Law’s Politics: Towards an International Political Theory of the Politics of Law

In the academic study of the international realm, norms are often held to be the opposite to ‘interest defined as power’ (Morgenthau). Norms are understood to be scripts of emancipation, and power to be a practice of domination. The paper argues that International Relations and International Political Theory all too often buy into a problematic dichotomy by adopting a binary perspective from which power is either held to be superior to norms or erased from the notion of the norm. The problem with this dichotomy is that norms are misconceived when limited to the two options of either being emancipatory values against the dictates of power politics or utopist scripts never standing these dictates in the long run. The paper aims to explore a deeper understanding of how norms are political and how elements like power, coercion, and violence circulate within norms and norms-related practice. To this end, it offers to draw on certain strands of work in legal theory, namely the legacies of American legal realism and critical legal studies, to elaborate on how norms and norms-related practice are political. It is the “critical attitude” in the mentioned legal theories that may inform our notion of law in an emergent transnational order in which a plurality of law structures various power relations in a multiplicity of actors.