International law in the age of permacrisis : ESIL research forum, Catania, 20-21 March 2025

The ESIL Research Forum 2025 Proceedings bring together selected contributions from the ESIL Research Forum held in Catania, exploring the status, function, and transformation of international law in an age increasingly characterised as one of “permacrisis”. Across a broad range of substantive fields—including international dispute settlement, human rights, international criminal law, sanctions, climate change and ocean governance, the law of state responsibility, and the use of emerging technologies in adjudication—the contributions interrogate whether permacrisis constitutes a genuinely new paradigm or rather exposes longstanding structural features of the international legal order. The volume also examines how international legal norms, institutions, and interpretive practices respond to conditions of persistent instability, overlapping crises, and heightened uncertainty, and how crisis narratives reshape legal authority, legitimacy, and governance. Taken together, the papers offer critical and interdisciplinary insights into the ways international law both manages and is transformed by permanent crisis, highlighting tensions between resilience and erosion, innovation and normalisation, and global inequality and solidarity.