Is Another World Possible?

International law today feels less like a source of stability in the world than a record of its unraveling.From Russia's invasion of Ukraine to U.S. President Trump's threats to annex Panama and Greenland, from U.S. airstrikes on Iran and alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific to Israel's protracted bombardment of Gaza, from Trump's upending of the liberal trade order to his radical defunding of international institutions-the sense that the world has veered wildly off course has become pervasive.That international law appears powerless to reverse this course, and may indeed be complicit in it, has also become a matter of public knowledge and discussion. 1 Yet if international law is in crisis, is that crisis new, or is it simply the re-emergence or re-enactment of older patterns? 2 And if the latter, are there any grounds to hope that it might serve as an instrument of reform and betterment in the world?The three books reviewed here invite us to see today's disorder, in international law as well as the world at large, as the continuation of empire by other means.Jens Bartelson's Becoming International investigates how, beginning in the sixteenth century, the "international realm" was "conceptualized into existence and became taken for granted" (Bartelson, pp.ix, 9).Jennifer Pitts's Boundaries of the International [hereinafter Boundaries] examines the "ideological and political work"-the justifications, distortions, and occlusions-performed by international law during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with implications for its