Traditional accounts of the ‘structural’ principles of international law are ‘positivistic‘ and ‘voluntarist‘, suggesting that: a) law and morality are conceptually distinct; and b) no international obligations can exist without state consent. Each paper in this panel challenges these orthodoxies in different ways. Whether by assessing the limits of legitimate democratic rule, the need to respond to endemic risk, what it takes to belong to a political community or the place of political morality in legal reasoning, each suggests new ways of understanding and engaging with the law that regulates international relations. In so doing they implicate the conference themes of democracy, security and identity as they pertain between states.