Tracking Systemic Change: Policies for Constructing International Legal Order

This project seeks to develop a more empirically grounded understanding of systemic changes in international law through comparative research into the “international legal policies” of a representative sample of states. This novel concept applies the methods of Foreign Policy Analysis to transform our understanding of how international legal normativity is interpreted and practiced in reality. The project is divided into four Working Packages (WP). WP1 focuses on theory building to develop the concept of “international legal policy” as an interdisciplinary framework for investigating distinctive national approaches towards the design and development of international law. This stage also involves a call for scholarly papers for a subsequent conference. WP2 tests the theorised framework in a series of semi-structured interviews with current and former international legal policymakers from selected states. WP3 is comprised of an international conference to directly engage the insider perspectives of these policymakers with the outsider perspectives of scholars on the relationship between normativity and reality. WP4 completes analysis and publication by synthesising the data to develop the first ever cross-country comparison of the analytical dimensions defining national approaches towards international legal order. The research will be compiled with workshop contributions for publication in an edited volume.