Is it possible to think internationally anymore?

A guest post from The Dial

Hello everyone,

This week, I’m really pleased to bring you a guest post from The Dial, an online magazine that, in its own words, covers “culture, politics and ideas, with a focus on locally-sourced writing from around the world.”

As its managing editor, Mara Wilson, remarked to me, it’s pretty much a perfect complement to Proximities. You get your quick fix of news from me, and then The Dial is a place you can go to pour a coffee and dive a little deeper.

I particularly respect that, despite only launching in 2023, they’ve already published stories from a staggering 85 countries.

In this piece, Mara and deputy editor Esther King ask an important and timely question using the COP30 climate summit, the war on Gaza, and Sudan’s civil conflict as context: can we still think internationally?

You can sign up to The Dial’s newsletter here.

Until next Saturday,

Barry.

---

Is it possible to think internationally anymore?

by Mara Wilson and Esther King

For the past 10 days, thousands of politicians, scientists, activists and business leaders have assembled in Brazil for the global COP30 climate summit.

Ten years ago, 190 states agreed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. A group of determined small island nations, justifiably concerned that any greater rise in temperature would prove unsurvivable, pushed the target forward, and it has since been embraced as a guiding post in climate talks.

But the target was never binding. The Paris Agreement did not dictate any actions to reduce emissions, climate journalist Sophie Yeo explains in a piece for The Dial. In the years since, countries have largely failed to reduce emissions and a recent U.N. report found that the world is on course for a rise of 2.8 degrees Celsius this century.

President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in January for the second time with no consequences. And he is not only ignoring climate diplomacy, but actively trying to undermine it, striking trade deals with trading partners like Japan and the EU that demand they buy more U.S. fossil fuels and threatening to punish foreign leaders looking to cut down on their emissions.

What was the point of the agreement if many nations did not stick to it? Looking at the Paris Agreement with the vantage point of a decade, what stands out most is that 190 nations could concord on anything at all.

We live in a time when everything seems more ordered than ever by international treaties or laws, but where these treaties are less binding than a handshake. What’s the point of having international standards if no one enforces them?

Look at Gaza: Existing legal frameworks — such as the Genocide Convention, international humanitarian law, human rights law and the right to food — were invoked by the U.N. and other international bodies in 2024 to ensure, “without delay,” that all basic services and humanitarian assistance were provided to Gazans. And yet the Israeli government continued to block aid convoys and allowed its military to target people seeking aid.

The U.N. reported in August that more than half a million people in Gaza were in famine. Elsewhere, international bodies have been slow to act. In Sudan, more than 21 million people face acute hunger as a result of a civil war that has been ongoing for two years. And yet little action has been taken to address the situation.

“The entry points for using the tools that we have — international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and at the U.N. Security Council level — have essentially been abandoned by those who ought to be invoking them,” executive director of the World Peace Foundation Alex de Waal said last year.

‘RACE TO THE BOTTOM’

Whether it’s the laws themselves or the parties invoking them, international law seems toothless, as Dial contributing editor Linda Kinstler writes in The Guardian.

Elsewhere, we see blatant disregard for international agreements about the rights of refugees. Earlier this week, the U.K.’s governing Labour Party announced new rules aimed at limiting the number of asylum seekers in the country and making it easier to deport them.

Under the new set of policies — titled “Restoring Order and Control” — asylum seekers and refugees will have to reapply for asylum every 30 months. The government can deport them if it deems their country of origin safe.

As this essay in the London Review of Books points out, absent from the discussion in parliament was any mention of international standards like the Refugee Convention, which sets out the rights of refugees and how these should be protected; notably, the Convention emphasises the importance of enabling refugees to feel settled in their new country.

Rather than be guided by international standards, the U.K. and other countries are instead engaging in a race to the bottom — competing to craft the most hostile environment for refugees. In the case of the U.K., the policy is ostensibly crafted to avoid losing voters to a greater evil — the political far right.

Of course, you could argue that many of these international laws and agreements were always haphazardly applied, and that the post World War II era in which they were designed now feels very far away. But what if now were the time to revise these old agreements rather than getting rid of them?

International law professor Surabhi Ranganathan argued this two years ago in The Dial in relation to the law of the sea. With climate change, long-held legal distinctions between land and sea are no longer as clear as they once were.

Questions of rights and access to water and land are pressing and existential: “What is the ocean? In whose interests is it used? Where do land and sea meet and part?” she asks.

And most importantly, “What opportunities might arise for world-remaking, if we dare to take these questions seriously?”