Abstract

This concluding chapter identifies several major challenges – or opportunities – faced by international law in the near future. These are the fight for inclusion as subjects with international legal personality by non-state actors, the need for suitable processes of lawmaking, the shifting boundaries of normativity, and associated questions about whether interstitial norms or soft law fully qualify as legal norms, the continuing problems raised by the absence in international law of the same kinds of enforcement mechanisms as may be found in domestic law, developments in the area of accountability mechanisms, including those applying to individuals and transnational corporations, whether the increasing complexity, specialization, and judicial fragmentation of international law place the system under strain or may be seen as a sign of maturity, and, finally, the similar questions raised by the fragmentation of theoretical discourse in international law.