Interdisciplinarity in International Law Scholarship

As a publisher I am used to staying behind the scenes and cajoling my authors into writing for us, so it is with trepidation that I take up this kind invitation from the OJ team – but as the quote from Bull Durham goes “the world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness”.

When I was invited to guest blog a number of topics were suggested, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that all the topics I want to address relate in some way to the impact of the internet on publishing. So these posts will explore questions of the dissemination and discovery of ideas in international law and I would be very interested in reading OJ readers’ responses to the issues raised. This post will consider interdisciplinarity as a possible way to increase dissemination.

We often ask our international law authors whether the internet has increased the amount of interdisciplinary work that they do. The problems addressed by international legal scholarship already do attract inputs from other disciplines, most notably international relations, political theory, and political economy, but I was always under the impression that international law is susceptible to a great deal more interdisciplinary scholarship than is currently the case. Would that be desirable though? Certainly as a marketer of books I would say yes as it increases potential sales. Assessment criteria for the (as yet not fully defined) Research Evaluation Framework which will apply in the UK place value on impact, and presumably successful interdisciplinarity can only increase impact.

Perhaps it is unfair though to expect more. There are more than enough points of black letter law to argue over without bringing in perspectives which can completely change the terms of the debate. Moreover we will all have witnessed exchanges between scholars from different disciplines that end up as a dialogue of the deaf. It might be helpful first to attempt a taxonomy of the types of interdisciplinary publishing that occur.

An admittedly crude classification of interdisciplinarity posits three types which could even be seen as evolutionary stages. Type 1 is simple cross-pollination: an author addresses a topic of interest to international lawyers but almost entirely from another disciplinary perspective, and hopefully with good cross-marketing by the publisher, international lawyers will pick up on it. Type 2 is where an international lawyer incorporates insights from another discipline (often gleaned from a Type 1 study described above) in a book or article still aimed primarily at other international lawyers. Type 3 is where the international law scholar fully engages with the material from another discipline intending to make an impact both on that other discipline’s understanding of a problem as much as on international law’s understanding of it. (By some definitions the first two types are referred to as “multidisciplinarity”.)

Quality assurance processes act against Types 2 and 3 as you need to approach a wider range of peer reviewers. Getting unequivocally positive reviews of such proposals or manuscripts is actually very difficult as Type 2 books can be dismissed as mere dabbling, whilst Type 3 books require the author to achieve a form of disciplinary bilingualism where readers from the other discipline would not notice any rough edges or bum notes. Within the confines of traditional publishing it is very difficult to reconcile notions of acceptable quality with the desirability of wider dissemination of ideas that interdisciplinarity promises.

The blogosphere offers a way around this. Open enough (by virtue of being global and free) not to present barriers to dissemination yet still targeting a rarefied audience, it knowingly engages in a trade off between immediacy and exhaustive research. Such an environment could be expected to foster interdisciplinary exchange by being less judgemental about attempts to go beyond one’s comfort zone.

It might be interesting to look at what are arguably the leading international law blogs to see whether this has happened. Opinio Juris’s About page states that it is a blog focussing on international law and international relations (admittedly the latter may be understood as referring to world events rather than the scholarly discipline) whilst EJIL Talk!’s About page talks about exploring “wide systemic meaning” which might also imply bringing in insights from other disciplines. It seems to me that the book discussions both here on OJ and over at EJIL Talk! do the most to foster interdisciplinary exchange, which should not be surprising as the writers are invited specifically to provide a variety of perspectives. As for the general analytical pieces my impression (and it is just that, I cannot say that I read every post in detail) is that on the topics where you can compare the posts, say on issues of targeted killings, EJIL Talk! seems to stick to black letter law expositions (and very thorough ones at that) whereas the OJ debates combine discussions of IHL alongside say the appropriate limits of the power of the Executive.

If that characterisation is right, can we read into this anything about national scholarly tendencies? Does Opinio Juris display a more American approach to interdisciplinarity and EJIL Talk! a British or European one? Of course there is no difference in the abilities of international law scholars from different places to study and write about other disciplines, but there may be a difference of temperament and of an understanding of the role of international law born of academic and national traditions. In terms of temperament this might be to do with the prevalence of law as a first degree in many countries outside the US, leading to an emphasis on specialization and excessive modesty about venturing further without “proper” qualifications, whilst American scholars who have first degrees in other subjects might be less cautious. The national traditions in international law reflect the extent to which academic and practitioner cultures in particular countries that have already ceded a good deal of sovereignty to international bodies are more open to the idea that international law provides answers rather than just arguments.

Whatever the causes I would be interested to know whether readers feel we need more interdisciplinarity of the types I described in journals in books or in our favourite blogs.