International Law has traditionally been a Western and modern discipline, but it is now a humongous and homogeneous bifurcate of scholarship that has since its establishment been traversing the untrodden trails of cognitive rumination which has expanded the perception and research crossbars.
The normative mainstream of international law has been founded on Western schools of thought rooted in the modernity project. Whereas, the international law lawyers from developing countries have transplanted the mainstream schools of international law critically and reinforcing the third world approach (TWAIL) project. Although, the heterodox approaches to international law have been promoted, basically, from a Western perspective and the methods are very heterogeneous and unconnected. Primarily, any discernment of international law can only be prolonged on constitutional law underpinnings such as democracy, fundamental human freedoms, affirmative action, human rights, social justice, sovereign equality, and the international rule of law. These underpinnings are embedded and treasured with jus cogens (peremptory norms of international law) that institute the core construct of international law that does not allow any derogation or exemption or reservation from that place. Therefore, international law derives its standards and principles of substantive constitutional law which bloomed into customary international law that enriched the progressive development of international law and its codification.
The present decade of the twenty-first century is blessed with new narratives of international law. Under which the title “international law” per se is being subjected to a compendium of questions about its suitability in the contemporary circumstances. Therefore, the present nomenclature has raised multiple issues such as Should “international law” be addressed as Universal Law, Global Law or World Law or Cosmopolitan Law as the considerations and organization of conventional inter-state convergence have been hanging in a situation of indeterminate state? Since the conclusion of World War-II international law has been transforming and shifting its focus on public affairs to private affairs by accentuating the trepidations of peoples, human beings, individuals, humanity and posterity as new standards that have further emasculated the proliferation of new projections. However, the state sovereignty is being re-formulated and re-conceived owing to the developments in the field of International Sustainable Development Law, International Common Heritage Law, International Human Environment Law, and International Trade Law. In the modern world undertakings, the new power destinations and different decision–making bodies have bourgeoned the supra-national normative regimes, specialized treaty regimes and self-contained regimes that have handed down their legal standards and principles and further expanded the mandate of global regulatory regimes, etc.
Today, international law envisions the proximal paradigms and post-structural permutations of democracy of cosmopolitanism beyond asymmetrical assumptions which is reflected in the architecture of governance institutionalism and its response to the heterodoxy of human rights in an age of globalization. Presently, international law is confronted with issues relating to the relevance of the refugee frameworks, use of force law, climate justice, the role of human rights monitoring bodies of the UN, climate change, gender justice, and development models. These issues have inflicted upon the earth the horizontal hazards of crises proportions, and planet earth, unfortunately, got deprived of its perpendicular canopy of protection that had been sustaining it for so long. Moreover, the climate change has been affecting the whole reservoir of nature comprising of agriculture, forests, mountains, oceans, high seas, human development, people’s health, and much more. Thus, obnoxious vicissitudes of global change have offered a picture of development which is mawkish, murky, and manipulated by the political powers that are around the chessboard of the common heritage of gene kind in and around national and supranational jurisdictions at which humanity is at war within the human.
Therefore, emerging discourse on contemporary nature of international law demands actually and immensely an attempt to dismantle the primordial, the parochial and preposterous citadel of international law to improve upon and present it with systematic, scientific and subtle understandings in all its twigs and branches. The fundamental intricacies and niceties of international law have been neglected in its pool of instruments, and that is the archaic nature of the present day international law. The instruments-oriented methodology of presenting universal concepts, theories and themes with case law make the understanding of international law dynamic and intensive. The current trend that imparts and informs the principles and paradigms of international law in a manner that is unconventional and innovative which ensures the high standards of understanding and maintains the inquisition of the stakeholders alike. Therefore, the most important question as how to treat the term “International Law,” to elicit a preliminary understanding of fundamental human rights in international law, Charters of League of Nations and the UNO and necessary instruments in international human rights as a reader, researcher and international law lawyer. I still ruminating and rummaging the different dimensions of Customary International Law (CIL), International Humanitarian Law (IHL), International Forced Migration Law (IFML), International Climate Change Law (ICCL), International Refugee Law (IRL), International Statelessness Law (ISL) and International Criminal Law (ICL) internationally, regionally and nationally with scientific intellectual autopsy. The lego-institutional issues in these areas have catapulted the existing balance of International Law that has accorded the obtuse and obscure intellectual treatment. The international law crafting and inherent distinctions to be used by the international lawyers before international judicial tribunals as a ready reference and guide on a plenty of issues relating to CIL, IHL, IRL, ICL, IEL, and IO, etc. become an anvil of intra-international law issues generation mechanism. Moreover, I wish to have an immaculate and impaccable new international law that would make a change from traditional reality of understanding the international law through the fulfillment of intellectual inquisitions by deconstructing the mainstream thinking of international law to understand the limits and laxities and try to explore the common elements in the areas of International Law of Treaties, International Judicial Settlement of Disputes and Criminal Law, International Trade Law, Intellectual Property Rights, International Relations, Privileges and Immunities, Diplomatic and Consular Relations that can help to shape a critical understanding of international law as whole which is reflective of all perspectives with a new visage.