What is international law, and how does it work? This book argues that our answers to these fundamental questions are shaped by a variety of social cognition and knowledge production processes. These processes act as invisible frames, through which we understand international law. To better conceive the frames within which international law moves and performs, we must understand how psychological and socio-cultural factors affect decision-making in an international legal process. This includes identifying the groups of people and institutions that shape and alter the prevailing discourse in international law, and unearthing the hidden meaning of the various mythologies that populate and influence our normative world. With chapters from leading experts in the discipline, employing insights from sociology, psychology, and behavioural science, this book investigates the mechanisms that allow us to apprehend and intellectually represent the social practice of international law. It unveils the hidden or unnoticed processes by which our understanding of international law is formed, and helps readers to unlearn some of the presuppositions that inform our largely unquestioned beliefs about international law.

This innovative edited collection uncovers the invisible frames which form our understanding of international law. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates how social cognition and knowledge production processes affect decision-making, and inform unquestioned beliefs about what international law is, and how it works.

This book challenges the idea that international law looks the same from anywhere in the world. Instead, how international lawyers understand and approach their field is often deeply influenced by the national contexts in which they lived, studied, and worked. International law in the United States and in the United Kingdom looks different compared to international law in China and Russia, though some approaches (particularly Western, Anglo-American ones) are more influential outside their borders than others. Given shifts in geopolitical power and the rise of non-Western powers like China, it is increasingly important for international lawyers to understand how others coming from diverse backgrounds approach the field. By examining the international law academies and textbooks of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Roberts provides a window into these different communities of international lawyers, and she uncovers some of the similarities and differences in how they understand and approach international law.

The practice of teaching international law is conducted in a wide range of contexts across the world by a host of different actors – including scholars, practitioners, civil society groups, governments, and international organisations. This collection brings together a diversity of scholars and practitioners to share their experiences and critically reflect on current practices of teaching international law across different contexts, traditions, and perspectives to develop existing conversations and spark fresh ones concerning teaching practices within the field of international law. Reflecting on the responsibilities of teachers of international law to engage with and confront histories, contemporary crises, and everyday events in their teaching, the collection explores efforts to decenter the teacher and the law in the classroom, opportunities for dialogical and critical approaches to teaching, and the possibilities of co-producing non-conventional pedagogies that question the mainstream underpinnings of international law teaching. Focusing on the tools and techniques used to teach international law to date, the collection examines the teaching of international law in different contexts. Traversing a range of domestic and regional contexts around the world, the book offers insights into both the culture of teaching in particular domestic settings, aswell as the structural challenges and obstacles that arise in terms of who, what, and how international law is taught in practice. Offering a unique window into the personal experiences of a diversity of scholars and practitioners from around the world, this collection aims to nurture conversations about the responsibilities, approaches, opportunities, and challenges of teaching international law.

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.

A reader-friendly overview of leading theoretical approaches to international law for students, scholars, and practitioners.

This innovative book extensively probes and reveals the existence of legal fictions in international law, developing a theory of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Reece Lewis argues that, since legal fictions exist in all systems and types of law, international law is no different and deserves discrete, detailed examination.