Abstract
A couple of years ago, while speaking to a small colloquium, one prominent international lawyer stated that “there is no interdisciplinarity.” As he saw it, there would only be a “war between the disciplines.” I think there is something to it: interdisciplinary research can be a struggle and often enough, scholars do systematically misunderstand each other—and pit at each other quite different definitions, concepts and stories. Just consider the different notions of “method” that prevail in International Relations (IR) and International Law.14 IR scholars and international lawyers do engage in rather different projects—even when the former are increasingly interested in international legal norms or the legalization of world politics. Finding that an international institution like the WTO is “more legalized” than, say, the concert of Europe is different from arguing that a particular state is in breach of its international legal obligations. For lawyers, the IR scholars' new interest in international law must appear as an attempt to understand law without taking “the law” seriously. However, I think one cannot simply blame “disciplinary boundaries” for these misunderstandings. In IR and International Law, we face “paradigmatic divides” that, more often than not, transcend disciplinary boundaries. In fact, collaboration of scholars gets difficult with the increase of distance on a field that could be circumscribed by the crossed paradigmatic and disciplinary axes. R.B.J. Walker and Robert Keohane might face certain difficulties in “understanding” while Mathias Albert and Gunter Teubner, who both draw extensively on Luhmann in IR and International Law respectively, do share some common “ground.” In other words, I think the divide between paradigms is much deeper than that between disciplines. The success and failure of interdisciplinary research might have more to do with different paradigms than different disciplines. Indeed, some of those theories that now are commonly cited on …
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