Could This Truly Be the End of Universalism? Starting 2026 with Reflections on Gaza, the Maduro Abduction, and Some of the World’s Neglected Conflicts (Sudan, Tigray, Yemen, Myanmar, and the Uyghurs)

Evidence from Gaza, Venezuela, and the world's neglected conflicts points toward the painful conclusion that we are living through the disintegration of universalism as an organizing principle of international order. 

The Unraveling Promise of Universalism

In the decades following World War II, the international order has been built on the promise that certain principles—about human life, rights, and law—would apply to everyone, everywhere, regardless of identity or power. Human rights were declared universal. The laws of war were codified as binding on all parties to conflict. Sovereignty was recognized as a protection for weak states as well as strong ones. To be sure, this promise of universalism was never fully kept. But it provided a shared language, a standard against which power could be judged, and a horizon of aspiration.

           As we look at the world in early 2026, the gap between universal principle and selective application is increasingly becoming a real chasm. What we have been witnessing is not simply hypocrisy, the perpetual gap between what states say and what they do—the homage that vice has still diligently been paying to virtue. What we have increasingly been witnessing is something much more corrosive: the increasing collapse of any shared belief that universal norms actually exist or should constrain behavior.

When every invocation of human rights, international law, or humanitarian principles is immediately read as disguised partisanship—when the powerful act with impunity while the weak are held to account—then universalism ceases to function even as a regulative ideal. Instead, universalism becomes merely another instrument of power politics. The sheer fact that the President of the United States sees himself constrained only by what he calls “my own morality” also means universalism is not at a good place. This is so especially since this is the morality of a leader for whom one of his key political ideas is that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him when all evidence shows that it was not. (See e.g., this and this previous commentary.)

This commentary examines three dimensions of this crisis of universalism: the war in Gaza, which has long exposed the selective deployment and mutual delegitimization of humanitarian law; the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on January 3, 2026, which demonstrates the assertion of imperial prerogative over sovereignty norms; and the pattern of neglected conflicts in Yemen, Tigray, Sudan, Myanmar, and China, which reveals the hierarchy that determines when universal concern gets activated and when it remains silent.

Together, these cases suggest that we are witnessing not merely a violation of universalism but its structural erosion—a world where norms are imperfectly applied to one where their claim to universality is no longer credible.

Together, these cases suggest that we are witnessing not merely a violation of universalism but its structural erosion—a world where norms are imperfectly applied to one where their claim to universality is no longer credible. I have argued in an earlier commentary that we are moving closer to a world as envisaged by German right-wing legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt, a world in which universal norms are no longer applicable and the globe is divided into Great Spaces respectively organized around imperial powers. Trump arguably is an advocate of a Schmittian world order. In my 2012 book On Global Justice, Schmitt was the foil against which a genuinely global order had to be defended. I took him seriously then because he was incredibly insightful. Now we all must take him seriously because the world is going his way.

I have also argued that “human rights are for everyone,” that that is the guiding theme for the work of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, and that human rights are a key ingredient of any credible universalist aspirations. But amid anti-universalist rhetoric, it is increasingly hard for this stance to even find a credible hearing. And yet—a world that has to deal with global problems such as climate change and the arrival of Artificial Intelligence needs universalism more than ever. The erosion of universalism puts humanity in a bad position to face the future.

The Conflict in Gaza and the Crisis of Universalism

The war in Gaza has all along been a kind of X-ray of the global moral order, a conflict whose generational relevance around the world goes much beyond its devastating importance for the region. It has revealed a profound crisis of universalism. In Gaza, universalism is not simply violated: its key components have been selectively invoked, strategically suspended, and mutually denied. Such erosion of credibility means universalism itself is at stake.

To elaborate a bit more on the underlying ideas, universalism, in its contemporary political form, rests on a few interconnected ideas. First, all human beings possess equal moral worth. Second, this worth can and should be expressed in universal norms, ranging from basic protection and subsistence to prohibitions on targeting civilians, protections for the injured and imprisoned, or also, at the collective level, rights to self-determination.

After 1945, these ideas were anchored in institutions and texts—the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, etc. They offered a shared language to condemn atrocities, demand accountability, and imagine a more just order. Political and legal innovations as different as the Nuremberg trials, the anti-apartheid movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the International Criminal Court all drew legitimacy from the claim that certain standards transcend borders and allegiances.

The conflict in Gaza has laid bare how fragile this language has become.

The Collapse of Shared Meaning

To be sure, the Gaza conflict has been narrated in universalist terms. The October 7 attacks were widely described as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The subsequent Israeli military campaign, involving enormous civilian death, displacement, and destruction of infrastructure, has been assessed by human rights organizations and UN officials with reference to the laws of war: proportionality, distinction between combatants and civilians, and prohibitions on collective punishment. Some have invoked genocide. Both sides have appealed constantly to universal categories: terrorism, resistance, self-defense, occupation, human shields, war crimes, ethnic cleansing.

Yet those same categories seem to have increasingly lost their shared meaning. Advocates in each camp have too often treated the universal not as a neutral standard but as a rhetorical device. For many who identify primarily with the Israeli side, universalism demands unequivocal condemnation of atrocities committed by Hamas while treating large-scale Palestinian death as the unavoidable cost of legitimate self-defense or Hamas's responsibility for using civilian shields. For many who identify primarily with the Palestinian side, universalism requires unqualified rejection of Israeli state violence while folding crimes committed by Hamas into a narrative of resistance against decades of occupation.

In both cases, the form of universalism remains: we continue to see claims about civilians, rights, justice. But its substance is bent around prior solidarities. Context is invoked selectively: it is essential for understanding the violence on one side but effectively irrelevant when applied to violence on the other side. As I have argued before, under such circumstances people will typically not see the real moral complexity of the situation. (Also see here.) And the sheer appeal to moral complexity will be dismissed as morally lukewarm. 

The war in Gaza has all along been a kind of X-ray of the global moral order, a conflict whose generational relevance around the world goes much beyond its devastating importance for the region.

All this signals a deeper breakdown. Universal norms require some minimal agreement that certain acts (e.g., deliberate killing of non-combatants, indiscriminate bombardment, starvation as a weapon) are wrong regardless of who commits them. Instead, we have observed reflexive translation of every moral accusation into a counteraccusation about bias. To call Hamas's actions "terrorism" is denounced as Islamophobic or willfully blind to occupation. To describe Israeli policies as potential war crimes is denounced as antisemitic or ignoring Hamas's culpability. We have also been reminded of the conceptual deformation involved in attributing large-scale atrocities to the very people who fell prey to the Holocaust.

To be clear, charges of selective application are often correct. But as invocation of universal standards is routinely dismissed as disguised partisanship, the norms themselves disintegrate. There is no longer a credible vantage point from which one can say, "this is wrong when your side does it and when mine does," and be heard as speaking in good faith. Universalism is silenced. This obviously is a huge challenge for the human rights movement.

The Failure of Institutions

Behavior of states and institutions accelerates this erosion. The post-1945 order gave powerful states disproportionate influence, most obviously through veto power on the Security Council, but clothed that power in universal language. In Gaza, the disparity between rhetoric and action has been stark and visible in real time.

Major Western governments, including the U.S., the UK and Germany, have affirmed Israel's "right to self-defense" in sweeping terms while offering military support and diplomatic cover, even as the civilian toll mounted. Expressions of concern for Palestinian suffering have been late, cautious, and rarely translated into meaningful diplomatic pressure. Meanwhile, large parts of the Global South, along with various UN bodies and investigative commissions, have condemned Israeli actions in the most sweeping terms. They have called for ceasefires while invoking apartheid and genocide. (Regarding UN bodies, also see here, here, or here.) But they sometimes said fairly little about obligations of armed groups like Hamas under humanitarian law, or about the hostages still held.

The Security Council has been paralyzed by vetoes when confronted with resolutions that would bind powerful allies. The International Court of Justice has been asked to rule on questions of genocide and occupation but its provisional measures are unenforceable without political will. (See here or here.) The International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for leaders on both sides. But it faces accusations of politicization and lack of jurisdiction from some quarters, and of timidity or false equivalence from others. International law seems to bite softest on those with power or the right alliances. As a result, it becomes difficult to persuade any informed public that these are really universal institutions rather than instruments of bloc politics dressed in legal language.

For many in the Global South, Gaza confirms the long-standing suspicion that human rights and the rules-based order are selectively deployed by a Western-led system which exempts itself and its allies. Memories of Iraq, Libya, and decades of selective intervention shape how current Western positions are read. By contrast, for many in the West, rising support for Palestinians in non-Western fora—and the sometimes indiscriminate rhetoric that accompanies it—is read as a sign that the very idea of universal individual rights is being replaced by civilizational, religious, or anti-colonial solidarities that treat Jewish suffering and security as inherently suspect.

Each reading feeds the other. The result is a mutual delegitimization of universalism: one side dismisses it as a mask for imperial interests, the other as a casualty of anti-Western ressentiment or antisemitic double standards. There is increasingly no place to stand for anyone who seeks to remain above the fray.

The Hierarchy of Grief

The Gaza conflict also exposes a more intimate crisis of universalism: the hierarchy of grief. Taken as a philosophical stance, universalism demands that we take the suffering of any human being as equally significant. But politically and psychologically, humans will tend to have thicker attachments to kin, neighbors, co-nationals, or co-religionists. The media, diplomatic, and public treatment of deaths and traumas in Gaza and Israel has rendered these hierarchies undeniably and painfully visible.

The names, stories, faces, and family histories of Israeli victims (especially from October 7) have circulated widely in Western media and political discourse. Making their way into narratives of terrorism, memory, and vulnerability, they were personalized and mourned individually—as they should be. By contrast, Palestinian victims have often appeared primarily as numbers—"the Gaza Health Ministry reports X dead," often supplemented with the qualification that the Ministry was controlled by Hamas—or as symbols of a collective tragedy. Only relatively rarely did they appear as persons with names, families, professions, and dreams. Even when the sheer scale of loss is immense, so even when we learn that many thousands of children have been killed, the narrative structure often denies them the individuation that makes grief fully visible.

That same asymmetry works in reverse in some Arab and Muslim publics and media. In some of their reporting, Israeli victims are reduced to emblems of a hated occupying state, their deaths minimized or justified. By contrast, Palestinian suffering is saturated with religious, nationalist, and emotional meaning and granted considerable moral attention—a kind of attention that their suffering does of course deserve.

In this environment, to insist that all civilian dead are equally deserving of grief, and that all civilian lives are equally worthy of protection, can sound either naive or partisan. It readily sounds like a refusal to acknowledge context, power, and history. Yet without such insistence, universalism collapses into a competition of incomparable traumas, each community claiming a monopoly on moral attention. Each community would then treat the suffering of the other as deserved, as exaggerated, or as instrumentalized. Without such insistence, that is, more trauma in the next generation is virtually assured.

What Defending Universalism Requires

Before proceeding further, let us ask: what would it mean today to defend universalism rather than pronounce its death? One answer is to distinguish between universalism as an ideology of power and universalism as a regulative ideal. As ideology, universalism has often served to rationalize imperial dominance, military interventions, "civilizing missions," and economic hierarchies. The language of rights and democracy too has been invoked to justify occupations, coups, and structural adjustment.

As an ideal, however—as the claim that every human being has equal moral standing and deserves equal concern under law—universalism enables critique of those very abuses.

Gaza shows how far institutions and states have drifted from that ideal. Gaza does not show the ideal itself is worthless. On the contrary, without it we are left with little more than tribal loyalty and calculations of power, dressed up as civilization, resistance, or historical justice. If we abandon the principle that the deliberate killing of children is wrong regardless of nationality, or that starvation and siege are impermissible tools of statecraft, or that hostage taking is a crime no matter the political context, then we are left only with competing narratives of victimhood and power.

A more demanding defense of universalism would start inside the conflict. It would mean, for example, acknowledging that both Jewish and Palestinian histories carry real traumas, legitimate grievances, and credible fears (all part of acknowledging the moral complexity of the situation). It would mean that any future political arrangement worth having must treat each person within it as an equal subject of law and concern—whether that takes the form of two states, one binational state, or some confederation.

It would mean applying the same standards of international law to allies and adversaries, to powerful and weak actors. It would mean refusing the logic that says, "our violence is necessity; theirs is barbarism." It would mean building cross-communal movements, as well as deploying vocabulary that resist the reflex of collapsing every judgment into accusations of betrayal, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or colonial apologetics. It would mean resisting the temptation to discredit opposition as biased bigotry.

To be sure, nothing about the current reality in Gaza makes such a universalism easy to imagine, much less to enact. The weight of history, the depth of trauma, the asymmetry of power, and the entrenched interests of political and military elites on all sides work against it. That is why that crisis feels so much like a crisis of universalism as such.

The Maduro Abduction: Sovereignty as Selective Privilege

If Gaza exposes selective application of humanitarian norms, the abduction of Nicolás Maduro demonstrates selective recognition of sovereignty, the foundational principle of the international order since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces, supported by military strikes, captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at their residence in Caracas and transferred them to U.S. custody in New York to face long-standing drug trafficking charges. This act was carried out without international mandate and in open disregard for the UN Charter. After all, the Charter prohibits use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state. UN experts and some nations, including U.S. critics and some allies, condemned the operation as a gross violation of international law and an assault on national sovereignty.

If Gaza exposes selective application of humanitarian norms, the abduction of Nicolás Maduro demonstrates selective recognition of sovereignty, the foundational principle of the international order since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Few will miss Maduro. He leaves behind a land in massive economic decline, held together only by oppression, with a quarter of Venezuela’s population now living abroad. Still, this incident crystallizes the end of universalism specifically about sovereignty: the end of the principle that all recognized states, regardless of size or power, enjoy equal protection under international law. In practice, to be sure, sovereignty has always been unevenly distributed: great powers intervene in weaker states with some regularity. The history of Latin America is marked by U.S. interventions. But interventions were typically justified through some appeal to universalist language—humanitarian intervention, invitation by legitimate authorities, collective security, the responsibility to protect—or conducted covertly with official deniability.

The Maduro operation represented something different: open assertion of a right to seize a sitting head of state on foreign soil, justified primarily by domestic U.S. legal charges and strategic interests in Venezuelan oil as desirable input for U.S. refineries. As can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, the winner of the Venezuelan election of July 28, 2024 was Edmundo González, who stood in for Maria Corina Machado (who was not permitted to run). Trump nonetheless implausibly claims that Machado lacks respect among Venezuelans.

The Trump government’s plans for Venezuela do not currently prioritize democratic transition.  To be sure, regime change is beyond what international law has ever recognized as legitimate grounds for interference in another country. But at least a well-thought-out plan for transition in a country where there is a democratically legitimized leader would offer the beginnings of a moral justification for what happened on January 3. As things stand, there is not such justification. It just seems to be about oil.

The logic is stark: Venezuela lacks military deterrence (particularly nuclear weapons) that would make such an operation unthinkable against, say, Kim Jong-Un in North Korea. It lacks alliances that would trigger collective defense. It lacks economic leverage to impose meaningful costs on the intruders. Trump’s January 3 intervention in Venezuela made clear that, as of 2026, sovereignty is a privilege extended conditionally to those who can defend it or who enjoy protection of a greater power.

To many observers—most of whom will not want to go on record about it—Maduro’s abduction looks like an act of open colonial enforcement. And that is ironic also because the Monroe Doctrine that now is being reinterpreted on the fly as the Donroe Doctrine is originally an anti-colonial doctrine: it was about discouraging further European colonialism in the Americas, not about inviting U.S. colonization of its own neighbors,

Russian aggression in Ukraine has been rightly condemned as a fundamental violation of the international order, especially by European countries. The same countries that in this manner have insisted most forcefully on the inviolability of borders and sovereignty so far have applied a conspicuously different standard to U.S. actions in Venezuela. The message received globally was unambiguous: sovereignty is inviolable when violated by adversaries; it is negotiable when the violator is an ally. In a world of Great Spaces as envisaged by Carl Schmitt, all of this makes sense. Europeans never expected to live in such a world and now find what they thought were shared principles abandoned by their military protector. And that, in turn, might set them up for a conflict with one who has ambitions to be the regional hegemon in that part of the world, Vladimir Putin. China might well feel emboldened when it comes to Taiwan.

Trump’s January 3 intervention in Venezuela made clear that, as of 2026, sovereignty is a privilege extended conditionally to those who can defend it or who enjoy protection of a greater power.

The Maduro case also illustrates how law itself becomes an instrument of selective sovereignty. The U.S. invoked its domestic legal system—indictments for drug trafficking—as sufficient warrant for extraterritorial action. Maduro was presented to an American judge as if he were a drug dealer from Atlantic City. That on January 7 the U.S. left another several dozen international organizations is mere icing on this particular cake.

But the principle that one nation's domestic law can justify military operations on another nation's territory to seize its leaders would, if universalized, produce chaos.

Imagine China seizing a Taiwanese president on charges of sedition under Chinese law, Russia abducting a Ukrainian official for "Nazi collaboration," or Iran extracting a Saudi leader for terrorism charges. The reason these scenarios seem outlandish is not that the legal logic is different—it is that only certain states possess the power to act on such logic and the geopolitical position to avoid meaningful consequences. Only in a Schmittian world of Great Spaces would such scenarios not raise eyebrows because the empire at the heart of a Great Space would reinforce its status in its global neighborhood.

The Maduro abduction thus becomes a case study in the transition from a rules-based order, however imperfect, to a power-based system where standards openly apply differently to the powerful and the weak. Russia and China might indeed be eager takers, and the prime losers would be the people of Ukraine and of Taiwan. But then the losers would also include everyone else who is in the real or putative sphere of influence of a real or putative power that could develop its own Great Space. In East-Central Africa, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame might well be one of the aspirants.

The Maduro abduction suggests that universalism in international relations—the idea that the same laws constrain all actors—is superseded by a blunt acknowledgment of hierarchy, where norms function not as mutual constraints but as tools for the powerful. "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” as a famous line from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has it. The whole point and purpose of universalism has been to not live in such a world.

The Geography of Indifference: Neglected Conflicts and the Hierarchy of Concern

If Gaza reveals competing universalisms and Maduro’s abduction exposes the selectivity of sovereignty, a pattern of neglected conflicts around the world demonstrates perhaps the most fundamental failure: the collapse of universal concern itself. Instead of a principle that atrocity anywhere should trigger comparable moral and institutional response we inhabit a political sphere characterized by a stark geography of attention. Some suffering is highly visible. Other suffering, often greater in scale, remains nearly invisible.

Consider Yemen. Over the last decade, the country has endured one of the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes: hundreds of thousands are dead from violence, disease, and starvation; millions have been displaced. A Saudi-led coalition, supplied with weapons and intelligence by the United States, has conducted years of airstrikes hitting markets, hospitals, schools, and residential areas. Houthi forces have also committed serious violations, including indiscriminate shelling and use of landmines. By any measure of suffering Yemen represents a massive and sustained humanitarian crisis involving credible allegations of war crimes by multiple parties.

Instead of a principle that atrocity anywhere should trigger comparable moral and institutional response we inhabit a political sphere characterized by a stark geography of attention.

Yet Yemen has generated nothing approaching the sustained international attention, diplomatic mobilization, or public protest of Ukraine or Gaza. There have been no comprehensive sanctions on Saudi Arabia comparable to those imposed on Russia. Western arms sales to the coalition continued for years with minimal interruption. The conflict rarely appears on front pages unless a particularly egregious incident briefly surfaces.

The reason is not mysterious: Yemen is strategically peripheral to Western interests (except for its ability to inflict some damage on Red Sea shipping), the victims are predominantly poor, and the perpetrators include key Western allies in a region where stability and arms sales seem to take priority over humanitarian principles.

The case of Tigray in Ethiopia offers an even starker example. Between 2020 and 2022, the region experienced what numerous observers described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing, possibly genocide, involving mass atrocities, widespread sexual violence used as a weapon of war, and deliberate starvation. Eritrean forces and Ethiopian federal troops, along with regional militias, destroyed health facilities, blocked humanitarian aid, and engaged in systematic targeting of civilians. Credible estimates suggest hundreds of thousands died. The Ethiopian government found ways of keeping the scale of atrocities hidden for months.

International responses were glacial and minimal. There were statements of concern here and there, some aid initiatives, limited diplomatic pressure. But there was nothing resembling the mobilization around either Ukraine or Gaza—no serious sanctions regime, no emergency sessions producing binding resolutions, no sustained media coverage bringing individual victims into global view. When the violence subsided, largely through military victory rather than negotiated peace or international intervention, the crisis faded from international attention. Tigrayans remain displaced, traumatized with minimal accountability for atrocities and limited reconstruction support. Even many educated people in the West barely know where Tigray even is.

Sudan presents an ongoing example. Since fighting erupted in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the country has descended into catastrophe. The RSF has engaged in ethnic cleansing in Darfur, systematic sexual violence, and mass displacement. Millions face starvation. Khartoum, the capital city inhabited by millions, has become a war zone. Humanitarian access is severely restricted. The scale of suffering is immense and growing. Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are involved in the conflict, pursuing their strategic interests there.

The international response has largely been characterized by indifference. (See a recent event on Sudan in IOP Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School.) There have been occasional diplomatic statements and underfunded humanitarian appeals, but no sustained Security Council action, no serious sanctions or accountability mechanisms, and little media attention beyond specialist outlets. Sudan is not geopolitically central enough to trigger the machinery of universal concern. There is no powerful patron whose interests are directly threatened (though there are powerful patrons who are themselves involved), no historical ties strong enough to make Western media publics feel invested, and no strategic resource important enough to generate intervention.

Myanmar's treatment of the Rohingya offers us a fourth example. The 2017 military campaign involved mass killings, systematic rape, and burning of villages that the UN described as bearing "the hallmarks of genocide." Nearly a million Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, where they have remained in camps, stateless and with minimal prospect of return or resettlement. The International Court of Justice has an ongoing case, and there have been various forms of diplomatic pressure and targeted sanctions.

Yet the Rohingya remain largely forgotten in international discourse, and their suffering no longer generates urgency. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar briefly renewed international attention but primarily focused on the military's seizure of power from Aung San Suu Kyi. It has not focused on the ongoing persecution of Rohingya or the military's violence against ethnic minorities and pro-democracy protesters. It is ironic that Suu Kyi fell from grace and lost her status as a global icon precisely because she turned out to be not deeply concerned with the fate of the Rohingya, who are Muslims—and as a result of that fall the Rohingyas themselves have been forgotten. It is almost as if concern for their lives was all along only a voyeuristic interest in how well Suu Kyi would handle herself.

The case of China's treatment of the Uyghurs—the fifth and last case I will mention—represents perhaps the starkest example of how power insulates perpetrators from universal norms. Since approximately 2017, China’s government has detained over a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in what it calls "vocational training centers" and what researchers, journalists, and human rights organizations describe as a vast system of internment camps. The evidence is extensive: satellite imagery of the camps' expansion, testimony from survivors detailing forced labor, sterilization, torture, and cultural erasure, and leaked government documents outlining the systematic nature of the campaign. (See here and here or here.) Multiple governments and human rights bodies have characterized the treatment as genocide or crimes against humanity.

Yet the international response has been restrained. Some Western countries have imposed targeted sanctions on individual officials and entities. There have been diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Olympics and restrictions on goods produced with forced labor. But these measures are marginal compared to the ongoing economic integration with China. The same countries that severed major economic ties with Russia over Ukraine continue to treat China as an indispensable trading partner despite credible genocide allegations. No serious multilateral effort to investigate or sanction China has materialized. Even many Muslim-majority countries, far from expressing solidarity with persecuted fellow Muslims, actively defend China's policies, bound by economic dependence on Belt and Road Initiative investments.

The Uyghur case demonstrates a crucial aspect of the collapse of universalism: atrocities committed by major powers with economic leverage (and nuclear weapons) face no meaningful international accountability. The universal prohibition on genocide becomes, in practice, a prohibition on genocide by weak states or by states without powerful defenders. China's position in global supply chains, permanent seat (and thus veto power) on the Security Council, and military power immunize it to mechanisms that universalism claimed would constrain all actors equally.

What the Pattern Reveals

These cases share certain features: they occur in regions of limited strategic importance to major powers; they involve victims who are typically poor, non-white, often Muslim or from marginalized ethnic groups; and the perpetrators are either Western allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE) or not important enough enemies to warrant intervention or sustained pressure.

The pattern exposes what one might call the actuarial reality of universalism: there is a calculus, rarely spoken about but clearly operating, that determines which suffering counts. The variables include geopolitical significance, cultural proximity, media access, historical ties, and identity of perpetrators. The power of the perpetrator may be the most decisive variable. The Uyghur case shows that even extensively documented atrocities by a major power generate far more limited consequences than lesser violations by weaker states. When suffering occurs in strategically important locations (Ukraine) or involves parties to a long-standing conflict with powerful diasporas and deep historical resonance (Israel/Palestine), the machinery of international attention activates. When it occurs in places like Tigray, Yemen, or Darfur that machinery remains largely inert.

The pattern exposes what one might call the actuarial reality of universalism: there is a calculus, rarely spoken about but clearly operating, that determines which suffering counts.

None of this is new. Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, and many other cases demonstrate that selective attention has always characterized international responses. But the current moment makes the disparity visible in ways in which it has never been before.  Social media and satellite imagery mean that atrocities in Tigray, Sudan or the Chinese interior are documented in real time, just as those in Gaza or Ukraine are. The information exists: it is the response that differs. And because the information exists, the choice not to respond, or to respond minimally, becomes more transparent and thus more damaging to what credibility universalism might still have left.

After Universalism?

Evidence from Gaza, Venezuela, and the world's neglected conflicts points toward the painful conclusion that we are living through the disintegration of universalism as an organizing principle of international order. This does not mean universal norms have never mattered, or that the institutions and treaties established after 1945 have achieved nothing. They mattered enormously, providing language and leverage for liberation movements, for humanitarian protection, and for holding power accountable. But their claim to universality depends on the at least widely shared belief that the norms applied to everyone, and that violations by anyone could be called out and potentially sanctioned.

That shared belief is collapsing. What we see instead is the emergence of a multi-tiered system where norms function differently depending on who invokes them and against whom. And this is a world increasingly resembling what Schmitt described in terms of Great Spaces.

Powerful states invoke humanitarian law, human rights, and sovereignty when it suits them and disregard or reinterpret them if it does not. International institutions increasingly function mostly as arenas for geopolitical competition. The same act receives condemnation or silence depending on who the perpetrator is (and who their friends are). Public discourse fractures into rival moral universes, each treating universal principles as weapons rather than standards.

Yet the question posed in the title nonetheless remains open: is this truly the end of universalism, or a crisis from which a renewed universalism might emerge?

Maybe we are witnessing not the end but the exposure of the limits of universalism. We now understand very thoroughly that it was always an aspiration rather than a description, and that its value lies in providing a standard by which to judge the inevitable failures. If so, the task is not to abandon universalism but to reconstruct it: to acknowledge its historical entanglement with power while insisting on the core insight that all humans possess equal moral worth and deserve equal concern under law.

Let us be clear: such a reconstruction requires changes that currently seem beyond reach. It would mean applying legal and moral standards consistently, condemning war crimes whether committed by Russia or Saudi Arabia, by Hamas or Israel, by the U.S. or China. It would mean reforming international institutions to reflect current geopolitical realities rather what these realities were in 1945, giving emerging powers genuine voice. It would mean building cross-cultural movements to resist reflexes of tribal solidarity and insist, say, on equal grief for all lives. It would also mean confronting the deep economic, technological, and military inequalities that make formal legal equality nearly meaningless.

We have no choice but to begin this work here and now. The moment is unpromising, the obstacles are daunting, but the stakes—nothing less than whether we inhabit a world of shared norms or naked power—could not be higher.

So, yes, this is a tall order. None of this is likely in the near term. Incentives run in the opposite direction: toward fragmentation, spheres of influence, and blunt acknowledgments of hierarchy. Carl Schmitt does seem to be getting his way. The language of universalism will likely persist because it remains rhetorically useful. Increasingly, however, such language will merely be empty rhetoric, deployed cynically by those who no longer believe in it and resented by those who feel betrayed by selective application.

If universalism is to have any future beyond rhetoric, that future will be forged in struggles like those discussed here, where temptation to abandon the equal worth of all human lives is strongest, and where the consequences of that abandonment are most devastatingly clear. The end of universalism is not inevitable, and we need it now more badly than ever before as the world needs to combat climate change and prepare itself for the arrival of Artificial intelligence.

We have no choice but to begin this work here and now. The moment is unpromising, the obstacles are daunting, but the stakes—nothing less than whether we inhabit a world of shared norms or naked power—could not be higher. The question in the title remains open. How we answer it will define international order for generations to come.