Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Mark A. Pollack (eds). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art

Abstract

While international law and political science disciplines were quite distant from one another for most of the past century, they have come closer to rediscovering each other numerous times during the last two decades. The growing intersection between the two has been scrutinized, analysed, and promoted by many international law and international relations pioneers. The present collection brings together the leading scholars writing at the crossroads between the two disciplines to consider and reflect on the current state of interdisciplinary international law and international relations The result is a book of high calibre that is not only essential, but also very delightful and enriching reading for scholars and students of international law and international relations. The volume under review can be understood as a continuation of the dialogue between international law and international relations scholars that was first prompted by Kenneth Abbott's canonical manifesto in 1989, and later convincingly reiterated by Anne-Marie Slaughter and Robert Keohane in the 1990s.1 These prominent interdisciplinary pioneers argued that international lawyers and political scientists were not communicating enough across their professional divide, and suggested various frameworks for collaboration. This new collection of powerful essays edited by Pollack and Dunoff demonstrates how innovative and insightful those pioneering proposals were: overcoming the international law (IR) and international relations (IR) divide was indeed a very fruitful exercise, which led to the birth of what the authors in the present volume call the scholarship. The volume demonstrates that IL/IR scholarship has overcome the disciplinary divide and developed into a unified sub-discipline, where both lawyers and IR scholars adopt the same conceptual approaches, employ the same tools, use common references, and deploy similar language. The division between the two intellectual traditions has disappeared and become invisible in the (no longer so) new IL/IR cross-discipline.