This book explores how legality--often hailed as the cornerstone of democracies, late capitalism, and the liberal international order--is mobilized within International Relations. Law is frequently viewed as a resource to pacify an anarchical international environment, a means to end war, reduce migrant deaths, combat ''bad'' governance, or prevent global warming. In this edited volume, we invert the assumed relationship between legality and injustices by asking to what extent law enables violence: from migrant deaths to lives lost in the name of "freeing" populations under a socalled "global" rule of law. While critical scholars have highlighted how law can produce violence, they have typically focused on discriminatory practices or the instrumentalization of law, without fully examining how these practices are maintained through appeals to law''s formal structures and the legitimacy they confer. This edited volume brings together empirical and theoretical contributions that interrogate how legality is used to justify and enable violence and domination in international politics. Shoshana Fine is Associate Professor of Political Science at the European School of Social and Political Sciences at Lille Catholic University and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She is co-author, with Thomas Lindemann, of La Violence au nom de la loi (Presses de Sciences Po, 2026) and author of Borders and Mobility in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Sara Dezalay is Professor of International Law and Politics (ESPOL, Université catholique de Lille).

Her research examines how law, violence, and global capitalism are mutually constituted, focusing on Africa''s relationship to globalization and asylum justice in Europe. She is the author of Lawyering Imperial Encounters (Cambridge University Press, 2024/2025). Thomas Lindemann, Agrégé in Political Science, is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and at École Polytechnique. He has published numerous books and articles on political violence and recognition in journals such as Political Psychology, Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, International Theory, International Relations, as well as Culture et Conflits and Revue Française de science politique.