#MOTRIX INTERNATIONAL FULL#

Footnote 6 Explorations across disciplinary boundaries seem to have come full circle. Footnote 4 Indeed, while critical IL scholars have come to warn of the dangers of interdisciplinary research and the detrimental influence of IR, Footnote 5 the former IR champions of ‘legalization’ have embarked on a search for the space left for politics in legitimizing an otherwise technical legalization. As Leander and Werner suggest, the boundaries have been recently re-drawn from both sides, affirming separate disciplinary identities anew. Footnote 1 While liberal IR scholars in the 1990s and 2000s studied ‘legalization’ (and ‘judicialization’) as a feature of global governance beyond realist power politics, Footnote 2 critical IL scholars endorsed ‘politics’ as the real game behind the formalized circuits of legal arguments. Crossing and contesting the boundaries ultimately reaffirms them as the matrix in which conflicts over states and the international are articulated as legal and political.Īs is widely acknowledged, IL and IR make for a rather complicated couple, with their ‘tainted love’ alternating between phases of attraction and rejection. We further illustrate how the same conceptual oppositions still enable and constrain current debates in IL and IR, discussing as examples the creation of states and the justiciability of international crimes. Reading these distinctions as intertwined ‘nested oppositions’, this article reconstructs the stylized but paradigmatic debates between Max Weber and Hans Kelsen over the nature of the state and between Hans Morgenthau and Hersch Lauterpacht over the nature of the international. Together, these two cross-cutting lines have shaped the possibilities and constraints of articulating substantive positions ‘in’ (international) law and politics at least since the Interwar period.

Although the apparent limits to challenging the boundary between legality and politics are not new, we suggest that they are intimately related to another great divide, i.e., that between the state and the international. While critical approaches investigating the politics of international law have come to insist on the lasting significance of legality proper, IR approaches to legalization have returned to politics. The boundary itself, however, has proven resilient. Interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of international law (IL) and International Relations (IR) has illuminated the roles of politics in law, of law in politics, and of the shifting boundary between the two in various areas of international affairs.

Motrix international