Professor Kilcullen will present a talk based on the topic of his latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. In 1993, a newly-appointed CIA director warned that Western powers might have ‘slain a large dragon’ with the fall of the USSR, but now faced a ‘bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’.

The decades following the Second World War saw hopes rise that humanity had learnt its lesson and that a new age had begun, guided by a body of universal law based on human rights. International courts held to account those found guilty of crimes against humanity. Countries that had been long-standing enemies came together in Europe and elsewhere to cooperate on economic, legal, cultural, scientific and political challenges, as well as on the emerging global threats to the environment.

Scholars have studied international NGOs as advocates and service providers, but have neglected the growing importance of these actors in enforcing international law. NGO enforcement comprises a spectrum of actions from indirect (e.g., monitoring and investigation), to direct (e.g., prosecution and interdiction). We explain the rise of these practices by the growing gap between the increasing legalization of international politics, and states' limited capacity to enforce international laws, and by the diffusion of new technologies and legal changes facilitating non-state enforcement.

Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations, University of Oxford, will deliver a Keynote Lecture on the contemporary decline of the liberal order, and call for a rethinking of liberal ideas and practices. The lecture will open a workshop the following day.

The term ‘liberal international order’ has become widely used – generally to refer to the international system that developed in the years after the end of the Cold War in 1989, or even to the whole period since the end of the Second World War in 1945.