From “Global Scripts” to “Street Fights”: The New Globalization of Law in a Fragmented World

This article argues that the globalization of law is not collapsing under contemporary pressures but is instead being reconfigured through intensified contestation and shifting political alignments. While post-Cold War scholarship often portrayed legal globalization as a linear expansion of liberal legality, anchored in human rights, rule of law, and international institutions, recent developments have defied that narrative. Challenges to the legitimacy of courts and organizations, growing backlash against rights-based frameworks, and the rise of illiberal state projects have led many scholars to diagnose a crisis of the global legal order. Against this view, the article conceptualizes legal globalization as a contested transnational field, structured by struggles over authority, symbolic capital, and competing visions of legitimacy. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and world society theory, the article shows how global legal vocabularies and institutions continue to operate, but increasingly as arenas of polarized conflict rather than vehicles of normative convergence. Empirically, it highlights how new actors, including autocratic governments and transnational religious and far-right movements, mobilize rights and sovereignty claims to reshape global legality. The article concludes that the central question today is not whether legal globalization will survive, but what kind of global legal order is emerging through these “street fights” over international law.