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Abstract: International relations theory (IR) is widely recognized as a valuable tool for lawyers and legal scholars, especially in their social role as international policy-makers. The frameworks of IR help lawyers to analyze social problems in theoretically informed ways and develop ameliorative responses. Yet IR is famously divided among contending theoretical paradigms. Approaches such as Realism, Institutionalism, Liberalism and Constructivism direct attention to different actors (e.g., states, international organizations, domestic government agencies and officials, individual citizens and civil society groups) and to different causal factors and processes (e.g., power, interests and incentives, values, norms and identities, persuasion and socialization).
IR has tended to treat these approaches as mutually exclusive and in competition. But that theoretical stance is increasingly problematic. International public policy manifestly involves actors, causal factors and processes that cut across theoretical lines; the same can be said of international law generally. The problem is especially serious for Institutionalist theory: logically, Institutionalism should provide a natural framework for lawyers and other policy-makers seeking innovative responses to global problems, but its relevance has been reduced by its identification with a relatively narrow state-centric, rationalist approach.
Without purporting to develop fully an enriched Institutionalism, this article identifies a number of insights that analysts could incorporate at three crucial stages of analysis: the social context in which problems arise and solutions are sought, the strategies followed by the actors interested in those problems, and the design and operations of international regimes.
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