Beyond Compliance: Rethinking Why International Law Really Matters

The conceptual, and more recently empirical, study of compliance has become a central preoccupation, and perhaps the fastest growing subfield, in international legal scholarship. The authors seek to question this trend. They argue that looking at the aspirations of international law through the lens of rule compliance leads to inadequate scrutiny and understanding of the diverse complex purposes and projects that multiple actors impose and transpose on international legality, and especially a tendency to oversimplify if not distort the relation of international law to politics. Citing a range of examples from different areas of international law – ranging widely from international trade and investment to international criminal and humanitarian law – the authors seek to show how the concept of compliance (especially viewed as rule observance) is inadequate for understanding how international law has normative effects. A fundamental flaw of compliance studies is that they abstract from the problem of interpretation: interpretation is pervasively determinative of what happens to legal rules when they are out in the world, yet ‘compliance’ studies begin with the notion that there is a stable and agreed meaning to a rule, and we need merely to observe whether it is obeyed.