Governance Without Consensus: International Law in an Increasingly Multipolar and Legally Pluralistic World
The Georgetown Journal of International Law (GJIL) invites submissions for a special issue exploring how international law can function amid shifts in the global distribution of power and authority.
International law has always operated amidst disagreement, and one of its central functions is to provide mechanisms to express and adjudicate competing claims. A lack of consensus does not alone indicate the breakdown of international law. However, global governance today faces challenges both from increasingly competitive geopolitics and rapid technological innovation, which together are contributing to shifts in the distribution of power and exercise of authority.
Geopolitical competition is sharpening disagreement over core conceptions of governance and the functioning of multilateral institutions. Technological innovation is changing where and how authority is exercised, while also creating new cross-border challenges that require coordinated responses. These changes require international law to adapt to address disagreement on a broader scale and over more fundamental questions.
GJIL thus puts forward the following central inquiry: How can international law adapt to provide effective means of coordination, dispute resolution, and meaningful constraints on power amidst a broader distribution of power and greater legal pluralism? Simply put, how can international law function effectively when consensus is limited and power and authority are more distributed?
The symposium will explore this shared inquiry across four areas:
- International trade and development: How might international trade law better reflect countries’ different economic realities and development priorities while preserving common ground for coordination and legal constraint? Submissions might consider the weakening of formal multilateral adjudication, increased reliance on national-security exceptions, or the growing role of regional, bilateral, and softer forms of coordination.
- International security: Amidst more distributed power, how can international law provide meaningfully accountability and respond to acts of aggression? Submissions might explore the role of alliances and coalitions, regional or domestic institutions, civil society, or other less centralized mechanisms that can serve as a check on power.
- International financial regulation: How should international regulatory coordination and institutions adapt as practical authority and implementation of regulatory mandates increasingly shift to networks, protocols, and financial infrastructure that may lack an identifiable intermediary or clear jurisdictional home? Submissions might examine where regulatory power resides in these systems and how public institutions can functionally organize around it.
- Emerging technology governance: How can international law facilitate experimentation and innovation while supporting baseline protections and cross-border functionality? Submissions might consider how governance can accommodate local preferences and different regulatory approaches while also avoiding a race to the bottom.
The Editorial Board is seeking papers that take up the central inquiry within any of these four areas through the lens of a specific institutional or technological challenge and consider what meaningful adaptation might look like.
Selected manuscripts will be published in Volume 58 of GJIL, and authors whose papers are selected will be invited to present their work at GJIL’s biannual symposium to be hosted at Georgetown Law in April 2027.
Authors may submit either a completed manuscript or an abstract (500–750 words) by October 31, 2026. Authors whose abstracts are selected for further consideration will be invited to submit a full manuscript by December 31, 2026. All publication decisions will be made following editorial review of the completed manuscript. Manuscripts should be less than 20,000 words (excluding footnotes), follow standard academic formatting, and use citations that conform to the Bluebook, 22nd edition.
