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.
Publications
- Norm Contestation in the Law Against War: Towards an Interdisciplinary Analytical Framework
| 2023
Lesch, Max; Marxsen, Christian (2023): Norm Contestation in the Law Against War: Towards an Interdisciplinary Analytical Framework, Heidelberg Journal of International Law, 83: 1: Nomos, 11–38. DOI: 10.17104/0044-2348-2023-1-11