TY - JOUR
AU - Jo, Hyeran
AB - For the past two or three decades, the marriage between international relations (IR) and international law (IL) has been a fruitful one. This interdisciplinary agenda has generated many research programs—legalization in world politics, rational design of international institutions, research on compliance with IL—just to name a few. IR and IL seem to be natural partners. International politics operates within the international legal and normative environment; IL is enmeshed with international power politics and the changing landscape of world politics. As a stock-taking book that also provides a way forward, Interdisciplinary Perspectives is a welcome addition to this literature. The contributors to the edited volume are well known to both fields; each has generated new collaborative research programs that have advanced the field. Researchers and students in both IR and IL will benefit greatly from this book, both as a reference and as food for further thought. The book starts with the big-picture debates that have defined the field: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and institutionalism. The contributors provide a good survey of each tradition without losing sight of the possibility of dialogue between different “isms.” Very appropriately, the book also questions the utility of an interdisciplinary approach. Did we get it right when IR and IL scholars started talking to each other in their work? The overall tone of the verdict is positive. Many contributors see the collaborative endeavor as worthwhile, although there are dissenting opinions on this. For sure, legal training and judicial interpretations are not necessarily the central focus of IR. For its own part, determining causality or establishing general empirical patterns is not necessarily interesting to international lawyers. Despite disparate approaches, training, and focus, however, the two fields have at least opened conversations in a productive way. The conversation has generated new questions and new understandings about world order, politics of international agreements, and the impact of international institutions. Those are the crucial insights gained from the interdisciplinary approach. The book deals with diverse issue areas from security, political economy, human rights, and governance. Its coverage of corresponding international organizations is wide, ranging from international courts to tribunals. Interdisciplinary Perspectives certainly gives a comprehensive view of the state of the art. With the benefits of interdisciplinary perspectives come challenges too. The first is conceptual: Compliance is defined as adherence to specified legal rules. As such, in a strict sense, the legality of an act should be judged by its conformity with well-defined legal criteria and standards. However, IR scholars view compliance as political behavior. Concepts like legitimacy, sovereignty costs, and reputation also mean different things to different types of scholars. The authors of the relevant chapters are frank about difficulties they encounter in tackling these concepts, and in their suggestions for ways to make the abstract concepts more concrete, specific, and sometimes measurable. These are in my mind important discussions that do not usually take place in journal articles. Conceptual challenges also pose theoretical and empirical challenges, and in particular problems with methodology. If IL is developed out of politics, how would IL constrain politics? Wearing my hat as a political scientist, I agree with the suggestion by Lisa Martin and Jana Von Stein that we should go deeper into studying the “causal” impact of treaties. The fundamental problem of not observing counterfactuals abounds in empirical questions on the effect of IL. For example, when a country ratifies a treaty, unfortunately, we cannot observe that same country not having ratified the treaty. We now have decent solutions such as counterfactual analysis, but a complete analysis also necessitates careful comparative case studies that look more closely into the sequential events to parse out cause and effect. With the growing number of international treaties and increasing presence of international organizations, these will continue to be bread-and-butter questions for IR scholars interested in international institutions. The edited volume recognizes that the field is paying increasing attention to nonstate actors, which is a step in the appropriate direction. States are still powerful actors, but questions about private governance, the role of industry lobbies, and individual citizens paint a different and a more diverse picture of world order and international institutions. How existing state-centric theories of international institutions may apply to nonstate actor settings will be of prime interest. For example, would theories of compliance, emphasizing, for example, the power of ratification or a managerial view of compliance, apply to nonstate actors such as multinationals? Do we need new theories of international institutions to explain the behavior of nonstate actors? Are nonstate actors playing fundamentally different roles from state actors in shaping the legal order? How should we theorize state-to-nonstate actor interactions, as well as nonstate actor-to-nonstate actor interactions? What is the impact of such nonstate actor interactions—for example, international organizations and rebel groups—on civil conflicts? These are the questions that need to be answered by the interdisciplinary research between IR and IL in the future. How can the marriage of IR and IL be more productive? One way to go forward may be to be even more interdisciplinary, both substantively and methodologically. IR and IL can borrow insights from other disciplines—sociology, psychology, and even biology—and expand their horizons in search of new, interesting, and exciting questions. Reciprocity, one of the engines of compliance, is also observed in nature and the biosphere; the psychology of negotiating government officials has yet to be studied, just to mention a few interesting possible spins. Some efforts are already well underway to expand IR and IL's methodological frontiers. These include experimental approaches studying individual preferences for international norms, as well as public opinion studies gauging the legitimacy of international institutions. One of my suggestions would be for this interdisciplinary field to find more relevance in the real world. Thus far, IL and IR have been good academic topics, although somewhat distanced from what people experience on the ground. After all, the scholars from both fields in IL and IR will want to consider the impact and implications of their ideas for everyday political life. If the collaborative effort between IR and IL were to have such an impact, their theories and empirical findings should speak more about what to do. Steven Ratner's chapter on how to improve engagement and persuasion is refreshing in that regard, as he writes with an eye toward policy and practical solutions, beyond legal theories and paradigm debates. © 2014 International Studies Association
TI - A Fruitful Marriage: Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Relations and International Law
JF - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1111/misr.12121
DA - 2014-06-17
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-fruitful-marriage-interdisciplinary-approaches-to-international-8cr7nMGmmv
SP - 1
EP - 330
VL - Advance Article
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -