"A Rupture, Not a Transition": State Accountability after the End of the Rules Based in Order
LIAS Public Conversation
29. Apr
Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar, University of the Andes, Bogotá | Brendan Ciarán Browne, Trinity College, Belfast | LIAS Senior Fellow Heidi Grunebaum | Arthur Muliro, Society for International Development, Rome | Adam Sitze, Amherst College | Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Date: Wednesday, 29 April 2026, 6:15 p.m.
Location: Campus | Lecture Hall 4
Speaking partially in French at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that the post Cold War, rules based international order has effectively ended and been replaced by a harsher reality of great power rivalry and coercion. We are, Carney claimed, living through “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” This is, Carney insisted, “a rupture, not a transition.” In this forum, Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia and Adam Sitze, Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, in the United States, discuss this harsh new reality and its implications for transitional justice and international law more generally.