In our third episode, James meets with Alameda associate, and Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International and Executive-Secretary of the Hague Group, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, to explore what used to be called the “rules-based international order”, and the emergence of new forms of global resistance.

Through a wide-ranging conversation spanning Gaza, Iran, Latin America, and beyond, the episode examines what Varsha describes as the collapse of empire’s “legal fiction” – the notion that global order was ever governed by neutral rules rather than power. As that fiction unravels, we are witnessing the return of overt coercion, territorial aggression, and the open defiance of international law by powerful states in the Global North.

But alongside this rupture, new alignments are taking shape. From the work of the Hague Group to growing solidarity among Global South nations, the conversation asks whether a different kind of sovereignty – and a genuinely decolonial internationalism – can emerge from the cracks of disorder.

If the old order was always a veneer, what replaces it as it falls away – and what possibilities exist for building something new in a world After Order?