On the unity of International Law Theory

Abstract

It has become a truism that international lawyers are, nowadays, facing a sharp disagreement regarding the main methodological foundations of the discipline. The issue cannot be whether or not there is such a division in the IL school of thought, but which its specific features are. In the present paper, it is submitted here that the current situation is not due to the various methodologies at our disposal, but an actual paradigmatic schism with deep repercussions on the main research agenda. This paradigmatic split steers our attention to the incommensurability of the different paradigms at stake, and consequently the mere possibility of a meaningful communicative interaction between them is dismissed. This picture, though, may be not fully convincing. This multi-paradigmatic state and its ongoing reissue could be seen in a different way, once we accept that neither perfect communication ever obtains nor absolute lack of contradiction is such an epistemological premise. Then, the admittedly existing cross-references, links and overlaps between different approaches can be interpreted not as a paradigmatic mistake (a sort of an internally dysfunctional approach), but as an acknowledgement by each paradigm of its inability to fully explain International Law reality and its openness to alterity, i.e., a recognition of other paradigms as legitimate interlocutors. This interparadigmatic dialogue, that is also noticeable in the main debates on IL structure, shows the most appropriate direction for international lawyers to follow, even if a final paradigmatic converging horizon is not conceivable or even possible.