Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Prof. Dr. Christian Marxsen

See also Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Legal Policy's Website

Responsible: 

Christian Marxsen & Malcolm Jorgensen 

About the Project

A seeming consensus has developed that the international legal order is in a transitional period, in which both assumed legal normativity and power structures are undergoing disruptive challenges. Whether states view positively or negatively trends such as the rise of a more ‘multipolar international order’, or the relative decline of ‘Western’ power, has direct implications for their competing policy approaches towards the design and development of international law. Yet few agreed indices have emerged for analysing the reality, form and magnitude of contestation. In which directions do states and other actors seek to develop the international legal order to come?

The project ‘Comparative International Legal Policy: National, Regional and Transnational Approaches’ addresses the question of how international law scholarship can better conceptualise and track forms of political change across the international legal order. Situated within the field of comparative international law, the project’s central object of analysis is the concept of ‘international legal policy’ (ILP), in the sense of national and transnational political approaches towards 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 one promising guide to the social relations that are integral to the construction 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 grounded in extensive research interviews with an internationally representative sample of government legal advisers and policymakers, combined with qualitative analysis of primary and secondary documentary accounts. Through theses sources the project aims 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 are explored in a series of international workshops and related book project, 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.

Publications

Conceptual Working Paper: