Since about 2008, the rise of autocracy and the decline of democracy has threatened the modern liberal international order. To counter the threat of authoritarian international law, the United States should collaborate with liberal democracies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop new plurilateral institutions and treaties to create a “liberal plurilateral order.” This Essay shows that states are planting the seeds of a future liberal plurilateral order in their response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Russia's aggression against Ukraine has brought into focus the growing significance of open-source information for international legal processes. Enabled by novel digital technologies, civil society actors have seized the opportunity provided by the vast amount of publicly available evidence to counter-narrate Russia's pretexts to justify its invasion within the deliberative bodies of the United Nations. This Essay explains the potential of this emerging practice to influence international legal discourse by increasing the costs for actors who base their conduct on false factual claims.

Scholarship in the discipline of international law may take different forms. It may deal systematically with general practice in a comprehensive way, resulting in a textbook or treatise that is a culmination of long years of teaching, research, and learning. It may examine specific topics of international law in an empirical, historical, and analytical exercise of intellect and reach considerable depth in understanding the topics, culminating in a monograph. Or it may focus on issues of narrow scope in an article, which, of limited size, is suitable for publication in a journal and yearbook. This review focuses on the public international law scholarship in all three forms published by Chinese scholars in the past few years, although the nature of a review necessarily limits the number of publications selected for review. The plan is to take stock of the mainstream thoughts and methods through reviewing the selected publications. The term “international law,” meaning public international law, is used throughout this review for sake of convenience.

A growing number of incidents—particularly since 2009—highlight the South China Sea (SCS) as the preeminent venue for the People's Republic of China (PRC) maritime gray zone operations. “Gray zone operations” are, in essence, operations that are designed to exploit or create legal (and other) uncertainties for a military or strategic advantage. A prominent example is the way that China has used the so-called nine(ten)-dash line without fully explaining the legal basis for it. There are other examples, as well. China has deliberately cultivated uncertainty about the sovereign status of maritime militia vessels—and thus about whether and how the conduct of these vessels might be directly attributable to the PRC. It has harassed U.S. survey vessels seventy-five nautical miles (nm) south of Hainan Island in an effort to disrupt military survey operations that it claims are impermissible and has sunk a Philippine fishing vessel at Reed Bank in an effort to enforce Chinese claims to exclusive fisheries rights in this area. It has also asserted claims and enforcement rights in zones that clearly belong to other states—including actions against Indonesian fishing vessels in seas in the vicinity of the Natuna Islands, which are part of the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (and Continental Shelf). And it has conducted operations on the basis of inapplicable maritime zone rights, such as by asserting a territorial sea and thus the right to control innocent passage around low-tide elevations with artificial installations built upon them—such as with Mischief Reef. The list goes on.