The European Journal of International Law Vol. 30 no. 3 EJIL (2019), Vol. 30 No. 3, 997–1008 doi:10.1093/ejil/chz058 © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EJIL Ltd. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Populist Governments and International Law: A Reply to Heike Krieger Marcela Prieto Rudolphy* Abstract In this article, I argue that there are two main objections against Heike Krieger’s view on what ‘a populist approach to international law’ entails. First, there are two methodological obstacles that counsel against constructing ‘a populist approach to international law’: popu- lism varies signifcantly depending on its defnition of ‘the people’ and international law is a fragmented regime. Second, the opposition between a ‘law of coordination’ and a ‘law of co- operation’ to which Krieger resorts is misleading, for it obscures the fact that the value of co- operation and coordination lies primarily in the values for which we coordinate and cooperate. As such, I argue that this opposition may make us partially blind to two important dangers that some forms of populism may pose right now: their cooperating to reshape international law and institutions according to (some) of their values and their refusing to cooperate or coordinate in the achievement of urgent goals. Nonetheless, I conclude that the precise shape of these dangers – as well as how to resist them – remains blurry if we do not pay proper at- tention to the ways in which different forms of populism defne ‘the people’. Scholars, politicians and practitioners alike are worried about the rise of populism across the globe. Some worry about the crisis of constitutional democracy; 1 others worry about human rights. 2 In her article, Heike Krieger is concerned with the im- pact that populist governments may have on international law. She says that populists * Fellow in Transnational Law, Gould School of Law, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; JSD candidate, New York University School of Law, USA. Email: mprieto@law.usc.edu. I am indebted to Gráinne de Búrca, Michaela Hailbronner, Felipe Jiménez and Sergio Verdugo for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. 1 See, e.g., M. Graber, S. Levinson and M. Tushnet (ed), Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (2018); Daly, ‘Democratic Decay: Conceptualising an Emerging Research Field’, 11(1) Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (2019) 9. 2 See, e.g., Alston, ‘The Populist Challenge to Human Rights’, 9 Journal of Human Rights Practice (2017) 1; K. Roth, The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values (2017), at 79. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/30/3/997/5673333 by guest on 06 March 2023