International Law and International Relations / القانون الدولي والعلاقات الدولية

International Law and International Relations

This volume is intended to help readers understand the relationship between international law and international relations (IL/IR). 

The excerpted articles, all of which were first published in International Organization, represent some of the most important research since serious social science scholarship began in this area more than twenty years ago.

The contributions have been selected to provide readers with a range of theoretical perspectives, concepts, and heuristics that can be used to analyze the relationship between international law and international relations.

These articles also cover some of the main topics of international affairs.

In this brief preface, we note the rise of law in interstate relations and flag some of the most important theoretical approaches to understanding this development.

We also introduce the topics chosen and discuss the volume’s organization.

the rise of law in international relations

The study of international law has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the last two decades. Of course, international affairs have long been assumed to include international legal issues.

Yet, in the first third of the twentieth century, analysts did not sharply distinguish ‘‘international law’’ from ‘‘international relations.’’ International relations courses were often about international law and frequently confounded the prescripts of international law with the way states were said to behave in fact.

By the time the United States entered the Second World War, that illusory mistake was exposed: it was clear that international legal rules and processes had not operated the way many had hoped.

The failure to contain German and Japanese aggression, the weakness of agreements to keep the international economy functioning, and the humanitarian disasters of the Second World War made most observers acutely aware of the limits of law in international affairs.

For more than thirty years after the end of the war, American political science turned its back on international law, focusing its study of international relations on the material interests and observed behavior of states.

Yet by the early 1980s, many international relations scholars had rediscovered a role for law in interstate relations.

Reflecting on the postwar order, many recognized that it was built not only upon power relationships but also on explicitly negotiated agreements.

These agreements in themselves increasingly piqued scholarly interest.

One reason may have been the sheer proliferation of such agreements.

A century ago, most international law was said to arise from custom – evidenced by continuous, recurrent state practice and opinion juris (i.e., the practice was compelled by legal obligation).

For a number of reasons – including the growth of independent states, the lack of consent implied by many approaches to customary law, the increasingly detailed nature of international agreements, and the rise of multilateral treaty-making capacity, e.g. by various working groups of the United Nations – today, many (if not most) international legal obligations are expressed in treaty form.

Some treaties codify customary law, but in a way that respects the express consent of the states that are parties to them.