The conclusion stresses the need for pragmatism and balance as responses to the grave threats to international peace and prosperity in the current world. It emphasizes that overly ambitious projects undermine international law, but pathways to cooperation and legal entrenchment still exist.

This chapter describes the end of the cold war, the Washington Consensus that drove efforts to reform the institutions and economies of the states that previously had pursued autarkic economic policies, and the counternarratives that pushed back against the Washington Consensus

This chapter looks at immigration as a battlefield in the struggle over the future. It considers how international law can be reinterpreted to limit the rights of refugees and otherwise to constrain immigration, as well as the harms these changes likely would bring about.

This chapter looks at the current attacks on international economic law with respect to trade and investment. It considers the trajectory of these attacks and the consequences of a complete dismantling of this body of international law.

The preface explains the immediate context of the book and acknowledges those who contributed to the project.

Ths chapter looks at the economic and political dimensions of the downside of the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy both drives knowledge clusters and creaters hinterlands where those left behind by the changes in the economy dwell. Significant evidence shows the extent of grievance on the part of the left-behind, which manifests itself in nationalist populism and hostility to international law. Populists depict international law as a series of corrupt power grabs by an élite that is indifferent to the left-behind. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the possibility of Chinese hegemony substituting for international law as a way of organizing international cooperation.

This chapter traces the revolt against international law by domestic courts. The Luxembourg Court of the European Union and the Supreme Court of the United States began this trend, but many courts around the world have joined in. A growing number of top-level courts in EU member states have rebelled against the Luxembourg Court. Russia’s Constitutional Court has taken the movement as far as it can go by wielding constitutional law in new and surprising ways as a way to excuse Russian noncompliance with its international obligations.

This chapter provides a somewhat more optimistic view of the posssible outcome in the battle for the future. It argues that small but necessary revisions of international law led by a norm entrepreneur state can lead to greater international cooperation and more resilient international law. It looks at cartel policy, antibribery law, and financial institution regulation as instances of successful projects led by a single state that became widely supported. It describe how similar efforts might play out in diverse fields such as climate change and cyber security.

This chapter describes the proliferation of international organizations created and extended during the 1990s. It puts these developments in the context of liberal internationalism as an extension of the Washington Consensus.

This chapter looks at the national security and public law aspects of the global crisis resulting from the rise of national populism and revisionist states challenging the global order. Threats include war, nuclear proliferation, erosion of human rights, and the pollution of cyberspace.

The knowledge economy represents a new domination by a longstanding factor of production. New insights and technological innovation have always shaped economic activity, but the rate of technological change and the proportion of knowledge as a factor of production and as a product have grown greatly in recent decades. This chapter describes the knowledge economy and explains how it makes it more likely that producers will have postive returns to scale – in other words, that profits will increase as the level of production grows. These features have profound implications for the international dimensions of the knowledge economy, as illustrated by branding and supply chains.