Introduction: Research Handbook on the Sociology of International Law

Abstract

The appearance of this Research Handbook reflects the editors' view that we may be in the middle of a particularly fertile, and potentially important, period of creative borrowing between the disciplines of international law and sociology. International lawyers who draw on diverse traditions of social thought have found them useful in creating spaces in which the constraints of what has become orthodox international legal thinking have been consciously cast off in pursuit of new kinds of thinking, more suitable for the rapidly transforming social and political landscape where contemporary international lawyering is done. The contributors to the Research Handbook situate their interventions within a particular tradition of sociological or social theoretical thinking, and then explain how and why this tradition is useful in thinking about some contemporary development, or problem, within the domain of international law and governance. Following a brief introduction, the chapter outlines some major theoretical conversations within sociology which will help to locate the following contributions. This discussion highlights core approaches which are most commonly identified in sociological literature (structural- functionalism, symbolic- interactionism, and social conflict perspectives); early engagements between international law and sociology (mainly the writings of Max Huber and Julius Stone); and more recent engagements between international law and social thought, underlining attempts to understand the nature, dynamics, and stakes of globalization as it relates to law, as well as interactions between poststructuralist social theory and contemporary international law.