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Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns created seismic shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, with lasting implications for human rights and international law. Arriving just as the international legal order was wobbling in the wake of a populist backlash and other great challenges, the pandemic intensified fault lines of marginalisation and state action, amplifying the forces that had already left the liberal international order in crisis and retreat. This article examines the pandemic's impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic has reinforced public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the role of the state in protecting its people from harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have supported and expanded the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such divides and contribute to the further retreat of the liberal international order. Examining these fault lines and their implications can help us re-imagine a post-pandemic international legal order that offers more protection for human rights, even as multilateral institutions and cooperation sputter or fail.

We find ourselves today poised on the edge of a moment of transition. As the traditional structures and institutions of the post-World War II global legal order weaken or fall around us, international lawyers have been questioning whether what we are witnessing is merely a cyclical downturn in the strength and utility of the international legal order, that is, just another periodic adjustment or ebb from the high-water mark of the 1990s—or whether we are instead witnessing the messy and painful collapse of one order and the bloody birth of another.