This paper is forthcoming as a chapter in the Handbook of International Law, Olivier de Frouville and Sarah Jamal (eds) Wiley, 2025. This chapter examines how international law produces and sustains practices of negative Othering. It traces the roots of exclusionary legal mechanisms to the colonial foundations of international law, where sovereignty operated as a tool to legitimize the subjugation of non-European societies. By foregrounding the continuing legacy of these dynamics, it further illustrates how the use, language, and structures of international law continue to facilitate marginalization. Three modern challenges are analysed to illustrate this complicity: the exclusion of women and of gender-diverse individuals from full international legal protection; the manipulation of the international refugee regime by states to exclude and devalue certain asylum seekers; and the classification of individuals in armed conflict, such as “unlawful combatants” and “human shields”, that effectively renders some lives unprotected. The chapter concludes by considering the potential for a transformative international legal order, one that resists negative Othering and embraces inclusive legal recognition.