Crisis in the international order

Ayşe Zarakol

Hello, everyone. My name is Ayşe Zarakol and I’m a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and I’m one of the Co-Editors of the special section, “Crisis in the International Order.” And I will be moderating this event tonight, where we will talk about some of the themes and articles of this issue, which focuses not only on the crisis of the international order, but the justice claims in that order. One of our speakers is remote, Arnulf. I can see now that he has joined.

So, I want to frame the discussion, first, by talking a little bit about what we were trying to achieve with this special section. The other Co-Editor is Chris Reus-Smit at the University of Queensland, Australia. He can’t join because of the time difference. But our starting point is something that everybody, I think, agrees with, that the liberal international order is in crisis. Even before COVID and before Russia’s War on Ukraine, there was consensus in academic circles and policy circles that the liberal international order was fraying at the seams. I don’t know how many workshops and conferences I’ve attended, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, on this issue. What’s happening with the liberal international order, can it be saved? Well, why is it, you know, why is it coming apart?

But our feeling was that amidst all this discussion about the crisis of the international order, there was an issue, an important issue, that was being overlooked, which is the fact that many of the criticisms and mobilisations against the liberal international order are actually activated by feelings of injustice. And it’s jus – so, it’s certain justice claims that motivate various actors around the world to either, you know, criticise the liberal international order or to undermine it or more directly attack it.

So, what we wanted to do is to bring together scholars who have thought about these justice claims, in a special section, and we also wanted to make the point that there isn’t one justice claim against the international liberal order, or our current international order, but a number of intersecting justice claims that often amplify each other. And we try to capture that idea with this concept, which is also, you know, in the Special Issue, in the heading, with concept of polymorphic justice, that different justice claims are coming together at this moment.

And in the Special Issue we identify a number of headings or – for these justice claims. For instance, we talk about recognitional justice claims, essentially actors in the international order who feel misrecognised, either because, you know, the order only recognises, you know, nation states, or those actors that have formal recognition, but they feel misrecognised in other ways. That they feel that they are treated as, you know, second class citizens, or that there is a certain type of hypocrisy in the liberal international order. It promises equality and equal treatment, but for reasons that have nothing to do with, you know, criterias of liberalism, treats some as less than.

Then there is the heading of distributive justice claims and the articles here focus on the tensions about – around distributional issues, around wealth or vaccines, or other types of goods, the way these are allocated in the international order, unfairly, many feel, especially between the Global North and the Global South. We have two articles dealing with that heading, one of which will be discussed here today.

And then, we have a section on institutional justice claim, the way international institutions, their rules exclude some and, you know, privilege others. Again, we have two articles under that heading. A fourth type of justice claim we talk about are historical and epistemic justice claims, how histories of the international are written and memorialised and the grievances that’s come from historical interactions that brought this international order together, two articles under that heading.

And finally, we have a section devoted to intergenerational justice claims, what we all – past – the past, but especially, you know, future generations and intergenerational justice claims es – are especially acute around the issue of climate justice or climate change and what do we all – next generation? And two articles under that heading, as well.

But the main issue, and what we will talk about today with the excellent contributors who are here, thanks to – crystalised around the division between the Global North and the Global South, because many of these justice claims are shared by the Global South and they’re deployed against the Global North, which is closely associated with the liberal international order, and that’s going to be the focus of our discussion today.

We have three contributors from the Special Issue. We will start with Arnulf Becker Lorca, who’s joining us remotely, who’s – he’s a Research Professor at the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, sorry, Chile. Sorry for my pronunciation there, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. And as I said, he’s going to talk about just – distributional justice claims.

Then we have Meera Sabaratnam, who’s a Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, and soon joining Oxford University, as Meera and Mark Laffey have an article on “Complex Interdebtedness” [means indebtedness], that falls under the heading of historical and epistemic justice claims. And our third speaker is going to be Sandeep Sengupta, who’s currently the Global Policy Lead for Climate Change at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, based in Switzerland. But he has written this article in his personal capacity and what he’s going to say doesn’t represent, necessarily, the views of that institution. He also has an affiliation with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

After our contributors have had a chance to discuss their articles, I’ll open the floor to questions and, also, get some from our online audience, hopefully, and at the end of the event, there’s going to be a reception that I hope everyone will stick around for, as well. So, let’s turn to Arnulf as our first speaker.

Arnulf Becker Lorca

Thank you, Ayşe. If you cannot hear me well, please wave and I’ll be looking at you in case things don’t work well. I’m sorry not to be there, but I’ll try to make it as smooth as possible. Hi Meera and Sandeep. It’s a glate – great pleasure to be with you to discuss this Special Issue and to introduce my sense of the relevance of justice claims from the South, having a specific focus on international law and international legal diplomacy.

So, I think my first point, which is easier, I think, to make orally than in the paper, so I’m going to start here, is that in some sense, for the South, in terms of the examples that I’m going to mention and are mentioned in the paper, it’s not so much that there are issues that – in relation to which justice demands emerge. So, we – usually, we think about climate change or COVID or the refugee crisis and, then, we think that, for some reason, the South starts to make claims of justice.

More than that, I think that it has been common in the history of international law and diplomacy since the 19th Century to think about the international itself as an area, or – in relation to which justice is one of the main issues. So, the idea would be to make a short comparison, while the North sees the international as a place of either conflict or co-operation, I think that the South sees the international as a place of injustice and therefore, many – and at the same times, as an opportunity to fight that original injustice.

So, in a very sweeping history, the idea would be that in the 19th – throughout the 19th Century, there was a demand of justice as recognition and as that demand was more or less satisfied in a history of succ – relative success, through decolonisation, that demand started to evolve into an understanding of the international as a place where you think about distributive justice. So, my – what I tried to do specifically in the article is to start from the present and realise that using COVID, the pandemic, as an example, there is a very strong trend to call for the shortcomings of the pandemic and the shortcomings of the reactions of the international community and demand greater solidarity and international co-operation. I tried to show that the South very much takes this discourse and talks about solidarity and co-operation, but at the same time, asks different things.

So, I – in the article, I distinguish between COVAX. I can explain more later, but, basically, the main system that was emerged to deal with access to vaccines for the – for developing countries. And I show how countries of the South, rather than – I mean, rather than only arguing for COVAX, they also argue for waivers to IP protections, etc., that are very much in line with a longer tradition of thinking about international diplomatic relations, where you argue for benefit transfer and differential treatment.

And the idea is on this – with this I finish the first round, is – what I want to emphasise is that while we think, within the language of liberal internationalism, that to tackle global problems you need, somehow, to strengthen solidarity and multilateral mechanisms by limiting sovereignty, the South does not see a tension between sovereignty and co-operation, but tries to get greater co-operation by enforcing, or strengthening, the entitlements of sovereignty. So, in a nutshell, the South uses sovereignty in order to force the North to co-operate.

And then, in a – in just one sentence, the article shows that this, it’s not a new strategy. This goes all the way back to the emergence of the Post-45 International Order. It goes back to a story where Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources was obtained in a diplomatic – long diplomatic fight. And from that, we can trace the expansion of sovereignty to create commodity agreement, producer associations, viral sovereignty later on. And that tradition is the one that explains today the dissonance that exists between the demands between the North and South. So, the South, while asking for solidarity, is also demanding sovereignty in order to extract redistribution.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you, Arnulf. Now, next we have Meera Sabaratnam, thank you.

Meera Sabaratnam

Thank you, Ayşe, and thank you to all of you for coming out on such a cold day. I’m going to talk a little bit about this idea of complex indebtedness as an alternative way of thinking about how the world hangs together. So, the argument that we make in the article is that the liberal international order and all of the things that we expect it to contain, such as co-operative institutions, human rights, international law, free trade and so on, has always, kind of, misunderstood itself. And that misunderstanding is very visible if, as Arnulf says, if you think from the South and how all of these institutions, these rules, these distributions of power, are experienced.

So, we argue in the paper that defenders of the liberal order have taken, let’s say, its abstract or ideal character as expressive of what it really is. It really is rule governed, it really is co-operative, it really is consensual, it really is organised through treaties that are arrived at through a process of negotiation and so on. And all of the deviations from that, instances where, let’s say, powerful countries don’t follow the rules, or they are protectionist instead of free trade, or they violate human rights in, you know, offshore sites. These things are deviations, but they don’t actually touch the basic order, which is liberal and rule governed.

Now, there’s lots of different kinds of criticisms for that, but of course, from the South one of the key arguments is that, actually, this system was always hierarchical and it was always unjust. It was established not democratically, but through empire and the adjustments, let’s say, that have been made to it, sort of, fought for through processes of decolonisation, have not managed to dislodge the underlying power relations that have organised the system. Now, there are various complexities to this, but that’s the basic thing.

So, how would you theorise a system that looks like people say it does from the Global South? So, what we do is we contrast the idea of complex interdependence. So, complex interdependence is, kind of, a key, let’s say, lynchpin of liberal ideas about what globalisation is, and we say it’s not so much interdependence, where you’ve got this reciprocity and this system of exchange, it’s a system of indebtedness. And indebtedness is the profound condition that structures, let’s say, southern sovereign agency, it structures the global financial and economic system, which is now much more finance driven than it is, let’s say, trade driven.

It also structures the struggles for justice, right? So, it’s not about simply saying these things are separate and that they’re about moral values, rather than material. What we’re trying to do is join these two things, and we say when we join these two things, politics is about who owes what to whom and why? So, you start to see the struggles for reparations, or for climate justice, or for the return of looted patrimony, as a struggle over the terms of indebtedness and obligation, and of course, in a system where Southern countries continue to pay large amounts of interest in debt.

And so, the advantage of this perspective is that it captures that hierarchical character of global order, it captures the inequality of the exchange, and it captures the reality of indebtedness as a basic political condition in which all of this happens. So, then, when we think about, oh, the nature of, let’s say, South-South co-operation, what you’re seeing, in part, is a shift towards a different framework of indebtedness. It’s an erosion of the monopoly indebtedness historically held by the Global North and a move towards a renegotiation of those terms.

And then, there’s great new literature, which I hope some of you have come across since the financial crisis, particularly thinking about debt as a form of power and the kinds of power that indebtedness exercises over us, not just as individuals, but as political communities and at the individual – at the international level. So, if we see the political order as not this, kind of, nice rules-based co-operative thing, but a real struggle over who owes what to whom, then we will understand the struggles for justice and the crisis of order that you have in the present, much more clearly. I’ll leave it there, thanks.

Ayşe Zarakol

And last, but not least, we have Sandeep Sengupta, who will talk about intergenerational justice claims, yes.

Sandeep Sengupta

Great, thank you, Ayşe, and thank you very much, also – I know Chris isn’t here, to both you and Chris for having invited me to write this article for the Special Issue and also, thanks to Chatham House for organising this event today.

Now, before I get into the issue of the intergenerational dimension, there is a bigger and a, you know, an older story that needs to be told when it comes to the issue of climate justice. Questions over equity and justice in relation to the global environment are not new, they go back a long time in history, and last year, some of you may know, marked the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference. So, this was a United Nations conference for the human environment, which was held in Sweden in 1972. And what is striking is that, even back then, issues of equity and justice, in relation to sudden perspectives and engagement on this issue, were central to the debate.

And so, what I’ve done in my article is tackle this issue in four separate parts. In the first part, I look back in history, so I trace back the engagement of developing world compared – on this issue of not only environment in general, but climate change in particular. And the key moment there, really, is the Rio Summit in 1992, which sees the birth of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

And what is really interesting about this original multilateral response to the issue of climate change is the degree and the extent to which it takes sudden considerations into account. So, it accepts the fact that the last majority of emissions have originated in the developed North. It accepts the contention that the Southern – countries of the South have a right to grow their emissions in order to achieve their Development Goals. It also accepts a situation in which the North takes on some pretty serious commitments to finance the, sort of, emissions reductions, or indeed, the adaptation measures, that Southern countries agree to take under this process and, also, to facilitate and promote technology transfer. And the high point of this is perhaps the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, where you have developed countries agree to take on legally binding emission reduction cuts in a time mount manner.

Of course, as we say, the rest is history, because thanks to the US failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international system was, in a sense, forced to adopt a new way of trying to solve this problem, and what the second part of the article does is it looks at how the negotiations that led to the development and the adoption of the Paris Agreement are – which was adopted in 2015, have taken place. And the main finding of the article, when it contrasts the two periods, is the degree to which equity and justice considerations in the new climate regime are side-lined and sent to the backdrop.

So, the commitments – so, just to compare these two regimes. So, in contrast to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which was top down, legally binding, strictly differentiated between North and South, and what we have in – under the Paris Agreement is a much more bottom up regime that is voluntary in nature, that is less legally binding. And that almost does away, entirely, with degrees of differentiation between North and South that was seen in the original regime. And many of the equity considerations, which were explicitly present in the previous agreement are, in a sense, not that evident anymore.

In the third part of the article, I look at, you know, where are we now, seven years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement? And the picture is not encouraging. So, we have a situation in which developed country promises either in terms of their emission reduction obligations are not met, or indeed, their commitments on finance. So, you – some of you may remember developed countries back in 2009 agreed to mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries meet their climate challenges and their climate mitigation/adaptation measures. Not much of that has actually been delivered.

So, what does this all mean for global order? And this is what I tried to look at in the final part of the article, where again, all of us are familiar with the reality of the climate crisis that the world is facing today. And the worst impacts, sort of, of course, felt by the poorest around the world and most of the poorest are in the developing South, but I think there’s one point also to – worth mentioning, is that there is no one South. There are several Souths and you have a situation which – why – you know, one of the reasons why the entire negotiations on climate change progressed the way they did was because, on the one hand, you had the small island developing states, that were the most vulnerable to climate change. You had the oil producing nations, which of course, their bread and butter depends on the use and generation of fossil fuels, and then, of course, you have the emerging powers in the more recent period, the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and the South Africans of the world, that have complicated this picture of the North-South divide.

But having said that, some of the underlying features and the structural features of the North-South division on climate change remain as salient as – they are now as they did way back. And some of the injustices that are reflected in the inability of poorer countries, poorer peoples, who face the impacts of climate change, threaten, in a sense, to undermine the legitimacy of the international order going forward, surely – purely because of the sheer scope and scale of the climate crisis that the world is facing today.

One final point on the intergenerational dimension. Now, obviously, climate change is a problem that has an intergenerational – has a matter of intergenerational equity. What do the future generations – I mean, they haven’t done anything to cause the problem, right? And yet, they are the ones who will be feeling the brunt of this challenge, going forward. But the point I make in this article is that it’s impossible, indeed, it’s counterproductive, to separate out the elements of intergenerational equity and intragenerational equity. Indeed, it would be a perversity of justice, I conclude, if responses to climate change were to end by pitting the poor of the – pitting the people of the future against the poor of today. Thank you, I’ll just leave it at that.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you, thank you very much. Now, we will turn to the audience. I can see there are already many great questions online, but I first want to give the audience in the room a chance to ask questions. Maybe we’ll gather three and then, we’ll turn to the panellists and then, I’ll – in the next round I’ll turn to our online audience and get questions from them. So, please your – raise your hands and introduce yourselves before asking your question. Yes, we’ll start with the lady in the front, here.

Hilde Rapp

Okay.

Ayşe Zarakol

Like – maybe for those in the back.

Hilde Rapp

I can tell. So, thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

It’s…

Hilde Rapp

Hilde Rapp, Centre for International Peacebuilding. Thank you so much all four of you for a brilliant, first of all, a journ – an article in the International Relations Journal, which really, kind of, sums up the complexities, and your individual contributions today. I was wondering whether the elephant in the room, you two, kind of, mentioned a little bit, in terms of the underlying structures of inequality, aren’t to do with venture capitalisms underlying the whole liberal international order.

Ayşe Zarakol

Okay, thank you. Yes, we’ll take two more, yes, yeah, so, yes. Oh, okay, there is the microphone, yeah.

Member

Thank you very much. Thank you to the panellists for the very interesting take on the international order. For me, just a short question is this issue of the Global South and Global North, and you have mentioned it very clearly, that it’s – sometimes we simplify it by putting them all into one box and talking about the world in terms of Global North/Global South. There are many nuances in between and it often depends on who is in power and who is in government, and we could see some of the countries, example Brazil and so forth, if you have a change of government, you have a very different change of focus. So, I think, moving forward, we’ve got to try and look at this – yeah, try not to divide North and South, but sometimes look at them in terms of what their individual values are and how that values are being projected on international stage.

One of the articles I’m busy writing, and I hope I’m able to publish it – I’m a former South African Diplomat, by the way, that has relocated to the UK – is this idea of alliance building, we’re in an alliance stage. There is no absolute power, there’s relative power. So, we’re finding what is happening is major powers are making visits all around the world, because there’s a gap in the power dynamic. They need to fill the gap. The bigger the gap, the more the alliances, and in that, there’s a very strategic decision is being taken.

What that means is that the international order is no longer business as usual, but that’s giving power to the – to countries that are developing. Yes, we can use the term there, the Global South, but some of the countries in the South, because they can assert themselves more in a negotiating position, they are basically saying, “If you want that power gap recompensated, this is our needs and you have to satisfy our needs.” So, the world is changing where that power dynamic is now becoming more equal than previously and that has further implications. I have a whole lot of things on that, but we can also see under COVID how the Global South and Global North divide stopped and then the – many other countries were working together. So, I think this whole concept of how the legal world order is changing needs to be relooked. Thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you for the comments, and yes, the gentleman back – yeah.

Member

Thank you. So, I’m going to try to focus more on the very current moment when it comes to, yeah, viewing the Global South like, a view of the climate thing. I think that the Global South has recently, like, started to buy the idea that the liberal global order is, kind of, universal and at the same time, it’s internally valid for development questions. So, we’ve got, like, more countries trying to join and get more integrated in the international society and I guess, yeah, I do understand that it shouldn’t be like a Global North and Global South, but I think it’s about how much the Global South countries are integrated in the international economy. And this is why, like, you get, like, latecomers and too latecomers and who are betting on the international order.

So, I think that with the climate now coming and imposing restrictions over the expansion of the benefits of this international economy, so I think the Global South is – kind of, faces a deadlock, where they don’t have any prospect to grow economically and at the same time, they have to, like, submit and be part of the responses towards climate change. So, I think, like, how do you think the latecomers, like India, Brazil, two latecomers, like Egypt, other countries, can deal with this, kind of, deadlock of economic prosperity and at this stage? Thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. So, you know, we have a question about whether the justice claims are actually against international order, or maybe it’s really about capitalism, and then some scepticism about, you know, the Global North-Global South division and also some questions about what the Global South can do in order to get what it wants. So, we’ll turn to the panellists. Please take any of these themes. Arnulf, did you have something to say…

Arnulf Becker Lorca

I’m think…

Ayşe Zarakol

…in response?

Arnulf Becker Lorca

Yeah, I think the questions are related. So, I agree with the elephant of the room comment and I think it has something to do about distinguishing the challenges that capitalism imposes on the North and the South, actually. So, diminishing terms of trade would be a very big way of diagnosing from the South the problems and the challenges of development. And I think that the idea would be that there are many capitalisms and the ways in which capitalism imposes challenges in the South has something to do with this continuity that I was explaining before.

So, on the one hand, it seems to me that we understand, many times, rightly so, the North-South division as a heuristics to understand, but in terms of the strategies that I was making reference is ver – it’s a very strong descriptive insight. So, it turns out that, to give just one example, today the negotiations, the marine genetic resources beyond national jurisdiction, is aligned the same countries under the G77 that allies countries in relation to the 1992 negotiations on climate and biodiversity, etc.

So, I think that there is a strong continuity. To give another example, and the non-aligned movement has been negotiating as a group on nuclear non-proliferation since 68, until today. So, I think that one of the challenges of actually, of understanding the Global South, is that as these strategies are less apparent from the North, it – one tends to think that the North-South division has more to do with either a heuristic device or ideology. And I would suggest that in terms of – even in terms of pure descriptive strategies, there’s this strong continuity.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Meera, yeah, anything?

Meera Sabaratnam

Sure. I’ll try and touch quickly on all three questions. On the question of capitalism, I mean, yes, of course, one of the longstanding criticisms of liberal thought in general is it’s division between the political and the economic. And one of the things we persistently do in international relations is treat a lot of international economic questions as technical matters, right? The terms of debt or the nature of financial co-operation, or harmonisation of trade rules, as being just, you know, something that the bureaucrats will take care of. But these are profoundly political questions, ‘cause they distribute all kinds of rights and entitlements and have ongoing obligations. So, one of the things we’re trying to do with the language of complex indebtedness is reunite the political and the economic things in our – in the way we think about it.

On the Global South and the Global North question, I mean, I would agree with Arnulf that there is something meaningful about the Global South category, even though it can be disassembled. But this is true for all large categories, right? We can say, “Oh, there’s such a diversity of women in the world that we shouldn’t have a single category of woman,” but we can still say, structurally, women are subject to certain kinds of sexism, right, that makes the category meaningful. So, in the same way, even though the Global South might incorporate, let’s say, Mozambique on one day and China on another day, like, it’s still a potentially meaningful category, although China is at the very limit, in some areas, of what that would mean.

And this comes to the last point about the global economy and integration and this may be not responding to your question directly, but it’s about this imaginary that we have that development is about further integration and catchup with the global economy. So, to use Mozambique as my example, ‘cause I did my PhD research there, Mozambique has been integrated into the global economy for more than 500 years, right? It’s been part of all of the triangular trades in the Indian Ocean, in the Atlantic Ocean. The question is, on what terms is it integrated, right? So, this is the real question and the – when you talk about interdependence as a global – kind of, maybe a global positive, as developing co-operation, it’s actually can be a site of vulnerability. And so, the terms of integration are really important and the terms of debt are really important, of course. The US is hugely indebted, but structurally, in a very, very different position to Mozambique, which, you know, quantitatively, has much, much less debt, both proportionally and absolutely.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Sandeep?

Sandeep Sengupta

Great, thanks and thank you for your questions. Maybe I’ll take the latter two questions. You know, the issue of North-South and whether the South has now become more powerful, compared to the past, you know, at least certain blocs within the South have become more powerful, compared to the past, I think can be contested. You know, for a while, no doubt, you know, China, Indias, Brazils, South Africas, of this world, form a category and they have a greater say now than compared to the past.

I think the question that we ask – need to ask ourselves, is the following. You know, why did, back in the 1990s, you know, even back – no, let’s just stick to the 1990s, why was the South able to negotiate a much better deal, a climate deal, in the 1990s than they did in 2015? If the so-called emerging powers were, indeed, as powerful as one might think, then would they – would – could they have not negotiated a better deal?

And there, I think – you know, that, in a sense, points to some of the structural frailties that still exist within the South and, also, the important of coalitional negoti – of coalitions for negotiation. Back in – back when the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, the principal fissure was between the European Union and the US, over differences of what type of climate regime they wanted to build. Whereas, in the current dynamic, you have a united North competing against a completely fragmented South, with different interests, so different motivations, and some of these differences, in a sense, also being exploited by the North. And the fact of the matter that remains is that even when we talk about the large emerging powers, their process of development has not completed. They’re still trying to integrate into a world economy and develop into a system, the historic rules of which have been set by the industrialised North.

So, some of these dynamics, I think, are still playing out and how, you know, how they interrelate in trying to develop while singularly answering your question, the real struggle is how do you develop in a carbon constraint world, in a situation where the West hasn’t kept up to its historical obligations. The carbon budget is ever diminishing, attempts are being made to push the burden of mitigation from the North to the emerging countries of the developing South, whereas the most vulnerable are the most – you know, the small island states and the least developed countries, that have done the least to cause the problem, but are yet positioned to face its worst impacts. So, it’s quite a complicated situation, but the salience of this issue remains very crucial today. Thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Now I will turn to the online audience and their questions. I was going to ask them to unmute themselves, but I think it will – there are lots of questions, so I think it will be faster if I just read them in – and then, that way, we can come back to the audience here and maybe do a couple more rounds.

So, I’ll start with the question from Derek West, who asks, “Who determines who owes what to whom?” Oh, a short, but difficult, question. And then, Rosemary Foot asks, “The introduction to the Special Issue states that international law has been challenged as “a biased Eurocentric institution, deeply implicated in the imperial practices that’s seeded the modern order.” Has that view of international law been transcended? Is it possible that this trans – national cultural practice has evolved to the extent where justice claims can be expressed, debated or – and even resolved?” And Abdul Malik Badamasi asks, “How do we address epistemic injustice claims, domestically and internationally, in the current reality of the fundamental reordering of societies?”

So, those are the questions, the three questions from the online audience for this round [pause]. Anybody? Who would like to go first? Sandeep, yes.

Sandeep Sengupta

Yeah, maybe I’ll try and take a bash at the “Who determines who owes what to whom?” question. At least in the climate context, it might be easier to, you know, quickly come to an answer for that, because we know that climate change is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a stock problem, so it’s not just the amount of greenhouse gases that have come year-on-year, or even decade-by-decade, but the cumulative collection of greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

And back in 1990, when the world met for the Second Climate Conference, it explicitly – the Ministerial Declaration put it quite explicitly. It said that “Three fourth of the world’s total emissions come from the industrialised world,” right? The striking part of it is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the world’s foremost authority on climate science, released its Sixth Assessment Report last year. And what that report found, and what I found striking and I’ve referred to it in my article, is that even 30 years after Rio, 60% of cumulative emissions are still from the developed world, 60% of cumulative fossil fuel and industrial emissions. And the IPCC, again, finds that, you know, even though the relative share of developed and developing countries has changed, insofar as the absolute emission reductions of the developed world, they are still not as much where – basically, where they need to be.

So, in terms of who owes what to whom, at least on the climate change side, there’s a way of breaking up – you know, if you go by the principle that, you know, if you break something, you are responsible for it, you are accountable for it, then there’s a way of computing the equity numbers, at least to some extent. Thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

Meera, would you like to go second?

Meera Sabaratnam

No, but fine. So, “Who determines who owes what to whom?” So, that’s an interesting way of phrasing the question, ‘cause you can read it as who should determine who owes what to whom, and who does determine who owes what to whom? And if we take the example – so, actually, three years ago I was at – four years ago I was at Chatham House, and we were debating about whether items should go back to museums or to countries in the Global South from museums in the North?

And even in this short time, the conversation about who owes what to whom, that’s changed, right? Because at that time, there was a fairly settled view amongst the, let’s say, the hierarchies of someone with the British Museum sector, that things would, of course, not go back and this was prohibited by law and that there would never be a consensus around these things. And yet, today we are seeing the change, the evolution, the breakdown of this consensus and what is behind that? So, there’s a large set of reasons behind that. Some of these are geopolitical, some of these are about good diplomatic relations, but others are about public sentiment, others are about pressure and about changing ideas of what is right.

So, to think about who owes what to whom and maybe to venture slightly into the who should decide who owes what to whom, we might be able to agree that at least having what the Editors describe as “a fair accounting of the past,” so some kind of epistemic justice, is a necessary basis on which to have a public conversation about who owes what to whom. So, if you don’t know, let’s say, what was stolen, or if you don’t know how much interest the Sudan plays – pays to the UK, then you can’t really have an informed conversation about who owes what to whom. And so, at least the preliminary process of accounting for that system is something which might inform – which must be a collective, kind of, deliberation.

The second and last thing I’ll maybe say on that is that we used to have this idea that the domestic and the international were very different political spaces. That the domestic was organised by people who had very clear relationships to each other, through to citizenship and through taxation and through living together and sharing a national culture, but the international was something else. And that works, again, at an abstract level, but concretely, it has almost no relationship to the way the modern world actually evolved and so, we cannot use the international as a sort of, endpoint for our obligations, as things like the climate conversation show very profoundly, but even other conversations about economics and culture and so on.

Ayşe Zarakol

Cool.

Meera Sabaratnam

Thanks.

Ayşe Zarakol

Arnulf, maybe the international law question, the answer will be…

Arnulf Becker Lorca

Yes, I’ll answer that and actually, I’m going to try to connect it to the who owes what question. So, I think it’s a very important question, because the mainstream of international law has been in the project of overcoming the histories of colonialism since the beginning under the idea that neutral concepts, after self-determination, would account – or would materialise that overcoming. On the other hand, more critical traditions in international law are, very rightly so, to remind us of the continuities of inequalities and even formal inequalities in international law.

However, I think that the stories that the – this presentation and the issue is rising, are ones that – where we see both interplaying. So, the idea that there is some overcoming and the continuities are here, and I think I’ll use Sandeep’s reference to 1992 as an example. So, she mentioned, clearly, that the difference in the grand bargaining of 1992, so I’m talking about the Rio conference, have to do with a more clear North-South political bargaining. But for that to be true, in terms of legal strategies, there was a long preparation in relation to the arguments in the bargaining. So, in 1962 developing countries, or the Third World, manages to pass a declaration on the principle of sovereignty over natural resources.

Now, if we shift forward in time, under international law in the 19th Century, resources were patrimony of mankind, rather than the sovereignty of decolonised states. And that tradition moves forward and when we arrive to 1992, states from the Global South said – say, “Very well this agenda of environmental protection. However, we’re not going to give up the – our claim to sovereignty. And if we’re going to claim limits or claim to sovereignty in the name of common interest, is going to be under either differential treatment, technology transfer or direct compensation, and the idea would be that that tradition moves forward. Now, if that is the case, the existing international legal position and therefore, the international legal order in general, is some hybrid monster that still has many inequalities, but in certain instances, has been used as a tool of resistance.

Now, that brings me to the question of “Who owes what to whom?” So, I think, traditionally, if this is true, the example I have gave as a semi-success, the position of the – of states from the Global South has always been who the international community as a whole determines who owes what to whom. But at the same time, they’re saying, in terms of their strategies, “We, the South, determine it for ourselves in this continuous bargaining,” where the North and the South encounter themselves as groups. So, 1992 would be a great example. Before 68, on Nuclear Non-Proliferation, GATT after that and the Doha negotiations in relation to trade, for example.

Ayşe Zarakol

Okay, thank you. Now maybe we turn to our in the room audience for another round questions, yeah. Wait for the microphone. Please introduce yourselves.

Cameron Brogan-Higgins

[Pause] Thank you. Cameron Brogan-Higgins, LSE student. I was just wondering about, if you take a bit of a step back on the perception of international justice or order. And I was just wondering your thoughts or comments on whether – how you see the internet reshaping the perception of international order or justice, and whether it be by mis or disinformation, or by, alternatively, on the other side of the coin, a rise of universal societal values?

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Yes, yes, the lady in the back, yeah.

Nanticha Avorno

Hello, I’m Nanticha Avorno, an economic student at King’s College London. So, I have two main questions. So, number one is for Dr Sengupta, which is, why do you think the issue of equity amongst nations in the different developmental state have been, kind of, ignore or taken a backseat in the Paris Agreement? And my second question is for everyone on the panel. The question is, can the feeling of injustice, you know, between Global North and Global South, ever be fully addressed in the liberal global order, given how, you know, eco – like, drain of wealth and economic power, kind of, determines who’s more powerful than other nations? Thank you.

Ayşe Zarakol

Yes, yes, thank you, thanks.

Terri Paddock

Hi, my name’s Terri Paddock. I’m a Chatham House member. This is, kind of, following on from those two questions and just the title of the talk being Crisis in the International Order, do you think there is hope? Can the crisis be solved and if not solved, then what, if anything, does give you some modicum of hope?

Ayşe Zarakol

Okay, thanks. Yes, our panellists, maybe this time we start with Meera.

Meera Sabaratnam

Me, oh.

Ayşe Zarakol

Yes.

Meera Sabaratnam

I might start with this question of can the feeling of injustice ever be addressed in a liberal international order, given its inequalities? And I suppose this relates to the second – the last question about whether there’s any hope. I think the answer to this question actually turns a lot on what happens with climate change, right? Because there’s a real consensus about what is happening, what causes it, what the likely outcome is, who’s going to be affected? You know, and so, there’s not a lot of disagreement – I mean, of course, there is disagreement at the fringes, but at least in, sort of – so, can we deal with that? And if we can’t deal with that, what does that tell us about the international order? What does it tell us about the international order that the term ‘reparations’ was so contentious that it had to be changed to ‘loss and damage’ in Egypt, right, and at COP 27, because they simply couldn’t deal with the idea that there would be ongoing obligations?

So, thinking about that makes me, kind of, pessimistic, because if you cannot absorb the nature of our mutual entanglement, if you cannot absorb the mut – the nature of the interconnectedness and the crisis that is, you know, is a real, kind of, life – lives at stake crisis, because you are so attached to your en – other entitlements, can we co-operate our way out of this problem? It doesn’t seem so.

So, is there any hope? Actually, no, I do think – so, there – things change, right? The liberal international order has not stayed the same since its inception. The liberal international order of the early 20th Century and the early 21st Century do look quite different, in many respects, and citizenship – and citizens are taking different views on what is happening and how it’s happening and the causes of it. So, yeah, so it will change and there may well be a necessity for greater co-operation, let’s say, to do with climate change or, in the wake of the pandemic, greater uplift, as there was after the devastation of the Second World War, right? So, there are moments where crises are so profound that they inspire change. And there are def – there’s definitely evidence of some kinds of that thing happening, so maybe I can be a little bit optimistic there.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Arnulf?

Arnulf Becker Lorca

So, I think the – so, I’ve learned things about the history in a bitter long – in a longer timeframe. I think the liberal international law – order is – in fact, has opened avenues of justice that didn’t exist before. So that, to some extent, we think that the liberal international order expanded globally through a history of colonialism. But in fact, that was not the international liberal order and in fact, we can think about the expansion of that order through the process of self-determination and appropriation of those rules. So, from the point of view of the South, a rule-based order that recommends this self-determination, sovereign autonomy and equality, is an order that actually opens many avenues for justice, and in that, I think there is always hope of realisation of that ideal.

Now, how that hope matches the crisises of today, I think then, there – we have a big problem, because the shift from Kyoto to Paris is actually a backlash against equality, as substantive equality, and against the idea of differential treatment, in favour of countries of the South. And unfortunately, here, the stakes are too high, so should we wait until really climate change amounts to a crisis as serious as World War Two? Maybe that’s the point we have to wait, but that would be very unfortunate. So, my hopes are very much qualified by that, so at what point will the North accept the justice demands of the South before it’s too late?

Ayşe Zarakol

Yes, thank you, and Sandeep, yeah.

Sandeep Sengupta

Yeah, thanks and then, since, Arnulf already, you know, took some of the points that I was intending to make, but – so, thanks for that, Arnulf. But maybe to get into a little more granularity, you know, I mean, you know, how does the Paris Agreement differ from, you know, the previous regime? I think the main difference is that of differentiation. I mean, under the previous regime you had a pretty hard firewall between North and South, in terms of definite obligations, bet it in emissions reduction, being on financing that the North had promised to the South and indeed, to the international community. And now, under the Paris Agreement, all of that has become, you know, more ambiguous and in a sense, even contested. And that ambiguity, in a sense, reflects, you know, the – sort of, the erosion of equity in the entirety of the climate regime that we saw previously.

Now, you know, there is much less differentiation between North and South. There is a lot more ambiguity as to who is responsible for climate finance and at successive, sort of, milestones of the negotiation process. You know, what started off as – in 1992, with developed countries agreeing to cover, there were lots of shalls in the Rio Convention UNFCCC document, kind of, developed countries agreed to cover the full agreed incremental costs of all the mitigation and adaptation measures that were to be undertaken by developing countries. And come Copenhagen and come Paris, you know, that’s translated to something more concrete. On the one hand, you have $100 billion per year figure, but then it’s about mobilising $100 billion, whatever mobilising means, from a wide variety of sources, public, private and others. Also, in Paris, you had, you know, other countries, you know, are welcome to also contribute financing.

So, there’s been a lot of blurring on the issue of climate financing and even the $100 billion per year, interpret it in whatever you like, that commitment has not been – you know, there was an Indian Ministry of Finance study that said that, you know – against OECD claims of generating $60 billion per year, I think it was back in 2017 or 2018, the Indian Ministry of Finance said that “Look, if all the loopholes are taken out and all the double counting is taken out, what actually accounts to climate financing is only $2 billion.”

And of course, you know, there are different, sort of, ways in clim – in which climate finance has been sliced and diced. There is no agreed definition on what climate finance is. Equally, there is no agreed definition within the agreed – definition of equity within the Paris Agreement, and even though it’s – you know, even the word ‘climate justice’ is there in the Paris Agreement, but it’s completely thrown in, you know, completely irrelevant preambular paragraph, in which a host of other things are also thrown in. And there’s a reason why that happened and the reason for that is power politics, in which you had increased unity in the North and greater and growing fragmentation in the South.

So, in terms of, you know, what does it mean for international order going forward? You know, I’d like to be optimistic and think that, you know, in the enlightened self-interest of the developed world, just given the sheer patience that climate change is eventually going to bring upon everyone’s door, you know, there is – there’ll be, sort of, more equitable sharing of the roles, responsibilities, conversation. Maybe I’ll just stop it there.

Ayşe Zarakol

Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. There were many questions online that we didn’t get to, but we will download them and share with the panellists. And for those in the room, I hope you will join us in the reception that will follow, and I’d like to remind everybody that Special – the issue that has our special section is available open access until April 9th. So, if you want to read more about these themes, that’s the place to go, and thank you very much for joining us tonight in this discussion.

Arnulf Becker Lorca

Thank you.