This year, when we invited applications for editorial inductions, we asked a simple question: what draws you to international law? Around 150 people answered ranging from second year students to fifth year students. This ranged from people who are still unacquainted with the discipline in a formal sense to those who have sat with the contradictions and tensions of the discipline. Reading through them, we were struck by not just what they said but also what the patterns revealed. These responses, for us, formed some kind of a map of how people encounter, hold onto, and sometimes lose and regain their relationship with international law. In this piece, we delve deeper into and reflect on what patterns we find in the responses and what we take away from these.
From Optimism to Despair
The most persistent thread for us in the responses was hope. Even the most skeptical responses carried some form of hope. Some had lost faith in the institutions of international law, but not in its possibilities and potential. We saw people falling between this spectrum of being optimistic towards IL, to people who are losing faith in it at times accompanied by a feeling of despair. This distinction between hope and faith is important for how we feel about international law. Faith, as we read it through Mickelson’s piece, is a trust in the system’s inherent efficacy and legitimacy. It is an acceptance that, if one remains committed to the discipline and its structures, the system will eventually produce just outcomes. Hope, however, is not tied to an assessment of institutional performance. We understand it as an orientation toward a desired outcome and a belief that something better can be achieved even if the current mechanisms are inadequate. One can therefore lose faith in the existing structures while still holding hope for what international law could become.
This distinction allowed us to situate responses along a spectrum. At one end were those grounded in optimism, and the other end were people who felt despair for international law. Students who had faith and /or optimism saw international law as the “conscience of the world,” a “moral compass,” a “promise of universality,” or the “best ‘existing’ mechanism to bring about peace.” For them, trust in the discipline’s normative foundations was intact, and reform was seen as a matter of commitment rather than reimagination. Then there were those who reflected more cautious hope. They acknowledged the discipline’s complicity in reproducing hierarchies and other “structural shortcomings,” yet still envisioned that international law (perhaps reimagined or reformed) could contribute to more equitable futures. This hope, we believe, rests not on the inevitability of change but more on the possibility of some form of an active collective struggle and intellectual re-envisioning.
This made us wonder what might lead some to be more hopeful while others to be more faithful or even ‘optimistic’ (again, taking from Mickelson’s meaning of it) and at times even have the feeling of despair. We could think of one possible reason based on our experiences and observations behind what causes one to see a shift between these emotions.
A lot of people who were optimistic or faithful of the discipline were also those who had not explored the subject in depth or are still being introduced to it. Their emotions, very similar to our own, come from earliest encounters whether in the school’s social science textbooks, conversations with our then peers, at times with parents and pop culture in some way idealizing international organizations. These encounters present IL as a system that brings the world together portraying it as neutral, universal, and almost benevolent. This is comforting because it reflects our need to believe that there is a shared set of rules capable of governing a not so organized world.
But the transition from this image to the first Public International Law course in law school breaks this image. The focus shifts from the idealistic narratives to doctrinal details addressing the distinction between binding and non-binding instruments, limited enforcement mechanisms, and the political realities. Because of this encounter, the neutrality and universality that we were promised, begin to erode. We realize that the system cannot live up to the vision that we were sold earlier.
Part of this disillusionment stems from what is absent in the curriculum. The foundations of IL are rarely examined with historical depth. We are told that its origins lie in the treaty of Westphalia, as though nothing before that mattered despite there being enough TWAIL scholarship tracing its roots much older, deeply colonial encounters. Before engaging with the foundations, we criticize international law for failing to be what it never really claimed to be in its own terms – a system reflective of diversity and nuance. We take the gap between the ideal and the real as some form of evidence of failure, when in fact the “ideal” may have been a product of selective storytelling rather than an authentic promise of the discipline. This is why optimism is often followed by despair. It is the feeling of having been misled. We find this reflection consistently in the responses of the students who have finished their PIL course. We could see the same frustration and sense of despair in the responses.
But we also believe that some find their way to still be interested in the discipline for various reasons – for me (Garvit) it was because I got introduced to the critical approaches to IL which made me understand international law through a different vantage point helping reimagine IL. For Charu, her hope is grounded more in reimagination through doctrine. Similarly, the responses reflect hope in different ways. I have gone through that despair right after my PIL course and for me despair became a kind of necessary stage before hope can take root again. We are sure it is a different trajectory for each of us.
Despair, in our reading of the responses, is never really absolute. Even those who speak of having “given up” on the discipline still chose to engage with it by applying to JFIEL. That act alone suggests an underlying hope (perhaps subconsciously) that reform is possible or at least worth imagining. For us this contradiction is innately human because it is evidence of the ability to hold disappointment and aspiration in the same hand.
We also realize that this journey from optimism to despair, and sometimes back again, is neither fixed nor unidirectional in any form. Our reading of these patterns is shaped by our own experiences, and we do not wish to claim it as something that everyone would go through. The factors influencing this journey are so many like personal encounters with injustice, exposure to professors who help us challenge or reaffirm certain beliefs, or the political climate at a given point of time. We are certain there are layers we might have missed out and we would welcome the perspectives of readers who have navigated through these feelings as well.
However, what stays with us is that the way students speak of international law reveals less about the discipline’s fixed reality, and more about the process of encountering it. This process is so dynamic because it is shaped by what we are, as much as it is shaped what is actually not told.
Finding Hope
A more conscious form of hope, as we understand from this process, is not a sentiment that everyone develops because it requires an active, sustained effort, as well as a space which fosters that effort. Mickelson similarly reflects on how hope is not a self-sustained effort and emphasizes solidarity in this process. Yet such spaces are not always present in the ways we encounter international law. We will not attempt to answer the question of how one can find hope, for it is one that we struggle with as well, and it is a question which is highly personal. But we resonate with Mickelson, in that hope is best found in shared acts of imagining and reflecting on each other’s vision for international law. For us this means finding international law in everyday life and, as Pahuja argues, actively imagining how we might want that every day to be different. Perhaps the more urgent question, then, is not whether hope exists, but whether we can create and sustain spaces where such visions can be spoken, heard, and transformed into something real. For JFIEL, “Knowing IL, Otherwise” is our effort to create that space and perhaps in doing so, to remind ourselves that the act of making room for such conversations may itself be the most enduring form of hope.
Garvit Shrivastava and Charunivetha Solai Gnanasekar are Editors-in-Chief of JFIEL (2025-26).
Picture Credit: Hope by George Fredrick Watts (1817-1904) Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village care of Privat Collection