Dr Giovanni Mantilla: “We should never take international law at face value.”

Dr. Giovanni Mantilla is a University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. His research investigates the politics of international lawmaking through multinational archival research, with emphasis on the international law of armed conflict and human rights law. Dr. Mantilla is the author of the new book “Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian law and Internal Armed Conflict”. In the book he traces the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict and explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s. The book was recently awarded the prestigious annual 2021 Francis Lieber prize from the American Society of International Law as the best book in the field of the law of armed conflict. 

Dr. Mantilla speaks to editor-in-chief Emil Hansen about his new book, the hidden politics underlying international law and what archival research can offer the study of International Relations (IR).

Could you speak to your path into academia? What attracted you to IR, and international humanitarian law (IHL) in particular?

My path into academia was not clear from the outset. It was not a plan that I was devising from my undergraduate years. It happened over time, as I realized that there were things that I liked doing that other fellow students did not like doing. I particularly like reading theory, which is a thing that, famously, undergraduate students do not enjoy doing. The fact that I liked theory was the initial kind of “hint” that I was suited for a career in academia. I liked to spend time considering abstract notions and was not looking to just get it done and move on to more fun things, but I rather just wanted to dwell on some of the big debates in sociology, which was the first body of theorizing that I was exposed to. That gives you a sense into how I ended up doing what I do now, this more sociological kind of International Relations (IR) theorizing.

It was in the final years of my undergraduate degrees in Languages and Socio-Cultural Studies and Political Science at the University de los Andes in Bogotá Colombia that I started thinking a little bit more about IR. It helped me to be exposed to teachers who had been professionally trained in IR—both in the US and in the UK—and in their courses had no qualms about assigning hard reading. They were not using textbooks—which is what many colleagues used in the US, particularly to teach undergraduates—so I was forced to grapple with some of the big names in IR, and again, I found that engaging and interesting. 

IHL was something that came particularly late in the game. It was something that I took an interest in after I was already a PhD student at Minnesota, many years after my undergraduate degree. The reason why I began to study IHL was because I had spent a number of years thinking about international human rights law and norms with regards to corporations as a result of my first job after University. After three years of working on that topic, I decided that I wanted to shift gears, that I did not want to commit the next ten years of my career and my dissertation to thinking about corporations. 

So I began thinking in more abstract terms about international law as a body of rules created by states to regulate states, but that was now said to apply to non-state actors. This is where my biography intervenes with this process. I am Colombian and grew up in a time where armed conflict there was still ongoing during the 1990s and into the 2000s. That is how my interest in the law of armed conflict, or IHL, began. 

The laws on armed conflict are said to apply not just to states, but also to rebels. So I began puzzling how it was that violent insurgent groups were being asked to comply with these state-made rules, and from then on the question really became how it was that these states began to accept these rules, because it is, to a large degree, counterintuitive that they would agree to some of these provisions. 

Your teachers seem really instrumental in shaping your path. Are there any specific scholars in IR or international law, you mentioned social theory, that stand out to you for being important for your academic trajectory?

The most important influences have indeed been my teachers in my undergraduate years in Colombia, and later at the graduate level in Minnesota. At Los Andes people like Ingrid Bolívar, Liliana Ramírez, or Luis Javier Orjuela exposed me to those classic sociological debates about what society is and how to study it. Early on in my second semester at university, I was reading Durkheim, Weber, and Berger and Luckmann, classic sociologists who grapple with the question of how to study human society as opposed to the natural world. 

“There was something about the empirical reality after 2001 that did not seem to quite match up with the claims of “broad socialization” of states’ and their norms”

In my undergraduate years I became very infatuated with Foucault. My first publications were undergraduate attempts at applying Foucauldian concepts to security policies in Colombia. So, I became attuned to the operation of power through discourses, focusing on how people are understood and categorized in the context of armed conflicts and how that makes them suspect to the state. That Foucauldian theoretical toolkit allowed me to think through my own reality. 

In terms of IR, when I got to graduate school I had already been exposed to some big names thanks to my teachers. Some of those were people like John Ruggie and Alexander Wendt, who were extending those sociological insights to IR in response to the much more simplistic notions that came from realism, but also partially from functionalist theories of what states are, what their interests are, how they pursue them, and how they then go about organizing the world. 

And so the work of John Ruggie, particularly the article “What Makes the World Hang Together?” was very important. And we also had to sit through and read most of “Social Theory of International Politics” Wendt’s famous treatise in my last year of undergraduate studies. That was a trip, but a good one. The book was sort of mind-blowing, and it takes you by the hand, trying to persuade you that international politics is not something fixed or given, but is constructed. Wendt is susceptible to critique, and I would not say that I’m a Wendtian, but it was certainly a kind of entry— a gateway, so to speak—alongside Ruggie, into what I eventually did.

When I arrived in Minnesota, I worked with a different range of constructivists. Minnesota had been known, at least for a decade and a half, as a home of constructivism, but also of critical IR through the work and mentorship of figures like Raymond Duvall, who advised Wendt, but also Michael Barnett, who was on the faculty at the time there, as well as Kathryn Sikkink, my dissertation supervisor. These three scholars all have very different takes on what global governance is, how it is made up, and how it operates. I do think that my work does resemble some sort of jumble, if you will, a combination between the very different perspectives that they have pursued in their scholarly careers. 

In contrast to this “old guard” of constructivists that you mention, you write that your book is to be a contribution to a “new generation of IR scholarship”, one that looks at ontological security, stigmatization, stratification, status and hierarchy in politics. What attracted you this new generation? What do you think it is reacting to? 

I will be honest in saying that I became interested in that work after I finished my dissertation in 2013. This was just around the time when those debates were really beginning to make an impact on the field through high-profile publications, edited volumes etc. I have been an avid reader of that work more recently. 

Now in regards to what I am trying to add to the movement —and I think this also partially answers the question of what I think they are reacting to—I think that they have clearly caught on to some of the silences or what the earlier constructivists’ work was glossing over, which has to do with the operation of power through norms and through law and other governing devices. That earlier constructivist work, which I think deserves huge credit and merit as a reaction to the prior debate between realists and liberal institutionalists, tended to present a notion of international norms and law as being the product of international agreement, even consensus. Laws and Norms were seen as representing views that were values and interests that came to be broadly embraced by states given time, which were then socialized and diffused and gave the world a more orderly face. 

Those were interesting claims, but there was something about the moment which followed the 1990s’ liberal internationalist hope that was dashed by events quickly. There was something about the empirical reality after 2001 that did not seem to quite match up with the claims of “broad socialization” of states’ and their norms. Despite living in a world in which international law had gained huge prominence, we still saw a persisting discourse that signaled difference, that pointed to pockets of international society that did not quite belong, that resisted integration, and were being chastised in various ways for wishing to stay outside of international society or for acting and promoting views that were not seen as consonant with the more broadly accepted views of the liberal international order. 

These theorists caught on to those two things and were coming not from the US or Europe, but from geographical locations whose histories were a lot more complicated, violence-ridden, resistant to the penetration of these kinds of laws and norms. It just became obvious that the claim of normative conversion had some clear holes and perhaps relied on at best incomplete theory, and also relied on partial histories that concluded some of those violent dynamics of exclusion and stigmatization, of sort of living outside or on the borders of international society.

So I think that is what that work is doing, and that is what makes it interesting. Past and present history continue to demonstrate that there is a lot to those theoretical lenses.

Your book must then be an attempt to compensate for such “partial histories”. Do you think an appreciation of the role of history has been lacking in IR? 

Yes, absolutely. I am trying to emphasize the importance of taking history seriously and taking careful historical work seriously for theorizing. I was trained within US academia, and academia in the US continues to operate—less so now, but until fairly recently—with a rather superficial approach to history. History tends to be seen either as a terrain in which one kind of dabbles into to test claims—I am thinking here of the mainstream neopositivist work that tries to engage in big questions but does so on the basis of chosen case-studies built often on secondary literature that has been written many years ago, which is used to test hypotheses—rather than to theorize and take inductive, deep plunges into the history, the context, the meanings, what was going on in the negotiating room, what was going on in policy circles at the time, to try to make sense of that from the ground up. 

A lot of the work that was being done in the US in the 1990s and early noughties have that kind of flavor, of using history quite instrumentally. That certainly speaks to the realist and the liberal institutionalist branch of work. Constructivists have always had a much more serious approach to history, but because IR theorists are trained to look for patterns of conduct and thought, legitimate ideas etc., there is a risk of glossing over messy detail, in order to bring to relief about things like norms, consensus, agreements, rather than the shades of disagreement and confrontation that may lie underneath. 

You try uncover this disagreement and confrontation through archival research. What led you into archival research, and what do you think it can bring to the study of IR and international law?

The one simple reason I delved into archival research is because there was very little work done on the specific questions I was interested in. There was no IR or international historical work done on the particular question I was asking in this book, which was on the emergence and development of the rules for international conflict. Whatever existed had been written by lawyers and had been written on the basis of published proceedings of conferences, mostly. In terms of the trajectory of the law and how it came about, interesting debates had always been done in published proceedings, and the answers that were given in such work were fairly general, quite unspecific. So I wanted to find out why exactly states came to view binding rules for internal armed conflict as something acceptable. I wanted to understand the reason, the political reasoning, the motivations, the behind-the-scenes interactions, not only the public debates in the negotiating room. And so, archival research allowed me to get to a degree of detail and insight about what was at stake for states, what was driving their interests in discussing these rules, the kinds of concerns that they had, which IR theory spent quite a long time debating the merits of thinking that something like an idea or a value had some importance for how states define their interests. Constructivists always seem to be fighting an uphill battle vis-à-vis the realists and rational institutionalists, and even though the claims and ideas about social norms were always there, dispositive evidence for them remained few and far between, remained quite rare. Archival research helped me make the points about the importance of social pressure, of dynamics of stigmatization, something like shame, oppression and opprobrium, empirically.

In short, archival research allowed me to theorize in a much more detailed, less birds-eye view, about things that scholars had been making cases for without decisively demonstrating their use in diplomatic practice. And that is ultimately what has allowed me to make a persuasive—well, we will have to see what people think about my book—but, from my perspective, a persuasive—and to some degree, innovative, theoretical contribution.

Archival research is a very powerful empirical tool, and I especially like your engagement with rationalist scholars’ assumptions about behaviour and motivation You actually go into diplomats’ notes and read what they were thinking and feeling at that time. But I see one potential challenge to your approach: the principal agent problem. At one point in your book, you mention that at the diplomatic conference in 1949, that the French delegate Larmarle received orders from Paris that he knew was going to be unpopular in Geneva. How did you think about and reflect upon the level-of-analysis problem in terms of saying anything about state motivation?

It is a great question, but I have to confess that I did not think about it in those terms. I was really, at that point, deep in the process-tracing mode of my research, so I was really doing the detective work of what the social dynamics in the negotiating room were, how they were being perceived by diplomats from these major countries where I had done my research, and I wanted to see whether their concerns resonated and made a difference at home.

So it is possible that that is a principal agent problem—these are actors that remain in constant communication with home, even in the 1940s with telegrams, and their higher-ups, their principals so to speak, were being kept abreast of what was going on. What was impressive to me was the extent to which the social concerns of the diplomats on the ground—how they fed back, shaped, and reshaped the perception of interest and strategies that were being pursued. Because one thing I show in the book was that the interest of these powerful countries that were opposing these rules did not really change; what they did was try to alter their strategies so that they could maintain their international standing, while nevertheless safeguarding their military interest.

I did not navigate it theoretically quite like you do in your question. I was more interested in the processes, whether those concerns were being taken up and led to policy change. In the book, the processes that I trace demonstrate that in fact, what happened on the ground in Geneva had an impact on what happened back home in London and Paris. But there are other processes that are not in the book because they do not pertain to what I am tracing here, where we can equally imagine diplomats conveying concerns about isolation and shame and embarrassment, which were not resonating at home for other reasons. 

And that, I suppose, is the one additional step of theorising that remains to be done. One example here is the case of the US diplomatic position at the Rome Conference in 1998, where the US had some pretty unpopular positions and was in the utter minority regarding whether the Court would have jurisdiction over parties that had not ratified the treatise, and in the book written by the lead diplomat, David Scheffer, at that conference, he very openly says that he felt quite embarrassed to have that position, and that he felt quite stressed in the room to be defending it, and that he tried to convey that to his higher-ups in DC. They however refused to change the US position because they knew that it was going to be something subject to domestic political debate and politicisation in Congress. So domestic politics and the degree to which an issue is in domestic political debate potentially restricts the ability of diplomats’ concerns in shaping and reshaping states’ strategies. There are conditions that allow for the operation of mechanisms I talk about in the book that may preclude their operation in other cases, the US example being one of them. 

“Because IR theorists are trained to look for patterns of conduct and thought, legitimate ideas etc., there is a risk of glossing over messy detail, in order to bring to relief about things like norms, consensus, agreements, rather than the shades of disagreement and confrontation that may lie underneath. ”

It is quite clear that diplomats like David Scheffer care about embarrassment and losing face. But what struck me while reading your book was whether you were able to arrive to a set of criteria for when states’ or other diplomats’ opinions matter? For example, in the book, in 1949, the UK delegate Craigie was particularly concerned about New Zealand not approving of them, and you later mention that no country wants to be isolated with Israel. Have you thought of how to quantify normative weight – both in terms of whether a country feels comfortable in a particular minority formation, but also the why certain voices matter more in contexts of negotiation? 

There are no clear markers here, there are perhaps some instructive ways to guess whose voice is likely to matter, but ultimately you have to proceed inductively to decipher who are the main protagonists in these specific processes. Since the negotiations I study take place in a particular institutional setting, universalist multilateralism, which follow particular procedures that do allow for the formation of coalitions to outvote powerful states, I do not take it for granted that those views of powerful states are the views that are going to matter the most. 

That being said, looking at what powerful states are saying and doing, discerning whether they take leadership positions in negotiations or not and asking why, is an initial plausible first step. I often structure the puzzles I tackle through asking how the opposition of powerful states was overcome, how they came to accept initially unpopular rules.

But I go back to the notion that you have to look at what happened in the room to understand the multilateralism’s social dynamics beyond Great Power leadership or heavy-handedness. There are for instance social categories of states that are recognized at different points of time as being “undesirable” to vote with. Thinking about the 1970s, there were a few clear “pariah” states then—Israel, South Africa, and Portugal. There were states that were allied with these “pariah” countries that disagreed with these negative notions, but which still recognized their social validity at the international level. I suppose that is simply trying to understand social positioning in the context of negotiations; to understand how, in terms of social groupings and positioning, where are the markers of legitimacy and illegitimacy. But there is no formula for it; you just sort have to triangulate in different ways. I like to proceed inductively myself; I also bring informed guesses from looking at the secondary material and knowing a bit about the historical context.

This also speaks to the complexity of the story you present. You link some factors to the influence of international society, the illegitimacy of decolonisation in the 50s and 60s, while sometimes it is individual agency that matters, that of the protagonists in the negotiations. Did your archival research change the way you thought about this dichotomy between the structure of international society and agency of individual actors?

Everybody that goes to grad school has to grapple with this debate of structure and agency. That debate really never found clear theoretical resolution, and I speak here for sociologists as well as IR scholars. There was some general, maybe unsatisfactory, conclusion, that both matter and that they matter in different ways for different conclusions. What I try to do is take both of them seriously and see how they come together to produce specific outcomes. 

In the book I take very seriously social structures at the international and social level in the 19th century and then changing into and through the 20th century and then more recently, after the Cold War, although there is no dedicated chapter to the post-Cold War moment. I studied the ways in which those social structures change historically, how they shape international debates and influence rule-making. That is where agency comes in. It is often agents that point to the limitations of existing social structures, and seek to change them. This is really consonant with the classic statements on norms’ emergence and norm entrepreneurship, which is that it is often agents on the ground that notice or have a particular concern with say, an atrocity of some type, and find existing norms, laws, ways of thinking about atrocity in a certain conflict, dissatisfying. They find ways — influential ways — to effect change, and they do so often in structured ways, and they go to existing institutions that function as platforms that allow to do some things in coalition with others. And sometimes they succeed.

It is an interplay always between structures at different levels, either at the international and social normative level; at the institutional level, institutions afford certain privileges, but also restrict access and forms of participation, and this is also something that has changed historically. 

Moving on to one of those tools that can be used to effect such change: international law. There is a lot of debate in IR about the nature of international law. Is it is a means of competition, a means of cooperation, of contestation, and is it even law at all? Has your research changed the way you think about what international law is and what it can do?

It has, and I would say not just my research but also what I have learned through teaching as well. I have become quite dissatisfied with broad claims about what international law does and is and how it operates, because it pushes you to make grand, perhaps broad-sweeping claims. What I have learned through my research and my teaching is a lot of variability exists. I have become far more attuned to the nuances than the usual frameworks that IR has, and I have become aware of the tunnel vision that these basic theories offer. I have found them dissatisfying when I approach the messy reality of diplomacy and rule-making. 

If I had to give you an answer about what international law is, I would say that broadly, it is an ordering device that has a different range of effects, some of which are coercive, some of which are instrumental, but most of which are far more complicated than that. International law, international humanitarian law in particular, is not only a restraining force, it is also an enabling force. It authorizes the use of violence in certain circumstances against some types of people at the same time as it forecloses or prohibits the use of violence against others. It frames some as civilians and others as combatants and it does so in quite messy ways.

That is the other point, that there is a lot of history. We should never take international law at face value. You have to understand the history of how its core categories has been constructed. Once you look at it, you understand that there is a lot more disagreement on things than you might expect to see, or that if we only read the black letter on the books, we do not get the sense of the ambiguities, contingencies, indeterminacies, disagreements, etc. that underline international law. And that is just treaty law, which is perhaps the easiest form of international law to study; if you get into customary law, it is even more complicated and contested.

I became dissatisfied with these broad sweeping notions, so the most I can give you is that in terms of what international law is that is an ordering device with a panoply of effects that one has to sort through and think carefully. It is quite different to think about international law now than it is to think about international law in the 19th or early 20th century. Some things remain and the social structure of international has enduring historical legacies, but also a fair bit has changed, allowing not just for the operation of colonial imperialist structures but also for the operation of resistance, even if it is at the margins.

It is hard not look at some of the ‘panoply of effects’ you uncover in the book as part of a fundamentally positive and desirable trajectory; you get more protection, you get more lives saved in warfare. Yet you are very careful to define these “political compromises” as “collective political achievements” and not “progressive development”. You impose this separation between your analysis and ethical concerns. I am curious as to how you have navigated this space in your work?

I tend to be a more inductive, empirical kind of scholar. And so, the first thing I will say is that in terms of the processes I am tracing in this book and the origins and development of rules for international conflict, I take seriously the intensity and the persistence of some states’ resistance to the creation of these rules. I take their strong opposition as a marker that this was something that they did not want done or approved, particularly states that had the upper hand of international order and law for a long time. In the book, it is the European empires Britain and France which were against the generation of these rules. And so, because I take their resistance against the creation and operation of these rules seriously, I am less uncomfortable with viewing these rules as affecting progressive normative change. 

I do not however really use that kind of language in the book, though perhaps the conclusion gets to some of that. The conclusion reveals a little more of my heart. But I thought about all this empirically; if these states were refusing to accept these rules, that means that the fact they were introduced and that they introduced some measure of restraint into a previously completely unregulated terrain of violence, then that is probably a good thing. But, that is only really about the one part of international humanitarian law which applies to internal conflict. More broadly IHL is a rather complex body of rules, some of which are far more problematic than the rules that I examine in this book, some of which authorize the use of violence or seem to restrict the use of violence against civilians, but do so in quite a tricky, politically malleable way.

“All international law is a product of politics in context ”

I would take a critical perspective on those, and in terms of how I navigate these debates, I would say that I try to do justice to the historical work and historical process. I have an ethics of integrity when I pursue my research, which is that I do not want to arrive at a research site with preconceived notions of what I would want the story to say, what I would want my argument to be. I might have found that these rules were devised, as some realists would hypothesize, as a way to legitimate intrusion into the domestic affairs of other countries, in order to conquer and dominate them, in order to introduce neo-interventionist and neo-imperialist policies. I would have articulated that then, but I did not find that stance in regards to these rules, and so that is why the book gives a sense of a progressive story.

But in using the language of collective political achievement, what I am trying to get at is that, broadly speaking, all international law is a product of politics in context. The fact that these were agreed-upon rules between states means that they were adopted at a point in time, but also that they are susceptible to contestation, to being discarded, to being revised, discounted in the future. In that sense, I try to steer away from teleology and the notion that the only way out is to expose the arc of history and look at only one direction.

I suppose that it’s also difficult to have such a teleological approach when you encounter the kind of contingencies in the story that you do. One thing that struck me was this French proposal that failed in 1949 when the Uruguayan chair did not know that he could vote as a chair. Were there any other major contingencies that you found interesting?

I think that is certainly the most striking one. One contingency that I actually did not put in the book, was the degree to which the decisions specific diplomats made at the time, probably under a lot of political tension, mattered in setting the tone and shaping the process of the negotiations and adoption of the rules.

In chapter 5 of the book, I tell a story of how Additional Protocol 1 was amended to include reference to wars of national liberation, phrased in far more controversial language, and this was not something Western states wanted, for political and legal reasons. They found it offensive, and damaging to the law, and nevertheless, the third world coalition moved forward with a vote to cement that gain, even as they understood that it was profoundly and deeply opposed by these powerful states. 

That decision was seemingly made by an individual. I learned this through my conversation with the Egyptian diplomat and scholar of international law, Georges Abi-Saab, I had this conversation with him after the book manuscript was done. Essentially, it appears that it came down to him to give the advice that the Third World should pursue a vote at the first session of the conference, instead of holding their guns and waiting it out until till later on. He appears to have beeb the one advising the postcolonial coalition to move forward with an open vote to lock in the outcome at the committee level. My understanding is that other members of the Third World coalition were a lot less certain about the wisdom of that move, whereas Abi-Saab  understood that it was now or never. That was the moment at which the political and institutional conditions were ripe for this vote to take place; if they were to delay it, those conditions could have unravelled.

So that was one critical contingency, even if the overall story is more complicated. But the fact that this watershed legal outcome came as a result of a decision of individual diplomats that chose to risk upsetting the more materially powerful states at the conference, potentially at the risk of wrecking the conference altogether, mattered profoundly for the rest of the process.

It is interesting that you mention Georges Abi-Saab, since he figures in the footnotes of your book as well. You explain the puzzle of Norway being one of the first Western countries to support classifying national liberation wars as international wars, with reference to the fact that the Norwegian delegate was a student of Georges Abi-Saab. It is interesting to think about how personal relations might have influenced these big questions. 

Absolutely. That is another insight that I have not yet had the time to theorize. What comes out of international negotiations is largely the product of personalized behind-the-scenes dealings: the work in working groups, in the conversation in halls, the conversations over dinner time, over breaks; that is where the compromises are worked out. I would say that certainly for the most difficult issues; for more mundane or less controversial issues public debate is perhaps where those are meaningfully worked out. But as I expanded the purview of my research and read more broadly, you begin to realize the importance of that “backstage”, of the informal, including the work of informal networks of diplomats. IR scholars have spent a lot of time theorizing on what happens in the negotiating rooms, asking things like: what are the revealed preferences? Is coercion, bargaining, deliberations, or persuasion taking place? Is this a negotiating threat or bargaining chip? Yet we know so little about what happens in the backstage. My sense now is that it is actually central.

What do you think this story says about the origins and how we should think about the so-called liberal international order?

That is the big question nowadays, right? As I noted earlier, I find it difficult to make sweeping claims about all of international law. The same applies when it comes to international order. But I would say that, generally, it seems to me that we have been laboring under a misunderstanding, namely that the international order we have is orderly, but especially that it has relied on consensus.

What I see in my own work, but also in other excellent historical work that is coming out now, and as I continue to expand my own empirical research into other areas you realize to what extent disagreement underpins a lot of the rules that now seem to organize global politics, in international human rights and humanitarian law, but also in rules of trade, etc. The degree of grudging acquiescence, unhappiness, disagreement, and the very thin consent that underpins a lot of international rules and institutions is staggering and has not properly been dealt with. Our IR theories have not been sharp enough to help us deal with these complications.

“The degree of grudging acquiescence, unhappiness, disagreement, and the very thin consent that underpins a lot of international rules and institutions is staggering and has not properly been dealt with. Our IR theories have not been sharp enough to help us deal with these complications.”

To a large degree, though, that is also explained by the fact that IR theorists have not gone and done the historical work inductively. Some of the many big theories we have rely on secondary sources or on partial cases, specific cases that give us a skewed notion of what the liberal international order may be. I am a lot less surprised by the degree of contestation that international law has been facing right now, and really has been facing for a long time, it has just come to a head far more sharply recently. But if you look at the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, it was a deep moment of contestation. And we seem to have forgotten that, partly because we are operating with theories that are not well equipped to deal with those kinds of complications. It is the right moment now to do more historical work and better theorizing.

What are you working on now then? Are you still trying to grapple with that complexity and those nuances?

I am now at a juncture at which I am deciding whether I want to delve deeper into IHL, or broaden the purview to make sense of multilateral processes beyond IHL. Because I have become fascinated by the complex processes of multilateral diplomacy, I am keen to explore other issue areas around the same time, in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, to try to understand, first in a more obvious way, whether the arguments I am making in this book and in other articles, apply more broadly or not. This will help me refine my own theoretical contributions. 

But I really am becoming much more interested in understanding the relationship between diplomacy, multilateralism, and international law. From our vantage point in 2021, we have become accustomed to the idea that international politics has become legalized nearly through and through. Provocatively, Ian Hurd has for example said that we live under the empire of international law. Yet my growing intuition is that in buying the observation about the over-legalization of world politics, we have forgotten that multilateralism and diplomacy, while related to international law, are not one and the same, that they may converge in some senses, but they may also diverge in some other senses. It is not uncommon to see prominent instances of noncompliance with international law coexisting with relatively little resistance on the part of many states.  This may be because there is another social structure, another layer of coexistence and of governing together, that is not completely overlapping or eclipsed by international law. 

So I am really interested in trying to understand the complex relationship between these social structures, and not doing what I think some are doing now, which is collapsing everything into law. 

What advice do you have to young prospective scholars who are considering going into academia?

Well, I would encourage them to think hard about their motivations to enter academia. I am a young scholar still and I have been through the long process of trying to find a position in academia. I know how hard it is, I know how much harder it is increasingly becoming. So it is important that motivation is strong and clear. It is important that people not do what I did, which is not think through very well what it means to follow a vocation in academia. 

That being said, a bit more analytically I guess, you have to understand that you are facing a social structure that is difficult to penetrate for various reasons, that seems to be increasingly more closed. There are ways of entering academia, obviously, there are ways of navigating that terrain, and one of those is to first, have clarity about what it is that motivates you, the topics that interest you, but also, how you can work out your path within those power structures. It is key to recognize that there are nodes of power which continue to influence success patterns in the profession. 

It is also critical to realize that, despite professional hierarchies, excellent teaching and research is not just done in the US, in the UK, in Australia, and in Europe. Look more broadly you will find extremely fertile terrain for theorizing and for teaching. I am Latin American, I have taught in Latin America for years, I would be happy to go back to teaching in Latin America. And there are excellent places in Africa, in Asia, and other so-called “non-core” regions of the world as well. 

So again, motivation is one, having clarity about why you want to enter academia, but also a clear understanding of the social structure that you are facing, and navigating it in a strategic way that also allows you to pursue your interests and your research without compromising it. 

Transcribed by Injae Lee