds of its own erosion. The persistence of the security dilemma, combined with the decentralized nature of self-defense and the ambivalent response of the international community, has allowed the re-emergence of a permissive space—one that challenges the coherence and credibility of a rule-based international order in this domain.
Institutional Failure and Expanding Permission
When the United Nations Security Council fails to act because of veto paralysis, the restrictive framework weakens. States then increasingly invoke doctrines that reopen permission, including humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, intervention by invitation, collective self-defense, and preemptive or preventive strike. These developments do not necessarily abolish law. Rather, they show how institutional incapacity transforms restrictive law into permissive practice.
The Charter system presumes that the Security Council will serve as the central gatekeeper for the lawful use of force, translating prohibition into regulated collective action. However, this presumption is contingent on political consensus among the Council’s permanent members. Where such consensus is absent, the institutional mechanism designed to authorize and discipline force becomes immobilized. This paralysis does not eliminate the underlying security pressures faced by states; instead, it displaces decision-making back to the unilateral level. In such contexts, states do not simply abandon the legal framework—they reinterpret it in ways that compensate for institutional inaction.
Humanitarian intervention exemplifies this shift. In situations where mass atrocities occur and the Council is unable or unwilling to authorize action, some states have asserted a right to use force to prevent or halt widespread human suffering. Although not explicitly grounded in the Charter, this doctrine has been framed as morally compelling and, in some accounts, legally emergent. Yet its selective invocation and lack of clear criteria underscore its permissive potential: it enables unilateral uses of force justified by contested humanitarian claims, effectively bypassing the collective authorization mechanism.
The doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) was, in part, an attempt to re-anchor such concerns within an institutional framework by emphasizing the primacy of Security Council authorization. Nevertheless, in practice, R2P has also contributed to expanding interpretive space. Once the threshold of mass atrocity is invoked, debates often shift from whether force is lawful to whether it is necessary, thereby softening the rigidity of the prohibition. Where the Council remains divided, the normative pull of protection can be mobilized to justify action outside formal authorization, blurring the line between regulation and permission.
Intervention by invitation introduces a different, yet equally significant, pathway. By relying on the consent of a recognized government, states have justified military involvement in ongoing conflicts without recourse to the Security Council. While formally grounded in sovereignty, this doctrine raises complex questions regarding the validity of consent, especially in civil war contexts or where governments lack effective territorial control. In such cases, the requirement of collective authorization is effectively circumvented, and the use of force is re-legitimized through bilateral or selective multilateral arrangements.
Similarly, collective self-defense has been interpreted in ways that extend beyond its original scope. States have invoked it not only in response to direct attacks on allies, but also in broader campaigns against non-state actors or diffuse threats. This expansion, often combined with counterterrorism narratives, allows for coordinated uses of force that remain formally anchored in Article 51 while functionally operating with considerable autonomy from Security Council oversight.
Finally, the persistence of preemptive and preventive doctrines further reinforces this trend. As discussed, these doctrines rely on expansive interpretations of threat and imminence, and their invocation becomes more pronounced in the absence of effective collective mechanisms. Where the Council cannot act, the threshold for unilateral determination of necessity appears to lower, enabling states to justify anticipatory uses of force under the guise of systemic necessity.
Taken together, these developments illustrate how exceptions to the regulatory framework—originally designed to channel and constrain the use of force—can be reconfigured into alternative pathways of authorization. The Security Council’s inability to consistently perform its regulatory role does not leave a legal vacuum; rather, it generates a proliferation of justificatory doctrines that reintroduce discretion at the state level. In this way, institutional failure does not simply weaken the restrictive order—it actively contributes to the expansion of a parallel sphere of permission, one that coexists with, and at times undermines, the formal architecture of the Charter system.
What unwillingness of UNGA tells?
The limitations of the regulatory framework on the use of force become even more apparent when viewed alongside the role of the United Nations General Assembly. Formally, the Assembly is vested with certain residual powers in matters of international peace and security, particularly in situations where the United Nations Security Council fails to act. Through mechanisms such as the “Uniting for Peace” procedure, the Assembly can recommend collective measures, including, in exceptional cases, the use of force. In institutional design, therefore, the Assembly appears as a potential corrective—a venue through which the broader international community may compensate for Security Council paralysis.
Historically, the Assembly has indeed functioned as a central body for the articulation of collective will at critical junctures of international politics. Landmark developments such as the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the negotiation and endorsement of major multilateral conventions underpinning international legal regimes, and the series of resolutions that catalyzed the process of decolonization all demonstrate its normative and political significance. In these contexts, the Assembly has acted not merely as a deliberative forum, but as a driver of systemic transformation, shaping the evolution of international norms and institutions.
Yet this record stands in sharp contrast to its limited role in the domain of the use of force. Despite possessing the procedural tools to respond to threats to peace in the absence of Security Council action, the Assembly has consistently fallen short of assuming a decisive operational role. This reluctance is particularly striking in situations where humanitarian intervention has been invoked, where the implementation of the responsibility to protect (R2P) would seemingly require broad-based international endorsement, and where the moral urgency of collective action has been widely acknowledged. In such cases, the Assembly has rarely moved beyond declaratory resolutions, failing to translate normative consensus into concrete recommendations capable of guiding or legitimizing enforcement action.
This pattern of institutional hesitation has important implications. Much like the decentralized invocation of self-defense by individual states, the Assembly’s unwillingness—or inability—to act decisively contributes to the expansion of permissive practices. In the absence of authoritative collective guidance, states and ad hoc coalitions are left to interpret and implement contested doctrines on their own terms. The result is a proliferation of actions that occur outside the formal regulatory framework, yet are justified through reference to its underlying principles.
Paradoxically, the Assembly’s normative authority may even amplify this effect. Because it embodies the broader international community, its silence or limited engagement can be read as tacit acquiescence. Where strong and coordinated objection is absent, practices that stretch or bypass the Charter framework risk becoming normalized. Over time, this dynamic reinforces the erosion of restrictive rules, not through formal legal change, but through the accumulation of precedents that expand the boundaries of what is considered permissible.
In this sense, the failure of the General Assembly to effectively step into the gap left by Security Council paralysis mirrors, at the collective level, the dynamics observed in unilateral state practice. Both contribute to a gradual transformation of the legal landscape: from a system centered on prohibition and regulation, toward one in which exceptions proliferate and permissive spaces widen. The unwillingness of the Assembly thus reveals a deeper structural limitation within the international order—namely, that the existence of alternative institutional pathways does not guarantee their effective use. Where both centralized authority and collective fallback mechanisms falter, the restrictive framework on the use of force becomes increasingly vulnerable to reinterpretation and erosion.
How Restriction Reverts to Permission
The preceding analysis can be consolidated through a broader observation: the legal regime on the use of force is most stable when three elements converge—restrictive norms, effective institutional authorization, and political alignment among major powers. When one or more of these variables are absent, the system does not collapse into legal emptiness. Instead, it undergoes a transformation in which ambiguity is actively converted into permission through justificatory doctrines. This process is driven not only by the abuse of the self-defense framework, but also by the inability of the United Nations Security Council to act decisively, and the relative silence of the United Nations General Assembly in the face of emerging violations.
The trajectory from restriction to permission is neither abrupt nor accidental. It is mediated through interpretive practices, strategic legal argumentation, and the construction of legitimacy narratives. States rarely reject the law outright; rather, they operate within its vocabulary, expanding its exceptions and exploiting its silences. The decentralized nature of self-defense, combined with institutional paralysis and limited collective objection, creates fertile ground for the gradual widening of permissive space.
Moments of alignment, however, demonstrate that the framework can function as intended. The response to the Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait illustrates this point. The Security Council identified aggression, authorized force, and collective action followed in a coordinated manner. Here, restriction and regulation reinforced one another, and political legitimacy aligned with legal authorization. This episode remains a benchmark for the effective operation of the Charter system.
By contrast, the NATO intervention in Kosovo marks a turning point where institutional failure prompted a shift toward contested permission. In the absence of explicit Security Council authorization, the intervention was justified on humanitarian grounds, advancing the claim that legality could be suspended in the face of paralysis and urgency. This was not a complete abandonment of the legal framework, but rather its circumvention through normative argument. The legacy of Kosovo continues to shape debates on humanitarian intervention, illustrating how failed regulation can generate alternative pathways of justification.
The 2011 military intervention in Libya initially appeared to restore confidence in the system. Security Council authorization provided a clear legal basis for action. Yet the subsequent broad interpretation of the civilian-protection mandate generated deep mistrust among major powers, particularly Russia and China. This, in turn, contributed to later instances of paralysis, demonstrating how even formally successful applications of the framework can produce long-term destabilizing effects.
Post-9/11 interventions further highlight the elasticity of self-defense. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was widely framed within collective self-defense following the attacks of 11 September. However, the 2003 invasion of Iraq represents a paradigmatic case of abuse. Claims relating to weapons of mass destruction, combined with expansive interpretations of threat, transformed uncertainty into a basis for unilateral force. This episode is particularly significant because it normalized a style of legal reasoning in which contested factual predicates suffice to justify military action, thereby weakening the restrictive core of the Charter regime.
A similar dynamic can be observed in the evolution of preemptive self-defense doctrines, notably in the practices associated with Israel. By advancing broader interpretations of imminence and necessity, such practices have incrementally stretched the boundaries of lawful force. Even where contested, repeated invocation contributes to reshaping the argumentative limits of the law, reinforcing the permissive potential embedded within the self-defense framework.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine offers perhaps the clearest contemporary example of law being used as permission through pretext. Russia’s justifications have drawn on a wide array of legal narratives, including self-defense, protection of nationals, collective defense claims linked to recognition strategies, genocide-prevention rhetoric, and historical entitlement. The significance of this case lies less in the credibility of these claims than in their existence: even manifestly unlawful aggression is articulated through legal vocabulary, underscoring the continued importance of legality as a source of political and diplomatic legitimacy.
More recent developments further illustrate how permissive spaces continue to expand. Military actions undertaken by the United States against Iran have been justified through a combination of self-defense arguments, including the protection of forces and interests against imminent threats, as well as broader counterterrorism rationales. Such justifications often rely on flexible interpretations of imminence and necessity, echoing earlier doctrinal expansions. While framed within the language of Article 51, these actions demonstrate how the absence of clear, authoritative institutional responses—whether from the Security Council or the General Assembly—enables states to advance permissive pretexts with limited constraint.
Yet, in several instances, the pattern has gone even further, revealing a shift not merely toward expansive interpretation but toward a more relaxed relationship with legal justification itself. The approach adopted by the United States in its confrontations with Iran—particularly under the administration of Donald Trump—illustrates this departure. Unlike earlier cases where extensive legal argumentation accompanied the use of force, the justificatory framework here was notably thin, fragmented, and at times internally inconsistent. References to self-defense were supplemented—and at times overshadowed—by broader and more indeterminate claims, including the necessity of regime change, the promotion of the well-being of the Iranian people, and concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. These rationales, while politically resonant, do not map neatly onto the established legal criteria governing the use of force, and their invocation reflects a willingness to operate at the outer edges—or even beyond—the doctrinal boundaries of Article 51.
Equally significant is the explicit posture of unilateralism that accompanied these actions. The United States did not meaningfully seek authorization from international institutions, nor did it present its actions as contingent upon collective approval. Instead, it openly signaled its readiness to act independently of the Security Council framework, effectively sidelining the institutional mechanisms designed to regulate the use of force. This stance marks a clear departure from the Charter’s emphasis on collective security and from earlier practices in which even controversial uses of force were embedded—at least formally—within multilateral processes.
Moreover, the absence of a formally structured coalition further distinguishes this pattern. Rather than assembling a broad-based alliance or securing explicit multilateral endorsement, the United States primarily expected ad hoc assistance and political support from individual states. This model of loosely coordinated backing, as opposed to institutionalized collective action, reinforces the shift toward a more individualized and discretionary approach to the use of force. It reflects a configuration in which legitimacy is sought not through formal authorization, but through selective alignment and post hoc endorsement.
Taken together, these elements suggest that the “Trump-style” military approach represents an outlier even within the broader pattern of expanding exceptions. While previous cases typically involved the stretching of legal doctrines to accommodate strategic objectives, this instance reveals a relative de-emphasis on doctrinal coherence itself. The move from carefully constructed legal arguments to more diffuse and politically framed justifications signals a further loosening of the constraints imposed by the legal framework. In this sense, it does not simply expand the sphere of permission—it alters the terms on which that sphere is constructed, raising deeper questions about the durability of legality as a central organizing principle in the governance of the use of force.
Taken together, these cases reveal a consistent structural pattern. The abuse of the self-defense framework, the incapacity of the Security Council to act in politically contested situations, and the relative silence of the General Assembly collectively contribute to the erosion of the restrictive regime. What emerges is not the disappearance of law, but its transformation: a system in which the prohibition on the use of force coexists with an expanding array of exceptions, interpretations, and justificatory practices that effectively recreate a sphere of permission.
For scholarly analysis, this underscores a critical point. The movement from restriction to permission is not simply a matter of doctrinal change; it reflects the interaction between legal norms, institutional structures, and power politics. Even contested or bad-faith legal claims remain significant, as they reveal the enduring role of law in shaping and legitimizing state behavior. The persistence of legal justification, even in the face of clear violations, confirms that international law continues to function—not as an absolute constraint, but as a central arena in which the boundaries of permissible force are continuously negotiated and redefined.
Policy implications
The central policy lesson that emerges from the foregoing analysis is that strengthening the legal framework on the use of force requires more than rhetorical reaffirmation of existing norms. The problem is not the absence of law, but the fragility of the institutional structures through which that law is interpreted and applied. Accordingly, meaningful reform must focus on reinforcing the mechanisms that sustain restriction and prevent its reversion into permission. Additionally, the norms and institutions devised to protect and sustain the legal framework on the use of force should be eagerly upheld and promoted by not only international institutions such as the UN General Assembly, but also by individual states, regardless of their national security priorities and military agendas simply because what is permitted through silence will become a tacit agreement through the passage of time and repetition of similar violations under the same circumstances.
Reduce Decision-Making Paralysis in the Security Council
The persistence of veto-induced paralysis within the United Nations Security Council remains the single most significant structural factor through which restrictive law reverts to permissive practice. As long as decisive action can be blocked by a single permanent member, the credibility of collective security is undermined and incentives for unilateralism increase. Addressing this requires targeted institutional reforms. These include the promotion of voluntary veto restraint in situations involving mass atrocities, the development of procedural expectations that require states to publicly justify their use of the veto, and the strengthening of escalation pathways to the United Nations General Assembly under mechanisms such as collective deliberation in emergency settings. In parallel, more structured and consistent consultation with regional actors could help mitigate deadlock by broadening the political base of decision-making and increasing pressure for consensus.
Clarify the Limits of Self-Defense
The elasticity of Article 51 continues to represent the primary doctrinal avenue through which the prohibition on the use of force is circumvented. Greater clarity is therefore essential to prevent the abuse of self-defense as a permissive justification. This requires sustained efforts by states, courts, and legal bodies to refine and specify the core criteria governing lawful self-defense. In particular, clearer definitions of imminence, necessity, and proportionality are needed to constrain expansive interpretations. Equally important is the development of more precise legal standards addressing the use of force against non-state actors, the application of self-defense in the context of cyber operations, and the conditions under which collective defense may be invoked. Without such clarification, the interpretive flexibility of Article 51 will continue to enable divergent and often opportunistic applications.
Develop Accountability for Legal Pretext
A further policy priority lies in addressing the growing use of legal language as a strategic tool to justify contested uses of force. The invocation of self-defense or related doctrines should not be insulated from scrutiny simply because it is framed in legal terms. Instead, the misuse of legal justification must itself become an object of institutional accountability. This could be advanced through the establishment of independent legal reporting mechanisms, the increased use of advisory opinions by international judicial bodies, and more systematic fact-finding processes capable of assessing the factual basis of self-defense claims. Such measures would not eliminate abuse, but they would raise the reputational and political costs associated with advancing weak or pretextual legal arguments.
Strengthen Regional Security Governance
In a system where global supranational authority remains limited, regional institutions can play a critical complementary role in reinforcing accountability and stability. Strengthening regional security governance offers a pragmatic pathway to mitigate some of the gaps left by global institutional constraints. Regional organizations can contribute by providing timely legal assessments of emerging crises, developing early warning mechanisms to identify escalating threats, facilitating de-escalation through diplomatic channels, and conducting post hoc reviews of uses of force. By operating closer to the contexts in which conflicts arise, such institutions may be better positioned to generate consensus and respond with greater agility than global bodies.
Preserve the Distinction Between Law as Ideal and Law as Application
Finally, effective policy design requires a clear distinction between law as an ideal normative framework and law as it is applied in practice. Conflating these dimensions risks producing reforms that are either overly aspirational or insufficiently grounded in political reality. Recognizing this distinction allows for more realistic expectations about what international law can achieve, while also identifying where institutional improvements are most needed. It is precisely by acknowledging the gap between principle and practice that more resilient and credible mechanisms for regulating the use of force can be developed.
Conclusion
The contemporary crisis surrounding the use of force should not be understood as the sudden collapse of a once-coherent rule-based international order. Such a characterization risks overstating both the past coherence and the present breakdown of the system. In reality, the legal order governing the use of force has always been partial in scope, uneven in application, and deeply contingent on political convergence among major actors. Its operation has never been purely legalistic; rather, it has consistently reflected the interplay between normative aspiration and geopolitical constraint. What appears today as crisis is, in many respects, an intensification of long-standing structural tensions rather than a departure from an otherwise stable equilibrium.
The prohibition on unilateral force remains one of the most robust and widely recognized restrictive norms in international law. It continues to serve as a foundational principle that shapes state behavior, diplomatic discourse, and institutional practice. Yet its practical effectiveness is never automatic. It is continuously mediated by the authority and functioning of institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, by the interpretive strategies adopted by states, and by the availability of legally recognized exceptions—most notably self-defense. The UN Charter did not remove the political nature of decisions about force; instead, it reorganized that politics within a legal framework that oscillates between restriction, regulation, and permission. This dynamic structure is central to understanding both the resilience and the fragility of the system.
The principal argument advanced in this analysis is that the apparent failure of the legal framework is best explained not by its erosion, but by its design. The system is constructed in such a way that moments of institutional incapacity or interpretive expansion do not produce a legal vacuum. Instead, they trigger a shift in the mode through which the law operates. When the Security Council is paralyzed, when self-defense is interpreted expansively, or when claims of humanitarian necessity are advanced outside collective authorization, the framework adapts by reopening spaces of legally framed discretion. In these moments, restriction does not disappear; it gives way to permission that is articulated and justified in legal terms. This capacity for internal transformation is both a source of continuity and a pathway for contestation.
This perspective helps to explain why contemporary cases—from the NATO intervention in Kosovo and the 2011 military intervention in Libya to conflicts such as Syria and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—should not be read as evidence of the irrelevance of international law. On the contrary, they demonstrate the enduring centrality of legal argument. States continue to frame their actions within the language of legality because it remains indispensable for legitimacy. Legal justification plays a critical role in coalition-building, in shaping international and domestic perceptions, in managing reputational costs, and in controlling diplomatic narratives. Even when legal claims are weak or contested, their very invocation underscores the constitutive role of law in international politics.
Accordingly, the most productive policy response is not to defend an idealized vision of a fully realized rule-based order, but to focus on improving the conditions under which restrictive law can operate more effectively. This entails narrowing the scope for permissive reinterpretation by clarifying legal standards, reducing institutional paralysis—particularly within the Security Council—and strengthening mechanisms of accountability for the misuse of legal doctrines. Rather than assuming that stronger norms alone will produce compliance, policy efforts must address the institutional and political environments in which those norms are applied and contested.
In short, the future of the legal framework on the use of force depends less on reaffirming abstract commitments to prohibition and more on the design and reform of institutions capable of sustaining that prohibition in practice. The central challenge is to preserve the restrictive core of the Charter system while managing the recurring pressures that push toward the expansion of permission. Achieving this balance requires not only legal precision, but also institutional resilience and political will—without which even the strongest norms risk being continuously reinterpreted at the edges.
