13.7 — The UN and International Law

There is no world police force, no world court with compulsory jurisdiction over everyone, and no world legislature.

So in what sense is international law law at all?

John Austin's nineteenth-century answer was that it is not — that law requires a sovereign who commands and can punish, and that international law is therefore positive morality rather than law.

And states behave as though it is law, most of the time, on most matters, which requires explaining.

Why states comply

Four mechanisms, and none of them is a police force.

Reciprocity. Most international law is a set of arrangements each state wants because others follow them too. Diplomatic immunity is the clearest case: every state wants its own diplomats protected, so every state protects others'. The same logic governs postal delivery, air traffic control, telecommunications standards, maritime navigation and the recognition of passports.

These work extraordinarily well and are invisible because they work. A letter posted in Chennai reaches Peru. An aircraft leaves Delhi and lands in Frankfurt under agreed procedures. Your phone works abroad. That is international law functioning, and nobody notices.

Reputation. A state that breaks agreements finds future agreements harder to make and more expensive.

Domestic incorporation. Most international law operates through national legal systems. A treaty is ratified, legislation is passed, and domestic courts enforce it against domestic actors. That is where the coercion actually happens.

And retaliation. Sanctions, trade measures, and — rarely — force.

Where compliance fails is precisely where these are weakest: when a powerful state's core interests are engaged, when reciprocity does not apply, and when nobody can retaliate effectively. Which is to say: exactly the cases everyone argues about.

The United Nations

Structure, because most criticism of the UN is aimed at the wrong organ.

The General Assembly. All 193 members, one vote each. Its resolutions are not binding. It is a forum, and its value is that every state has a seat and a speech, which is not nothing for small states with no other route to attention.

The Security Council. Fifteen members: five permanent with a veto — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — and ten elected for two-year terms. Its resolutions under Chapter VII are binding and can authorise sanctions and force.

The veto is the organisation's central design feature and its central complaint.

The case for it was made in Chapter 12.1: the League failed because the great powers were outside it. A body that could pass binding resolutions against a great power would be ignored or would drive that power out. The veto keeps everyone inside at the cost of paralysis on great-power disputes.

The case against it is that it means the Council cannot act on any matter involving a permanent member or its close allies, which includes a large share of the world's serious conflicts.

And the composition reflects 1945. No permanent African, Latin American or South Asian seat. India has campaigned for one for decades, supported by four of the five permanent members at various points and blocked in practice by the requirement that any reform pass the Council itself, where it faces the veto it seeks to expand.

The Secretariat, headed by the Secretary-General, who has almost no formal power and whose influence is entirely persuasive.

The International Court of Justice settles disputes between states — and only where both accept its jurisdiction, which is the limitation. Its advisory opinions are influential and non-binding.

And the specialised agencies, which is where most of the actual delivery happens.

What the UN system actually does

A necessary corrective, because the political organs dominate the coverage.

The World Health Organization coordinated the smallpox eradication campaign — the only human disease ever deliberately eliminated, declared eradicated in 1980, having killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. It runs the influenza surveillance network that determines each year's vaccine composition. Its pandemic performance in 2020 was criticised on timing and on deference to member states, and the criticism has substance.

UNICEF and the vaccination programmes, which are a substantial part of the child mortality decline of Chapter 11.12.

The World Food Programme, the largest humanitarian food provider.

UNHCR, for refugees.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the Universal Postal Union and the World Meteorological Organization — the boring ones that make the world function.

The IPCC, which assesses climate science (Chapter 14.2).

And the treaty framework: the Law of the Sea, the Montreal Protocol on ozone (Chapter 2.1), the conventions on genocide, refugees, torture and the rest.

The Montreal Protocol deserves emphasis as the standing counter-example to pessimism. Universally ratified, targets met and strengthened, the ozone layer measurably recovering. It is proof that international agreement can work, and Chapter 14.5 examines what was different about it.

Peacekeeping

Not in the Charter. Invented in practice, and the terminology matters: Chapter VI covers peaceful settlement, Chapter VII covers enforcement, and peacekeeping was described by one Secretary-General as Chapter Six and a Half.

The classic model: deployed with the consent of the parties, neutral, using force only in self-defence, monitoring a ceasefire both sides want.

Where it works, it works. Cyprus, the Golan, Liberia and Sierra Leone are cases where missions stabilised situations for years or decades.

Where it fails, it fails catastrophically, and the failures share a cause: a mission designed for consent deployed where there is no peace to keep.

Rwanda, 1994 (Chapter 11.11): a force present, its commander's warning ignored, the force reduced rather than reinforced.

Srebrenica, 1995: a declared safe area defended by a lightly armed battalion that was overrun.

And the abuse record must be stated. Sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers has been documented in multiple missions. The UN has no criminal jurisdiction over troops, who remain subject to their own national law, and prosecutions by contributing states have been rare. Reforms have tightened reporting and repatriation and the accountability gap remains.

India is among the largest contributors of peacekeeping troops in the organisation's history, with over 250,000 personnel deployed across some fifty missions and around 180 killed in service.

Sanctions

The main non-military instrument, and its record deserves precision.

Comprehensive sanctions, as on Iraq in the 1990s, impose costs on civilian populations while the leadership adapts. The humanitarian consequences in Iraq are disputed in scale and were serious enough that the approach was largely abandoned.

Targeted sanctions on individuals and entities — asset freezes, travel bans, export controls on specific goods — are the current standard and are more precise.

What the research finds. Sanctions rarely change a government's core behaviour. They can impose costs, signal disapproval, constrain capability, and provide a policy option between doing nothing and using force — which is their real function. And they frequently strengthen the target's leadership domestically by supplying an external enemy.

What international law cannot do

Stated plainly.

It cannot stop a permanent Security Council member. The invasions of Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2022 were both conducted by permanent members, and in both cases the Council could take no action.

It cannot enforce against a state that rejects jurisdiction. The Philippines won an arbitration on the South China Sea in 2016 and China rejected the ruling (Chapter 12.10).

And it is applied selectively. The same powers that invoke it against adversaries decline it for themselves and their allies, consistently. This is the strongest argument made against the system and it is factually correct.

What it can do

And the balance is not nothing.

It settles boundary and maritime disputes routinely and quietly, and dozens have been resolved by the ICJ and by arbitration without war.

It provides the framework for the functioning international systems above.

It creates a standard against which conduct is measured, which changes the cost of violating it even when it does not prevent it — and Chapter 11.11 showed the specific instance: the word genocide was avoided in 1994 precisely because using it would have created an obligation, which is evidence that the obligation had force.

And it gives small states a language in which to argue. A weak state has no other instrument, and a system of rules, however imperfectly applied, is more useful to the weak than a system of pure power.

Which is the honest summary. International law works well on the technical and reciprocal, poorly on the political, and not at all against a great power's core interests — and the alternative to it is not a better system but no system.

Where this shows up in your life

Every flight, every international call, every parcel, every vaccine schedule, and every weather forecast beyond your own country's borders depends on it.

And India's position in it is the one to watch. The world's most populous country, without a permanent seat, arguing for reform of a structure designed in 1945 by five states two of which no longer exist in the form they had. Whether that structure adapts or is bypassed by other arrangements is one of the open questions of the next twenty years (Chapter 12.10).

What the next page covers

Chapter 13.8 closes this Part with everyday civics — passports and visas and what each actually is, how taxes work and what happens to the money, what a licence or a registration actually establishes, how to deal with a police stop or a court summons, and the practical machinery of citizenship that most people are never taught and encounter only when something goes wrong.