The Role Of Law In International Politics

This interdisciplinary volume examines the highly topical issue of the role international law plays in international politics today.

This illuminating book explores a multitude of areas in which law and politics intersect on the international plane, providing a comprehensive analysis of the foundations on which both international law and politics rest. The book examines both disciplines’ mutual interaction in more specific areas such as public authority, global space, and peace.

Teaches how and why states make, break, and uphold international law using accessible explanations and contemporary international issues.

This study proposes a new basis for international law. The author rejects a moral basis for international law, advocating instead the substitution of a functional one. Philosophy, sociology and legal theory are all brought to bear on the question, what law best suits the modern world.

Influential writers on international law and international relations explore the making, interpretation and enforcement of international law.

The space occupied by international law in shaping political action is subject to continuing debate and controversy. This book aims to answer the question of how and why international law impacts the behaviour of actors on the international stage in the absence of central authority and faced with asymmetric power. At a time when the role of normative restraints in international relations, and international law in particular, has come under renewed questioning, it advances an analytical framework for understanding the effect of norms on behaviour that is not contingent on material restraints or a given political constellation, while being informed by the practical realities and practice of international organisation. In doing so, this book draws on an interdisciplinary range of sources, including international law, political theory, cognitive psychology and behavioural economics to explore a communicative action-based approach of how norms and ideas persuade actors to engage in a course of action consonant with international law to achieve a particular outcome. In probing the role of norms on questions such as the use of force and accountability, and issues of equity and justice, it examines the challenges international law faces and what the way forward may look like.

In this fully updated and revised edition, the authors explore the evolution, nature and function of international law in world politics and situate international law in its historical and political context. They propose three interdisciplinary 'lenses' (realist, liberal and constructivist) through which to view the role of international law in world politics and suggest that the concept of an international society provides the overall context within which international legal developments occur. These theoretical perspectives offer different ways of looking at international law in terms of what it is, how it works and how it changes. Topics covered include the use of force, international crimes, human rights, international trade and the environment. The new edition also contains more material on non-western perspectives, international institutions and non-state actors and a new bibliography. Each chapter features discussion questions and guides to further reading.

All ten of the living former U.S. State Department legal advisers from the Carter administration to that of George W. Bush examine the role international law played during the major crises on their watch.