International law is often described as a restraining force: a set of rules intended to narrow the space for coercion and impose limits on what victory can deliver. Yet, in practice, it is also a language of strategy—used to manage domestic expectations, defend diplomatic positions, and shape what outcomes can be presented as legitimate. This tension sits at the centre of a new article by Miloš Hrnjaz, a researcher in the New South Institute’s South-South Dialogues programme, published in the Review of Central and East European Law (Brill) on 9 February 2026.

In “The Art of Avoiding Serbia’s Defeat in the Case of Kosovo: The Promises and Limitations of International Law”, Hrnjaz returns to a question that has remained politically alive in Serbia since 1999: what does “defeat” mean when a war ends, and what does the law allow—both to those who lose and those who win? The article traces how the Kosovo dispute has been argued through legal instruments and reference points that still structure debate, including the Kumanovo Agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Rather than treating these as settled milestones, Hrnjaz shows how they continue to matter because they anchor competing interpretations of loss, continuity, and national interest.

A central contribution of the piece is to clarify what international law has promised to states that are militarily defeated in the post-Second World War order. If the prohibition on the use of force has altered the meaning of victory, Hrnjaz argues, it has also altered the meaning of defeat: the fact of military loss no longer automatically licenses annexation or the redrawing of borders. In this reading, the law offers a particular reassurance to the defeated—an insistence that, even after a battlefield outcome, the state endures and its territorial boundaries should remain intact.

But the argument does not stop at the promise. Hrnjaz is equally attentive to the point at which law’s comforting logic meets the reality of power. Using Serbia as a case study, he examines how victorious states can pursue political goals while formally avoiding the appearance of violating legal constraints, and how the practical effect can be to erode the very territorial integrity the law appears to protect. In other words, the article treats international law not as irrelevant, but as a field in which outcomes are negotiated—sometimes through compliance, sometimes through manoeuvre, and often through a careful management of legitimacy.

This is the kind of inquiry that sits squarely within NSI’s South-South Dialogues programme: an insistence on examining how global governance frameworks work in practice, and on tracking the interaction between legal argumentation, diplomacy, and state strategy. It also connects—without forcing an analogy—to NSI’s broader work on South Africa. South Africa’s international engagement frequently involves navigating precisely these tensions: the gap between principled commitments and geopolitical constraint; the pull between territorial integrity and self-determination in contested settings; and the ways in which “rules-based” language can be both a tool for restraint and a tool of persuasion. For South African policy and public debate, the question is rarely whether international law matters, but how it matters—when it constrains, when it enables, and whose interpretation carries weight in uneven global contexts.

Hrnjaz’s article offers a disciplined way into those questions. By focusing on how “defeat” is understood, argued, and politically managed, it invites readers to take seriously the dual character of international law: as a normative project, and as a terrain on which power is exercised.

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