Nehal Bhuta & Megan Donaldson

We see today flagrant breaches of the prohibitions on the threat or use of force, but also renewed pressure and scrutiny on a related but broader prohibition, the prohibition of intervention, forcible or otherwise. In some ways, it is this broader norm of non-intervention which presents the most deep-seated puzzles in international law and international politics. In a world of profound interdependence, when should states butt out of other states' business? Nehal Bhuta (Edinburgh) and Megan Donaldson (UCL) are joined by Marco Roscini (University of Westminster) and Frédéric Mégret (McGill University) to explore the past, present and future of this norm.

Scholarship referred to in the episode includes Marco Roscini, International Law and the Principle of Non-Intervention (2024); and Frédéric Mégret, Interference in Sovereign Affairs and the Discursive Economy of International Law (2025).

There were gasps in the courtroom when the ICJ delivered its advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change on 23 July 2025. In this episode, Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School), Phoebe Okowa (Queen Mary University of London, member of the International Law Commission) and Lavanya Rajamani (Oxford) explore how, with its robust and at times radical reasoning, the Court has delivered a truly significant moment for international law.

Scholarship referred to in the episode includes Phoebe N. Okowa, State Responsibility for Transboundary Air Pollution in International Law (2000); Lavanya Rajamani, ‘Interpreting the Paris Agreement in its Normative Environment’ (2024) 77 Current Legal Problems 167; Margaret A. Young, ‘Climate Change and Law: A Global Challenge for Legal Education’ (2021) 40 University of Queensland Law Journal 351; and Margaret A. Young, ‘Fragmentation’ in Lavanya Rajamani and Jacqueline Peel (eds), Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (2021) 85.

In this episode, Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb are joined by Tom Dannenbaum to discuss two sets of issues. First, the legality of the use of force by Israel and the United States against Iran, and specifically its nuclear programme, from the standpoint of the jus ad bellum. The discussion turns around the possible justifications that Israel can give for its use of force, including the notion of stopping an imminent armed attack by Iran. Second, the recent judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the interstate case of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, which deals with various aspects of the war in Ukraine, including the downing of the MH17. In particular, the contributors analyze the Court’s approach to extraterritorial jurisdiction and to the network of relationships between the European Convention, international humanitarian law and the jus ad bellum.

Migration has become a defining issue of our time, visibly shaping political discourse, legal systems, and public imaginaries. Yet for all its salience, international law’s capacity to respond to the complexities of human mobility remains fractured, fragile, and often inadequate. In this episode, we take a hard look at the international legal architecture surrounding migration: where it comes from, where it fails, and what alternative frameworks might exist beyond the dominant focus on non-refoulement and transnational criminal law. We begin with a frank assessment: despite landmark treaties like the 1951 Refugee Convention, international law provides no comprehensive regime for facilitating – much less fostering – human mobility. Instead, migrants are increasingly subject to carceral and criminalizing legal responses, while international legal regimes defer to the sovereignty and discretion of receiving states.

Joining us for this episode are three experts in global migration law and governance: Jaya Ramji Nogales (Temple Law School in Philadelphia), Noora Lori (Boston University), and Amanda Bisong (European Center for Development Policy Management). Together, they offer critical insights on how legal scholars and practitioners might better understand, challenge, and reimagine the role of international law in regulating – and enabling – mobility across borders.

Scholarship mentioned includes Bina Fernandez’s ‘Traffickers, Brokers, Employment Agents, and Social Networks: The Regulation of Intermediaries in the Migration of Ethiopian Domestic Workers to the Middle East’ (2013) 47 International Migration Review 814–43 and Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024).

Susan Marks’ EJIL 36(1) Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?’. It’s a provocative question for international lawyers, as the trope of the family runs through the discipline in all kinds of complex, even contradictory, ways. In this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute & University of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her Foreword and the larger project it inaugurates. Their conversation ranges across the three ‘cases’ featured in the Foreword—the human family in human rights law, the ‘family of nations’, and the child as future in climate change debates—and beyond. What are the stakes of employing these familial tropes? What do they offer and what might they mask? What alternative discourses or imaginaries might be available?

The exchange moves through visual as well as textual languages of family, in the form of photography exhibitions (for a glimpse: New York Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955); the deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Family of Migrants’ (2025); as well as World Press Photo’s ‘Ties that Bind: Photography and Family’ (2025)). 

Other scholarship mentioned includes Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of the Family of Man exhibition as ‘A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Against Future Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in Koskenniemi et al (eds), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).  

International law operates in a world of rapid technological transformation. From the battlefield to the border, from online content moderation to open-source investigation, from humanitarianism to development, from counterterrorism to migration management, practices of central concern to international lawyers are progressively altered by the introduction of new technological tools. Many of these developments are troubling. The use of advanced algorithmic targeting tools used by Israel in Gaza instantiates both the tremendous civilian harm that data-driven technologies amplify and inflict, as well as the limitations of our existing legal repertoire in registering the nature, depth and scale of such harms. These injustices are layered onto the entrenched hierarchies, inequalities and sanctioned forms of violence in international law, but they also take on novel shapes as power and authority are routed along digital paths. 

In this episode, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University of London) is joined by Angelina Fisher (Guarini Global Law and Tech initiative, NYU) and André Dao (Laureate Program in Global Corporations, Melbourne Law School). Their conversation, drawing on a recent EJIL book review symposium, spans the co-constitutive relations between international law and technology, the limits of human rights, and new avenues for legal critique and resistance that reclaim a shared, collective future against its algorithmic appropriation.

Other scholarship mentioned in the course of the episode includes: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by B. Wing) (1997); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence – Translating International Law into Local Justice (2005); Fleur Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013); Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights – Freedom in a Fishbowl (2020); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2021); Henning Lahmann, ‘Self-Determination in the Age of Algorithmic Warfare’ (2025) European Journal of Legal Studies 161–214.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has sought to reverse Afghan women’s hard-won progress toward gender equality. Through dozens of decrees, policies, and statements, it has targeted the autonomy and rights of women and girls, barring them from public life and severely restricting their basic freedoms. Yet, Afghan women have refused to accept their political, social, and economic erasure. Both inside the country and within the Afghan diaspora, they have protested the Taliban’s edicts in domestic and international fora, often at great personal peril. 

In this episode of the EJIL Podcast, Afghan activist, researcher, and filmmaker Sahar Fetrat and University of Michigan Law Professor Karima Bennoune join hosts Neha Jain (Northwestern University) and Michal Saliternik (Netanya Academic College) to discuss Afghan Women’s fight for justice and accountability on the global stage. The conversation highlights the potential and limitations of various international legal processes, mechanisms, and strategies—including current and anticipated proceedings against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court—for reclaiming Afghan women’s rights. It also explores ways to strengthen international action against gender persecution and gender apartheid in Afghanistan and beyond.

Christina Voigt, Andrew Lang and Mona Ali Khalil join Megan Donaldson to reflect on the present moment in international law from the perspectives of the climate, trade and security regimes. The conversation brings out divergent senses of the history of the present; perceptions of how deep the current dissensus is; and views on the avenues open to lawyers today. (For context, and as if to underline the rapidity of geopolitical shifts at present, the window between the start of recording and the end of editing saw the US initiation of withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, announcements of major tariffs, and advocacy of forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.)

In this episode, Paola Gaeta and Roger O’Keefe join Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb to discuss recent developments at the International Criminal Court. The Court has now issued arrest warrants, or arrest warrants have been sought by the Prosecutor, for several serving heads of state or government of states that are not parties to the ICC Statute. Both states parties and non-states parties are now reacting to these warrants, with varying degrees of support or condemnation. The hosts and their guests discuss these developments, focusing on the Court’s jurisprudence on whether high-ranking officials of non-states parties can benefit from immunities that they are otherwise entitled to under general international law.

In this EJIL:The Podcast! Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Fabio Costa Morosini and Artur Simonyan join Editor-in-Chief Sarah Nouwen. Inspired by their articles on Brazilian textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law and on International Lawyers in Post-Soviet Eurasia, the conversation explores how students encounter international law during their studies, whether a study of textbooks in Brazil and Post-Soviet Eurasia leads to similar findings as Anthea Roberts’s pathbreaking study on how international law is taught in the states that are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and whether international lawyers in Brazil and Post-Soviet Eurasia feel part of what Oscar Schachter once called an invisible college of international lawyers. The gender citation gap also comes up.