Interdisciplinarity on the Move: Reading Kratochwil as Counter-Disciplinarity Proper

Leiden Journal of International law 26(3), pp. 503-508, 2013

in: Andre Nollkaemper et al. (eds), International Law as Profession (Cambridge University Press), pp. 287-310, 2017

International lawyers have looked at the study of their object by international relations scholars above all with suspicion. Whereas they have warmly welcomed the increasing recognition of international law’s power also in political sciences, some of them have turned wary about the ways in which international law is (mis-)treated in the move to interdisciplinarity. Their anxieties pertain to the fate of both international law as an object of study and, by implication, the future of the discipline of international law. We submit that these anxieties overall boil down to concerns about the autonomy of international law, both as a domain of international or world society and as an academic discipline. While this argument is in itself not unheard of, we submit more specifically that international lawyers’ responses have been largely counterproductive, threatening to undo some of the insights gained into the politics of international law. Our contribution first takes a step back from present day anxieties to contextualize them against the background of attempts to establish international law and international relations as scientific disciplines (II). A quest for scientific inquiry has similarly informed international relations scholarship, yet these parallel missions paradoxically feed present anxieties about interdisciplinarity. We will support this argument with a brief genealogy of the mainstream interdisciplinary agenda as it has evolved over the past two or three decades (III). In a third and final step, we will sketch our view of international law as practice. We point to the promise of asking what makes for a valid legal argument by investigating these standards as the medium and outcome of practice itself. We finally highlight its purchase for moving past anxieties of interdisciplinarity towards a productive study of the politics of international law (IV).

How does the power of legality impact inter-disciplinary research between International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL)? This is the question this chapter tries to answer. This implies that this chapter does not provide an empirical discussion of legality or a-legality. Rather it is interested in the reconstruction of how the power of legality changes the boundaries between these two disciplines. On the one hand, it is certainly still true that these two disciplines are ‘so close yet so far away’. They are close as their disciplinary histories are irremediably connected. Yet they are far away as they do not speak the same language. Conversations between them first of all need translations, i.e. not just a mere transposition, of basic concepts and problems.

Is there any need for interdisciplinarity in the study of international law? What importance is currently attached to an interdisciplinary approach by international legal scholarship? What are the challenges posed by, and the risk inherent in, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of international, law? These are the three main questions addressed in this paper, published in Meccarelli (ed.), Reading the Crisis: Legal, Philosophical and Literary Perspectives, Madrid, Editorial Dykinson, 2017 (https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/handle/10016/25705).

International Criminal Law Review, 2016

This introduction explores interdisciplinarity by first considering law as a discipline to account for how international criminal law has emerged as a field of practice and scholarship within the broader epistemic context of law. It then considers the nature of international criminal law scholarship before turning to questions of interdisciplinarity.

European Political Science, 2009

The history of interdisciplinarity in international relations (IR) is not a simple narrative. Initially a transdisciplinary meeting place for scholars from many disciplines, IR developed after the 1940s into a closed sub-discipline of political science, and only after 1980 did it once again engage with other disciplines in a sustained way. This article traces these `three ages' of IR, and concludes with a case study of the emerging historiography within IR.European Political Science (2009) 8, 16-25.

This article is concerned with the debate about interdisciplinary methods in international law, in particular the turn to International Relations. It finds the historical critique of Martti Koskenniemi grounded in a more methodological issue: the turn toward a redefinition of norm properties impedes on the critical discursive quality of law. Shaping this historical critique into a research question that allows for meaningful engagement, the article discusses Koskenniemi’s charges drawing on recent constructivist scholarship. Giving an account of what it means to be ‘obliged’ to obey the law, this article defends the coherence of Koskenniemi’s position and suggests that we should take the critique of the interdisciplinary project between law and International Relations seriously. While it agrees that a significant part of the discourse fails to appreciate the particularities of the law, it suggests that understanding legal obligations requires taking the institutional autonomy of the law into account. Respecting this autonomy, in turn, points to a multi- instead of an interdisciplinary project. The reflexive formalist conception of the law that this article advocates captures the obligating nature of the law, independent of the normative content of particular rules.

Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional

The Institute for Advanced International Studies at the University Laval (HEI) celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2014. This represents an exceptional moment to reflect on the past, present and future of International Studies in Québec, the francophone sphere, and beyond, and most particularly to discuss the interdisciplinary evolution of this field of study and research. In the context of interdisciplinary institutions dedicated to graduate education in International Studies, the topics of continuities and discontinuities are particularly important at such points of juncture. For example, the transition from “International Relations” to “International Studies” is promising increasing integration of related disciplines, previously considered unrelated. Up to which point is this interdisciplinary integration can move and mark a departure from the previous field of International Relations? What are the epistemological, ontological, and administrative challenges that this integrative trajectory has generated, is generating and will generate? The goal of this workshop is to share our past experiences and to advance future solutions to these questions. At the University Laval, the institutional change from the Centre Québécois des Relations Internationales (CQRI) to the Institut Québécois des Hautes Études Internationales (HEI) in 1994, and the following transformations in the HEI education programs, underlines the gradual construction of a field of “International Studies”, which originates from the field of “International Relations”. Beyond this specific case, the challenges of interdisciplinarity in International Studies appear under multiple guises. These challenges are for example associated with the transformations in the object of study associated with International Studies, the connexions between multiple fields of study and research, the specific development in Québec and the francophone sphere, the organization of education programs at multiple academic levels, and the management of academic institutions with a specific interdisciplinary mission in International Studies. During the workshop, discussions on these perspectives could benefit from a comparative approach as well as epistemological, sociological, and historical analyses. By going beyond the traditional historiography of the academic field of International Relations, this workshop will enable us to situate the history of the HEI and other education institutions dedicated to International Studies in the local and institutional context as well as the major regional and global developments of the field in the last decades. By highlighting the role of the HEI and similar institutions in Québec, Canada, the francophone sphere and beyond, this project will finally echo the increasing interest toward the analysis of specific research institutions, practices, and education programs in the development of the field of International Studies. Proposals about integration experiences between diverse disciplines in the study and research of major topics such as institutional design, the agri-business field, conflicts associated with natural resources, etc., will be particularly appreciated.