International Law and World Order: Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

Debates about the nature and role of international law have preoccupied international relations (IR) scholars since the inception of the discipline. They involve some of the most fundamental questions about the theory and practice of world order: to what extent is IR a rule-based activity? How do rules and institutions emerge and function under conditions of anarchy and power competition? What effects, if any, does law have on the behavior, interests, and identities of global actors? One way of developing and organizing answers to these questions is through theoretical investigation. Each of the discipline’s main theoretical approaches makes arguments about the role of law in the construction and maintenance of the processes and patterns that constitute political order at the global level. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz largely dismissed international law as an epiphenomenon to power politics and security competition. Rational institutional literature emerging in the 1980s developed a more nuanced picture, highlighting law’s role in fostering order and cooperation among sovereign states. Contemporary constructivist approaches go one step further and acknowledge law’s centrality for understanding patterns and processes of social ordering, while critical scholarship, including Third World approaches to international law, focuses on revealing and challenging the structures that underpin the formation and operation of law in a stratified global order marked by legacies of colonialism and economic and political inequalities. Some of those theoretical claims are related to and derived from historical analysis, and there now is a recognizable, interdisciplinary move among historians, IR scholars, political theorists, and international lawyers to engage with the role of law in the historical evolution of world order.