Two Proposals for Universal and Perpetual Peace: A Short Comparison

Hard times need bold thinking. In the year 2022, Luigi Ferrajoli published ‘Per una Costituzione della Terra. L’umanità al bivio’ (A Plea for a Constitution of the Earth. Humanity at a Crossroad), where, urging to take the several constitutional charters and international conventions on human rights seriously, he advocates for a sweeping reform of the U.N. Charter, aiming at establishing the institutional frame for making global constitutionalism effective. The year 2024 has seen the publication of Jorge E. Núñez’s Cosmopolitanism, State Sovereignty and International Law and Politics. A Theory, where he argues for a system of international (inter-societal and inter-individual) relationships where national legal orders and international law coexist within the coordinating frame of an irenic universal law. The paper purports to offer the outline of a critical comparison of the two proposals (realistic utopias?) Ferrajoli and Núñez respectively set forth.