Description
Over the last 20 years there has been a pronounced reduction in the amount of binding, or hard, international law being produced by states. States have grown wary of creating hard international law and have begun to prefer softer, non-binding alternatives. International legal theory has struggled with how to theorise soft international law because of its non-binding nature. And yet the majority of international legal theory accounts of soft law do see it as international law, rather than simply political agreements between states and therefore in the province of IR, often theorising it as a lay-over on the way to hard law. But this ignores the reason soft law has proliferated in the first place: states are reluctant to be bound. Theorising soft law as simply a version of hard law is limited and international legal theorists have struggled to account of soft law’s compliance pull or normativity. This is where IR theory, specifically constructivist and English School understandings of normativity and international society, can provide insight. They can offer ways to understand normativity that do not rely upon bindingness but offer deeper ideas of normativity as drawing upon social norms, erasing the conceptual divide between legal and social norms.
