Tracking Systemic Change: Policies for Constructing International Legal Order

A seeming consensus has developed that the international legal order is undergoing a period of significant disruption, yet few agreed indices have emerged for analysing the reality, form and magnitude of changes at a systemic level. The project ‘Tracking Systemic Change: Policies for Constructing International Legal Order’ addresses the question of how international law scholarship can better conceptualise and track forms of political change across the international legal order. Focussing on contestation that extends beyond specific rules and institutions, the project aims to develop a comparative account of states’ policy approaches and perceived ‘roles’ towards the system of international law.

Legal advisers and policymakers increasingly face questions that are not merely interpretive in nature, but require perspectives on the basic power and social relations to be enshrined in international law. The re-emerging field of ‘comparative international law’ is among legal scholarship’s most notable attempts to account for resulting forms of difference, which include both variations in legal interpretation, as well as more profound divergences in states’ political approaches towards law. The concept of ‘international legal policy’ (ILP) is accordingly the project’s central object of analysis, defined as the specific type of foreign policy concerned with the conception of and strategies taken in relation to international legal rules and institutions. This interdisciplinary concept emerges as a potential bridge across interrelated fields, by capturing processes of change that emerge from states’ differentiated political approaches towards legal authority.

The principle advantage of reframing research as ‘comparative international legal policy’ is to facilitate an interdisciplinary reconsideration of legal scholarship’s blind spots, with foreign policy analysis into policymaker’s perceived national ‘roles’ offering a promising guide to non-legal approaches that are integral to the design and development of international law. Comparing the roles that government policymakers seeks to perform as both subjects and authors of international law, including shifts in those role conceptions, offers a novel framework for observing change and continuity across the international legal order as a whole.

The project is based on qualitative analysis of documentary evidence, drawn from primary and secondary accounts, combined with the conduct of research interviews with an internationally representative sample of government legal advisers and policymakers. These tasks aim to identify and compare the changing national roles, and associated international legal policies, that states and other political groupings have towards the international legal order. Relevant findings will be explored in an international workshop intended to create direct engagement on emergent themes—between insider perspectives of legal advisers and policymakers and outsider perspectives of legal and political science scholars.