ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the extent to which the global legal order can be seen to be failing. It traces the liberal internationalist attempt across the 20th and 21st centuries to create a global liberal legal order around the ideas of ‘liberal peace’, security, and global economic prosperity built upon the globalisation of capitalist economic relations. Moral humanitarianism operates as a form of overcompensation for liberal failure, a distraction from the inadequacy of global liberal politics and international law to address the causes of global social conflict and to properly address widespread problems of social injustice and inequality. For the liberal pragmatist the form of war-police action has been seen as necessary for securing the economic rights of global liberal society. The link between an expanding zone of liberal peace and the expansion of a global capitalist economy runs deep within the liberal political tradition.
