From Universality to Plurality: Mainländer and the Afterlife of International Law

[Gustavo Leite Neves da Luz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University. He holds a PhD in international law from the University of Hamburg.]

International law is not dead. Its treaties remain in force, and its institutions operate. Its vocabulary still shapes the language through which power is exercised, contested, and justified. But something else has become difficult to sustain: the belief that international law still speaks from a universal standpoint untouched by empire, hierarchy, and exclusion.

This is where the central crisis lies. The current question is not whether international law exists, but whether its transcendental self-image endures. The issue is not the disappearance of legal form. Rather, the foundational concepts—universality, humanity, civilisation, and common reason—on which international law has long relied no longer appear stable or unproblematic. Their credibility is now in question. What is declining is not international law itself, but the metaphysical framework that enabled it to present itself as universal.

Philipp Mainländer offers a sharp way of naming that crisis. His philosophy does not simply repeat the now-familiar declaration that God is dead. More radically, it imagines a primordial unity breaking apart into a plurality. Unity perishes; multiplicity appears. The world emerges after the collapse of the One. Whatever one makes of his wider metaphysics, that move is illuminating for international law. It suggests that what may be ending is not legal order itself, but the fantasy that legal order can still derive its authority from a single, elevated, universal standpoint.

Decolonial critique has already prepared the ground for that insight. International law has long presented itself as the language of humanity, order, and common interest. Even when it speaks in the idiom of sovereignty, consent, and equality, it often does so against the background assumption that its concepts express a reason available to all. Critical scholarship has shown that this universalism was never neutral. For authors such as Anghie and Becker Lorca, It was formed through colonial encounter, the civilising mission, developmental hierarchies, and by differentiating peoples into the fully sovereign and the not-yet-sovereign, the civilised and the uncivilised, the developed and the underdeveloped.

The point is not simply that international law has often been hypocritical. Universality itself was historically constituted through exclusion. What presented itself as universal was often the provincial elevated to the status of the general. In that sense, universality was not the opposite of imperial power. It was one of its principal juridical forms. The universal could appear universal because the history that produced it was naturalised, elevated, and then concealed (e.g. Pahuja and Chimni).

This unease is not new. International law has long generated its own pessimists: thinkers who have doubted whether legal form can ever escape power, hierarchy, or strategic instrumentalisation. Koskenniemi’s account of international law as vulnerable to the opposing charges of apology and utopia, Carty’s insistence on the limits of legal imagination in international affairs, and the broader critical tradition associated with New Approaches to International Law all expose the instability of any claim that international law speaks from a secure universal ground . What is often dismissed as legal nihilism is, in part, the recurring recognition that international law cannot secure innocence merely by invoking universality, humanity, or reason. Mainländer sharpens that inheritance. He does not merely reveal contradiction within legal discourse; he offers a metaphysical image of what follows when the unity that once grounded that discourse has itself collapsed into plurality.

This is why the usual language of failure is no longer enough. To say that international law fails suggests its ideals remain intact while practice falls short. But that diagnosis is too reassuring. It leaves untouched the question of how those ideals were constituted, what forms of power they permitted, and why the language of humanity often became one of administration, tutelage, and management. The issue is not only betrayal. It is structural.

Mainländer matters because he helps us see that, once unity collapses, thought can no longer proceed from above plurality. It must move from within the world, not from beyond it. For international law, critique should not end at exposing the gap between norm and reality. Instead, it should target the very posture through which international law has imagined itself as a singular and elevated discourse above struggle, history, and situated power.

What distinguishes Mainländer from more familiar critical scepticisms is that he does not merely describe the instability of legal argument or the fragility of legal institutions. He offers, instead, an ontology of disintegration: a way of thinking what follows when the unity that once claimed ground order has already broken apart. In that sense, his relevance to international law lies not simply in reinforcing pessimism, but in clarifying the terrain after metaphysical collapse. He helps explain why pluralism appears not as a normative choice freely embraced, but as the condition that remains once universality can no longer credibly function as law’s unquestioned foundation.

This shift fundamentally alters the philosophy of international law. If the universal foundation is no longer credible, the objective is not to restore it in a modified form. A less assertive version of the same transcendental claim is inadequate. The afterlife of international law cannot involve reviving the old metaphysical framework through procedural language. Instead, it must originate from plurality, not as a deviation from universality, but as the fundamental condition of legal and political existence.

Moving from universality to plurality should not be mistaken for relativism. This move does not require abandoning normativity or treating all claims as equivalent. Instead, it means relocating normativity. Rather than grounding legal meaning in supposed universal reason, we are asked to think of normativity through relation, contestation, translation, and coexistence among historically situated worlds. The aim is not to abolish generality but to detach it from transcendence.

Decolonial thought has long pushed in this direction. Quijano’s critique of coloniality and Santos’ epistemologies of the South all reject the belief that a single history can quietly stand in for the universal . Their importance for international law consists not only in denunciation but in displacement. They force us to think of legal order from those places that universalism has historically subordinated, managed, or rendered derivative.

The ocean makes this issue visible. Few expressions sound more universal than the ‘common heritage of (hu)mankind’. Yet, in practice, the legal imagination of the ocean has often reproduced familiar asymmetries: who names humanity, who governs the common, who has the authority to manage extraction, and who bears the consequences. In her critical work on the law of the sea, Ranganathan shows that even the language of the common may be less about emancipation and more a vehicle for technocratic enclosure and extractive ordering.

This matters because the sea destabilises legal thought. It resists enclosure and unsettles fixity. It exposes the instability of categories that international law has often used to stabilise the world. Thinking of international law from the sea shows more clearly that universality was never as settled as it claimed.

Recent developments already bear the marks of that transition. The entry into force of the BBNJ Agreement in January 2026 does not restore a single law of the global commons; it adds another layer of governance that must coexist with older institutions and sectoral mandates, managing plurality rather than overcoming it. The 2025 BRICS Rio de Janeiro Declaration similarly points to an increasingly heterarchical international order in which rival institutional projects claim authority in the name of more inclusive global governance, rather than accepting a single normative centre. At the same time, the sharp rise in tariff-covered trade recorded in the WTO’s 2025 monitoring of G20 economies shows the limits of pluralism: fragmentation may loosen the hold of imperial universality, but it can also harden into competitive blocs, strategic unilateralism, and unequal bargaining power. Plurality, in other words, is not necessarily emancipatory. It may signal the opening of a less hierarchical order, but it may equally produce a more unstable one.

In this sense, plurality does not negate the future of international law. It is the condition for that future. The death of the old juridical god may be unsettling, and it does invite nihilistic readings. But the alternative is neither a return to universal innocence nor a surrender to legal nihilism. It is a practice of coexistence without metaphysical guarantees. Instead, it may open a space for international law to be reimagined without claiming innocence. No longer would it be a discourse descending from nowhere, but one shaped by encounter. It would not be a universal already achieved, but a fragile and unfinished practice of negotiating coexistence in a world that was never one.For this reason, ‘afterlife’ is a more precise term than ‘death’. International law endures its metaphysical crisis, but it is transformed in the process. Its concepts, institutions, and arguments persist, yet they now operate under altered conditions of credibility. These elements can no longer command acceptance by presuming universality. Instead, they must justify themselves within a context where the universal has been provincialised and where imperialism, racial hierarchy, and epistemic domination are intrinsic to the discipline’s formation.

The central question for contemporary international lawyers is not whether the discipline can be preserved through renewed faith, but whether it can persist without reliance on transcendence. Can international law conceptualise order without invoking imperial universality? Can it address the common without resorting to tutelage? Can it articulate humanity without reproducing the mechanisms through which ‘humanity’ was historically administered?

Mainländer provides little reassurance in this context. Once unity collapses, a return to innocence is impossible. However, this collapse brings clarity, which may be essential for international law at this juncture. The afterlife of international law will not be secured by lamenting the loss of universality or by maintaining the pretence of its neutrality. Its future depends on whether international law can acknowledge the end of its metaphysical foundation and learn to speak more modestly, truthfully, and justly from within the plural world that persists.