The Politics of Norm Change in International Peace and Security Law

This interdisciplinary and collaborative project explores the evolving norms and practices in inter­national peace and security law, integrating perspec­tives from Inter­national Law (IL) and Inter­national Relations (IR). The “crisis” of the inter­national (liberal) order has become a buzz­word. This in­cludes the corner­stone of peace and security law, the pro­hibition on the use of force in article 2(4) in the UN Charter. While this norm has been de­clared dead several times, it con­tinues to shape inter­national politics. This publication pro­ject con­tributes to this debate in two ways: On the one hand, a joint publi­cation project with Christian Marxsen, Max Planck In­stitute for Com­parative Public Law and Inter­national Law, links IL and IR approaches to develop a heuristic for studying the con­tested norms of peace and security. This project brings to­gether an inter­disciplinary group of scholars who shed light on the con­testation, change and potential erosion of several norms in peace and security law. On the other hand, this project studies two central inter­national prac­tices in peace and security law: de­claring war and writing letters to the UN Security Coun­cil to notify it about the use of force in self-defense under article 51 of the UN Charter. These letters have become a sticking point in disputes between Western and non-Western states about the right of self-defense against non-state actors, in particular under the contro­versial “unwilling-unable-standard”. Drawing on inter­national practice theories, the socio­logy of law and the socio­logy of deviance, this project traces how the article 51 letters have re­placed de­clarations of war; the diplomacy of these letters and their organi­zational politics within the United Nations; and their effects on the development of the prohibition on the use of force and the right to self-defense.