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4 - The Turn to the History of International Law in the Field of International Relations

from Part I - The Historiography of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2024

By
Giovanni Mantilla  and
Carsten-Andreas Schulz
Edited by
Randall Lesaffer  and
Anne Peters
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven & Tilburg University
Anne Peters
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the recent (re)turn to history in scholarship of international relations (IR) on international law. We argue that two interrelated trends explain this development. The first is primarily internal to the field, where historically sensitive approaches have gained ground over the past thirty years. The second is external and the result of IR scholars’ productive engagement with debates in other fields, including global history, intellectual history and legal history. Although the new historical IR work on international law remains heavily indebted to histories produced outside the confines of the discipline, IR scholars at the vanguard of this movement are increasingly comfortable with writing histories themselves. New IR historical accounts have thus emerged, spanning broad subjects of international society, order and transformation, as well as specific areas of international law, including human rights, humanitarian law and international organisations. We review the history of the disciplinary divide between IR and legal history, outline how IR theoretical approaches have made use of history, highlight some of the thematic areas of the new IR historical work, and lay out possible future research directions.

Keywords

Historical international relationsinternational historyhistoriographyinternational lawtheory of international relationsinternational societyinternational orderhistorical sociology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 136 - 161
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

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