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I. NON-WESTERN IMPERIALISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT In the past thirty years, scholars affiliated with the TWAIL movement have brought questions of imperialism to the center of [...], While Western imperialism played a crucial role in the creation of modern international law, it is ever more important to analyze the engagements of non-Western imperialist powers with the field so as to comprehend the changing global patterns of legalized violence and expansionism. In this Essay, we analyze Russia's international legal arguments in support of its use of force against Ukraine through the lens of inter-imperial rivalry. In so doing, we call for strict scrutiny of the deployments of jus ad bellum equally by all imperial powers. Critical approaches to international law, especially Marxism and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), can help us understand Russia's aggression against Ukraine and related legal arguments. They also show how this unfolding crisis can help refine our critical analyses so as to theorize and adequately respond to reconfigurations of global inequality, violence, and expansionism. Our argument unfolds in two parts. The first part focuses on non-Western imperialisms and their shifting engagements with Eurocentric international law. In so doing, we will make the case for a non-culturalist, materialist understanding of imperialism and its importance for international law. Secondly, we map Russia's international legal arguments in support of its use of force with an emphasis on inter-imperial rivalry as an explanatory device for their structure and content. Engaging with Russia's arguments demonstrates continuity with argumentative deployments of jus ad bellum by Western powers during the 1990s and early 2000s in their imperial adventures. At the same time, Russia has refracted rather than simply repeated the arguments of the Western powers, reworking them to fit a partial appropriation of the USSR's anti-fascist legacy. What renders these arguments unpersuasive for international audiences is not primarily their doctrinal incoherence or novelty, but rather the (justified) strict scrutiny of Russia's factual claims about Ukraine posing a threat to its security and Russia's attempts to position itself as an embodiment of universal values, such as anti-Nazism. However, if Russia's engagement with jus ad bellum is part of a broader pattern of imperial powers' deployment of international law in inter-imperialist rivalries, debates within the discipline would benefit from extending the same level of scrutiny and disbelief to all imperial powers.