THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT

International Law for Peace Conference 2026

Changing the Narrative

23 January 2026, Orchard Hotel Singapore, 9am - 5pm

(Image credit: NUS AI Know generated image)

Across the world, missiles streak across the skies and bombs fall upon civilians, while images of war, famine, and mass displacement circulate with numbing regularity. To speak of peace in international law at such a moment may appear almost naïve. Yet it is precisely this moment that demands a return to the question of how international law constructs, preserves, and imagines peace.

Eighty years after the adoption of the United Nations Charter, the multilateral system it conceived appears increasingly fragile; its institutions brittle. Structures once designed to safeguard collective security and protect human rights now struggle to respond to new forms of violence, inequality, and ecological breakdown. The Charter’s vision of a peaceful and prosperous world rooted in law seems under strain, yet this fragility also opens the possibility for renewal. The question is not whether international law has failed, but whether we have ceased to ask what it might still make possible.

The Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore convenes this conference to change the conversation. The aim is to shift attention from the narrative of failure to a more complex and constructive account of international law’s role in the making of peace. The discussions will revisit moments in which law has provided a vocabulary for restraint, cooperation, and reconstruction. They will examine the doctrines, institutions, and practices that have mediated between violence and order, between political power and legal imagination.

The conference aims not to offer a prescriptive roadmap for peace - an undertaking necessarily entangled with the shifting terrains of politics, diplomacy, and power - but to reflect on the legal architectures, doctrines, and institutions that have enabled peace to take form in different historical and regional contexts. Through a series of panels and dialogues, participants will explore how international law has contributed to the prevention, mediation, and resolution of conflicts, as well as the construction of post-conflict orders. The keynote address will be delivered by Emeritus Professor of International Law at The London School of Economics and Political Science Law School — Professor Christine Chinkin.

To speak of international law and peace today is therefore not an act of denial, but one of insistence: an insistence that law retains the capacity to imagine and to build a world in which peace is not merely the absence of war, but the presence of systems of international law that continue to push for peace.