Climate Change and the Future of the State

London Review of International Law Annual Lecture

Climate change is challenging many of the foundational pillars of international law. One of the most significant is the concept of the state. The seventeenth century vision of the territorial state emerged as an answer to the question of political authority posed by the wars of religion in Europe. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which international lawyers treat as setting out the classical criteria for territorial statehood, was itself adopted in the context of political struggle against the imperial ambitions of the United States in Latin America. Today, as Judge Tomka noted in his Declaration to the ICJ’s Climate Change Advisory Opinion, international law ‘stands in the midst of a great normative contestation’ over the meaning of the state in the context of climate change. As Judge Tomka recognised, that contestation touches upon the very identity, the conditions, and the limits of the subjects of international law. But while international lawyers may have looked to Europe and the Americas for legal innovation in earlier centuries, today the future of the state and its relationship to territory is being reimagined in the Pacific.

Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She has been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum. She presented a Special Course at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2021, and was elected to the Institut de Droit International in 2025.

Chair: Professor Stephen Humphreys

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