Populist Governments and International Law: A Reply to Heike Krieger

In this article, I argue that there are two main objections against Heike Krieger’s view on what ‘a populist approach to international law’ entails. First, there are two methodological obstacles that counsel against constructing ‘a populist approach to international law’: populism varies significantly depending on its definition of ‘the people’ and international law is a fragmented regime. Second, the opposition between a ‘law of coordination’ and a ‘law of cooperation’ to which Krieger resorts is misleading, for it obscures the fact that the value of cooperation and coordination lies primarily in the values for which we coordinate and cooperate. As such, I argue that this opposition may make us partially blind to two important dangers that some forms of populism may pose right now: their cooperating to reshape international law and institutions according to (some) of their values and their refusing to cooperate or coordinate in the achievement of urgent goals. Nonetheless, I conclude that the precise shape of these dangers – as well as how to resist them – remains blurry if we do not pay proper attention to the ways in which different forms of populism define ‘the people’.