The bridge crack'd: A critical look at interdisciplinary relations

International Relations

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 119-125

  Klabbers, Jan ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62549124589     PISSN: 00471178     EISSN: 17412862     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0047117808100617     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. See Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'International Law and International Relations Theory: A Dual Agenda', American Journal of International Law, 87, 1993, p. 205.
2. See Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'International Law in a World of Liberal States', European Journal of International Law, 6, 1995, p. 503.
3. See Anne-Marie Slaughter, Andrew S. Tulumello and Stepan Wood, 'International Law and International Relations Theory: A New Generation of Interdisciplinary Scholarship', American Journal of International Law, 92, 1998, p. 367.
4. See Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
5. See Jan Klabbers, review of Slaughter, 'A New World Order', International Organizations Law Review, 2, 2005, p. 461.
6. See also Jan Klabbers, 'The Relative Autonomy of International Law, or The Forgotten Politics of Interdisciplinarity', Journal of International Law and International Relations, 1, 2004/5, p. 35.
7. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
8. See Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd edn (New York: Knopf, 1955).
9. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939).
10. See Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, World Peace through World Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
11. See Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a review, see Jan Klabbers, review of Goldsmith and Posner, The Limits of International Law, Finnish Yearbook of International Law, 16, 2005, p. 401. Their approach is very much based on a simple game theory model, where the world is composed of two states that interact with each other. There are no third states, much less NGOs, international organizations, or other non-state groupings in their fairly limited universe. Nor, for that matter, does the model take domestic actors and their disagreements into account.
12. For one example, see Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, 'Why States Act through Formal International Organizations', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42, 1998, p. 3.
13. See, respectively, Nicholas G. Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004).
14. Without wishing to make too much of the analogy, realists tend to see criminal law as the archetype of law, whereas constructivists focus more on private law paradigms.
15. For a lawyerly take on constructivism, see Jutta Brunnée and Stephen J. Toope, 'International Law and Constructivism: Elements of an Interactional Theory of International Law', Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 39, 2000-1, p. 19.
16. See, in particular, David Kennedy, International Legal Structures (Baden Baden: Nomos, 1987); Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Helsinki: Finnish Lawyers' Publishing Company, 1989).
17. To present some anecdotal evidence again: I have taught international law to groups of students, often including social scientists, and these students display two major intellectual problems. First (not terribly relevant here) is that they have difficulties realizing that many substantive debates are fought by procedural means: Debates on legal competence or jurisdiction often mask underlying substantive debate. Second, they tend to come to class with ideas about how law will provide the right answer - which is then something for politics to either accept or reject.
18. See www.helsinki.fi/oik/globalgovernance.
19. See, on the latter point, e.g. Martti Koskenniemi, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law. Report of the Study Group of the International Law Commission (Helsinki: Erik Castrén Institute, 2007); Jan Klabbers, Treaty Conflict and the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
20. See, e.g., Jan Klabbers, 'Some Reflections on Globalization and University Life', in Jan Klabbers and Mortimer Sellers (eds), Internationalization of Law and Legal Education (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming 2009).