[Jeffrey L. Dunoff is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law and Mark A. Pollack is professor of Political Science and Jean Monnet Chair ad personam
at Temple University]
One of the most difficult choices in our book, and one of the most contentious discussions at two book workshops, was about how to approach the question of “theory.” Our approach was to identify four research traditions in IR that had been invoked productively by IL/IR scholars – namely, realism, institutionalism, liberalism, and constructivism – and ask four leading scholars to review and identify how each tradition had been adapted and developed to explore the making, interpretation and implementation of international law.
Doing so, however, posed two problems. First, it privileged IR theory over international legal theories. We agreed with this critique, but we felt that the centrality of IR theories in the IL/IR literature in fact reflected our view of the literature more broadly, which is that what was labeled IL/IR scholarship was not primarily interdisciplinary in nature, but represented the application of IR theory and methods to international law as a subject. We see this imbalance between IR and legal theory as a lamentable feature of contemporary IL/IR scholarship – a point to which we will return in a subsequent post – but one that accurately reflects the current state of the field.
Second, a number of our participants were concerned that, in selecting these four theories and asking our authors for canonical statements of each, we were reifying distinct, non-overlapping theories, and thus aggravating a decades-long “isms war.” Far better, some contributors suggested, to do away with the isms altogether, in favor of a “non-paradigmatic approach.” Despite such concerns, our own view was that realism, institutionalism, liberalism and constructivism, as distinct theoretical research programs, have been the intellectual nurseries within which scholars have developed and refined theories and testable hypotheses about factors such as power and distribution (realism), information and institutions (institutionalism), domestic and transnational society (liberalism) and norms and ideas (constructivism). In this symposium, for example, Richard Steinberg makes a strong case for the distinctive contributions of realist theories focusing on states, state interest, and state power.