ABSTRACT
The time is ripe for new thinking about collaboration between international law (IL) and international relations (IR). Intellectually, both disciplines have opened themselves to new perspectives and new ways of thinking in recent years. State-centric understandings of international order, on which both IR and IL were built, are being questioned now by scholars in both fields. Interest in the role of nonstate actors, in international organizations, substate actors, and transnational advocacy groups, has permeated both fields. Both fields, too, have become interested in “international regimes” and the array of logics by which rules can channel self-seeking behavior into more cooperative paths. 1 In IR this move has been supplemented by a renewed interest in the power of ideas to transform politics. Constructivists in IR have spent the past 15 years demonstrating and analyzing the ways in which shared ideas and social norms, legal and otherwise, construct new actors in the world (like “human rights monitors”) and construct new interests or shared tasks (for example, “promoting good governance” or “participatory development”). As IR became more attuned to the power of international norms and rules, collaboration with international law became newly attractive and important.
