The first part of this discussion examined the growing tendency of powerful states not merely to violate international legal rules but to reshape their meaning through increasingly expansive interpretations of self-defence, sovereignty, and necessity. The concern is not simply that breaches occur, but that they are progressively normalised within the language and institutions of international law itself. Examples such as Gaza, alongside broader patterns of interventionist practice and selective respect for sovereignty, illustrate the extent to which the post-war legal settlement is under sustained pressure.

Against that background, the second part turns from diagnosis to structure. If the prohibition on the use of force is weakening, the question is not only why this is happening, but also whether the existing international system retains the institutional and normative capacity to resist that erosion. This requires closer examination of the limitations of the UN framework, the constraints of collective security mechanisms, and the extent to which meaningful legal responses remain available.

The Need to Address Institutional Impediments in UN Decision-Making

Here, any honest analysis must also grapple with the UN Security Council’s veto problem. The veto was a deliberate design feature, accepted as the price of great-power participation. But it means the collective security system is structurally incapable of responding to violations by, or protected by, any permanent member. Accordingly, reform efforts should be intensified.

The norms and principles, such as the “Uniting for Peace” procedure and R2P, on the one hand, and the relevant mechanisms, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), on the other, offer partial alternatives and deserve more serious utilisation than they currently receive. So does the development of clearer legal standards around economic coercion – an area where the law remains underdeveloped and where powerful actors currently operate in a legal grey zone.

What is Actually at Stake

In view of the foregoing, it is hard to remain optimistic. The trajectory is not good. The prohibition on the use of force is under sustained pressure from multiple directions simultaneously: expansive doctrinal reinterpretation, selective enforcement, and an institutional architecture that is structurally ill-equipped to hold great powers accountable. States currently exploiting legal flexibility may find, as power balances shift, that they have weakened the very rules that could one day protect them. But that long-term self-interest argument has rarely been persuasive enough on its own to change behaviour in the short term.

A clear choice now confronts the international system: either to uphold a rule-based order grounded in legal constraints or to accept a power-driven, unpredictable, and unstable system. The former may be politically challenging, but it remains the only viable path to sustainable peace and stability. The latter, by contrast, invites long-term instability in exchange for short-term gain. The preservation of international law is therefore not merely a normative aspiration but a practical necessity. If the current trajectory of erosion is not reversed, the international system risks becoming increasingly fragmented, unpredictable, and prone to conflict. Once the long-established threshold of applicable international law is eroded, such an outcome would represent a collective loss for all members of the international community, ushering in an era of profound instability.

The task for scholars and practitioners is not to lament the current situation but to think carefully about what can realistically be done within it. This includes identifying where the pressure points are, which institutional levers remain functional, and how the normative case for the prohibition on the use of force can be framed in terms that connect with political realities rather than floating above them. Cataloguing violations is necessary but not sufficient. The harder question -what specific reforms, arguments, and coalitions might slow or reverse the erosion- is the one that deserves more sustained attention. The world is in urgent need of collective wisdom, in which diplomacy and international law are once again effectively utilised in the pursuit of international peace and security.

Conclusion

The international legal order has never operated in a world free from power politics, inconsistency, or selective enforcement. Its value has always lain elsewhere: in the existence of commonly recognised limits capable, however imperfectly, of restraining the unrestricted use of power. What makes the present moment especially concerning is the possibility that those limits are gradually losing both their normative clarity and practical authority at the same time.

No single reform or institution is likely to reverse this trajectory on its own. Yet abandoning the effort would carry consequences extending far beyond any individual conflict or geopolitical rivalry. Once the prohibition on the use of force becomes sufficiently malleable, international law risks ceasing to function as a meaningful constraint and instead becoming little more than a vocabulary through which power justifies itself after the fact. Preventing that outcome requires more than formal commitment to legal principles. It requires sustained institutional engagement, intellectual honesty, and a renewed willingness by states and legal actors alike to defend the integrity of the rules upon which international stability ultimately depends.