Interdisciplinarity on the Move: Reading Kratochwil as Counter-Disciplinarity Proper

As yet another tour de force by Friedrich Kratochwil, The Status of Law in World Society has an interesting idea or provoking thought on just about every other page. Set up as a series of meditations, Kratochwil guides us through a wealth of literature across ages and disciplines, and as such impresses his readers once again with his articulacy and prolificacy as an interdisciplinary scholar. Interdisciplinarity runs as a red thread through the whole book, but is also explicitly discussed as a theme in the first meditation. In this short review, I would like to reflect on the book from this perspective, discuss its critique of the International Law and International Relations (IL/IR) agenda, and its approach in light of the central slogan ‘(how) to move on’. More specifically, I will use Kratochwil’s leading role in the development of a reflexive research agenda for International Relations, to shed a different light on the practice of interdisciplinarity. Or to put it more provocatively, this review will use Kratochwil against Kratochwil. It does so, first, by arguing that telling the story of IL/IR is not an innocent exercise, and that this is reflected in this meditation. Second, while IL/IR research is aptly criticised for its hegemonic conquest and its tendency to be disciplining rather than interdisciplinary, I would like to problematise the way this critique is presented; and whether this indeed provides a productive way ‘to move on’. Third, moving beyond the critique of the mainstream agenda, I will argue for a reflexive interdisciplinarity as an alternative research mode for IL/IR research.

The first meditation guides us in a typical Kratochwillian fashion eloquently through some common pulls and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research. To give just an example: Kratochwil compares interdisciplinarity to virginity: ‘a state that many, if not all of us, appreciate, but which we do not maintain’. ¹ On the other hand, he suggests, like Monsieur Jourdain we should realise that we speak prose, which is always already interdisciplinary. ² Yet, we are not in a Judy Garland movie, and this is something to regret, or so we are told on page 32. After all, we lack clear scripts to deal with problems we encounter, as well as a set division of labour based on our various talents and expertise, and the guaranteed happy ending. Such examples to clarify more abstract arguments, by themselves make this book a worthwhile and – with all due respect – fun read.

So interdisciplinarity seems at once unavoidable, necessary and problematic. The problems generally occur from speaking different languages, from interests in different questions, and from conceptual sloppiness. ³ This latter problem is nowhere clearer than in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s celebratory statement back in the 1990s, that IL and IR share a conceptual space – i.e. use the same words – and hence can and should develop a joint research agenda. ⁴ However, she refrains from any further reflection on how the respective disciplines (let alone specific scholars) use these apparently similar words, and how this use impacts on their meanings, and the worlds they produce. This has been a recurring and signature theme in Kratochwil’s rich catalogue over the past decades. In The Status of Law, Kratochwil focuses on two other examples of interdisciplinarity going astray, namely Goldsmith and Posner’s game theoretical analysis of the limits of international law, ⁵ on the one hand, and the famous legalisation debate (with precision, delegation and obligation as key variables) in International Organization, ⁶ on the other. The main problem that transpires – inevitably, from a critical constructivist perspective – is not only the descriptivist fallacy, but also the epistemological ideal that informs these research projects. This is in itself a valid and important critique, and as sophisticated as we would expect from the author. It looks like the interdisciplinary agenda could use its own ‘Third Debate’ to move beyond the Cartesian quest for foundations and certain knowledge – or should it?

Interestingly, the critique on this particular strand of what has been labelled ‘IL/IR research’ ⁷ has been cast from both sides: critical IR as well as critical legal scholars. With, however, different ways of handling it. Critical lawyers appear to make a rather surprising move of retreat behind their disciplinary confines. This is the suggested call for ‘counterdisciplinarity’, as propagated notably by Martti Koskenniemi and Jan Klabbers. ⁸ But this strategy of alleged ‘counterdisciplinarity’ is in fact a counter-IR-disciplinarity. Or more specifically, a counter-IR-as-an-American-social science-disciplinarity, which at least partially reflects the central concerns of the Third Debate within IR itself (with Kratochwil as one of its propagators). However, the result in the critical lawyers’ case, ironically, is some kind of hyper-disciplinarity, to shield law from social science (narrowly defined) all together. As such this proposed counterdisciplinarity – which remains rather rudimentary as a battle cry – in turn runs the risk of reifying disciplines as little parcels of knowledge, which are empirically and normatively autonomous from other parcels, or in any case from International Relations and political science. Having opened up the agenda of the politics of international law over the past few decades, critical lawyers now seem to try to put the genie back into the bottle.

Instead, in his meditation Kratochwil more productively suggests that we should move on, by acknowledging that, first of all, science is a social practice, too. ⁹ Moreover, he diagnoses the problem of interdisciplinary research in its failure to acknowledge that law is not a theoretical science, but an argumentative practice, and that as practical reasoning it requires different criteria to assess the practice than scientific truth claims. Neither does measuring the power of international law in terms of its behavioural effects (as in compliance approaches that dominate the interdisciplinary agenda) get us very far in illuminating the workings of international law as both inherently legal and inherently political at the same time. Contrary to the assumption of instrumental rationality and the attendant conception of law as a constraint and norms as prices, we can only understand the practice of international law in a wider framework of interaction and the institutionalisation of norms. After all, as Kratochwil has long since shown us: norms are counterfactually valid. ¹⁰

These are all valid and important arguments, whose implications are developed throughout the book in practical (if no less abstract) mode of working and thinking things through. It is deconstructive insofar as it retraces conceptual steps to uncover hidden assumptions and paradoxes, yet combines this with a more productive mode of ‘therapeutic redescription’, aimed at a diagnostics that enables us to ‘go on’. ¹¹ The book sets out how we can and should move beyond (meta)theoretical battles, and move on driven by empirical questions, puzzles and paradoxes, without ending up with lukewarm compromises or syntheses of incompatible paradigms. This is an important message for interdisciplinary research, and anyone interested in studying (the politics of) law is well-advised to join the conversation at Kratochwil’s table.

Nevertheless, for someone working in this field for some years, there is something unsatisfactory about the whole discussion on interdisciplinarity, and how it is represented by advocates and critics alike, including this meditation. This concerns, first of all, its focus on this particular mainstream agenda of IL/IR research – and then lamenting its hegemony. But isn’t this hegemony at least partly created by all critics who give pride of place to criticising such approaches as opposed to engaging with other interdisciplinary projects and one another in particular? Secondly, this seems a rather narrow representation of IL/IR research. I simply do not recognise this picture as addressing what many colleagues who analyse the ‘politics of international law’ are doing, including Kratochwil’s own work over the past decades.

The point is not only that this critique narrows interdisciplinarity to a particular research agenda, but also, thirdly, that it means that we have the discussion on the basis of particular (scientific) parameters, with a specific telos of interdisciplinarity that is, to develop a common research agenda, or maybe even joint discipline, according to Kenneth Abbot as one of the pioneers, ¹² in the first place. Moreover, this reinforces the underlying assumption that both disciplines are homogenous bodies of knowledge, or in any case, that we need to have a unified representation of a discipline in order to make inter-disciplinary cooperation, dialogue and exchange possible. In other words, telling the story of IL/IR is – of course – not an innocent exercise. It sets the contours of the debate, as well as the gap that needs to be bridged. Rather than moving beyond the division as presented by Morgenthau in the 1940s, the contemporary IL/IR agenda reconfirms the stereotypical identities by building on a clear division of labour. It not only presents disciplines as unitary things, but also limits the prospects of interdisciplinarity from its very beginning.

But this is not the only agenda or history of interdisciplinarity. Another story could be told. One that seems particularly relevant for the overall argument in The Status of Law could start from the linguistic turns in both fields, and the parallel development of a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between politics and law than the traditional division of labour which reifies stereotypes of power versus norms and rules, or theory versus empirics, or instrumentalist versus normative optics. ¹³ Indeed, Kratochwil himself (together with Nicholas Onuf) has been a pioneer of such a research agenda long before the official call for interdisciplinarity was launched in the 1990s by Slaughter, Abbott et al. Telling this alternative narrative would redirect the whole interdisciplinary project. It could circumvent that critical scholars in IL and IR alike focus their attention (or arrows) on criticising realist, rationalist or instrumentalist approaches, and waste their energy on ‘epistemological problems that cannot be solved in the first place’, to paraphrase Kratochwil himself. ¹⁴ And here there seems to be a tension in this meditation in terms of whom the author nevertheless selects as his most important addressee to formulate his argument for (and against).

Starting from this alternative narrative of interdisciplinarity would open space to have an engaging dialogue based on rather different parameters for knowledge production all together. Klabbers suggests that a proper dialogue requires ‘shared background sensibilities’. ¹⁵ It seems that rather than recreating a Third ‘debate’ for interdisciplinary research, and trying to convince scientific (and legal) positivists of the limits of their agenda, maybe we had better choose sparring partners with whom we actually can have a dialogue. In terms of the argument formulated in The Status of Law, this would not necessarily point to a different direction for its own interdisciplinary undertaking. The turn to praxis indeed is a very productive upshot to the insights from the linguistic turn in both fields. But such a different history of IL/IR research would change the focus of the discussion and put other questions upfront – notably: how does praxis help us to move beyond the insights of the linguistic turn, and the valid point but by now also commonplace of law’s indeterminacy? ¹⁶ How does the IR agenda of ‘competent performance’ ¹⁷ differ from and what does it add to critical legal scholarship’s discussion of law as an ‘argumentative practice’ and ‘professional competence’? ¹⁸ What is distinct about praxis, or law as practice and a language game as we ‘seek to find our way through language’, ¹⁹ as opposed to Critical Legal Studies’ parallel interest in performativity? My hunch is that Koskenniemi would nod approvingly to the suggestion that legal reasoning involves more a ‘knowing how’ than just a ‘knowing that’ (namely, the rules). ²⁰ How can we recognise a competent performance when we see one, without getting trapped in linguistic bewitchments, or introducing foundations or Archimedean points through the backdoor? How does discourse relate to practice, and what role for materiality? ²¹ Throughout the book there are several hints about praxis taking a different turn, and how it concerns more than just legal technique, ²² but overall Kratochwil’s choice for the mainstream IL/IR agenda as its starting point at once limits how far The Status of Law can push the interdisciplinary debate into new directions. To an audience of critically minded scholars it might come across as driving with the rearview mirror, ²³ whereas a more sustained dialogue or engagement with critical legal scholarship as a seemingly natural sparring partner could have pushed the debate and interdisciplinarity into the next gear. ²⁴

Crucially, this focus on shared background sensibilities is not a call for self-referentialism or parochialism. Quite the contrary, it could even be a tool against such unwarranted practices. After all, our IL colleagues are still born and raised in a different discipline, with a different language, different canons, different questions and different common-senses. This acknowledgement often leads to prophecies of doom, where interdisciplinarity is destined as a modern version of the Babylonian confusion of tongues. Indeed, this danger looms large when the identification of a ‘shared conceptual space’ is presented as the natural and unproblematic foundation for cooperation. Under such conditions, Kratochwil warns, disciplinary myopias can work in tandem rather than correct each other. ²⁵ However, as both critical legal scholars and critical IR scholars, in a parallel reference to Wittgenstein, have long since made clear: concepts are not neutral transmitters of reality, but gain their meaning in use.

This also opens up a whole different approach to and telos of interdisciplinarity. The solution to conceptual sloppiness then is not the quest for a clear definition, as the lowest common denominator that we can agree on, as an alleged firm foundation for our ‘rigorous’ scientific agenda. As Kratochwil points out, such ‘preliminary operational definitions’ usually end up as insipid compromises that neither offend nor satisfy – let alone entice or inspire – anyone. ²⁶ While language communities are usually presented as one of the main obstacles of interdisciplinarity, one could also turn the argument on its head. Taking distance from the Cartesian quest (as Kratochwil does not get tired to instruct us) and moving towards a reflexive interdisciplinarity, the productivity of interdisciplinary dialogue lies rather in its undermining of common senses, exactly through the dissonance created by talking to someone who is not disciplined in the same language, who asks for translations of our common senses, ²⁷ and posits out-of-the-disciplinary-box questions.

Rather than a joint research agenda, the export of methodology or knowledge, or even the development of a new discipline as the alleged holy grail of IL/IR cooperation, a more modest and fruitful practice of interdisciplinarity is when it operates as a mirror that tells me something about my own blindspots because of my disciplinary knowledge, rather than focusing on filling the gap of someone else’s lack of that very knowledge. ²⁸ This is interdisciplinarity as counter-disciplinarity proper: using cross-disciplinary encounters to learn about one’s disciplinary blindspots, hidden assumptions or silences, and to destabilise its certain knowledges and common senses. ²⁹ And this is in fact what Kratochwil does in the course of the nine meditations. The format of the book fits this message well. While rejecting (the mainstream agenda of) interdisciplinarity and its search for causes (and in a sense buying into the monopolisation of the term by a particular agenda as well as the narrow view on International Relations), the remainder of the book is an exercise in reflexive interdisciplinarity, or ‘counterdisciplinarity’-proper, even if it is not presented as such. Kratochwil critically reflects on unquestioned tenets of scientific and legal positivism as the orthodoxies in IR and IL, but also questions new orthodoxies which do not take into account that law, after all, is no theoretical model, but a praxis. ³⁰

The meditations guide us through the implications of this acknowledgement in terms of a more nuanced understanding of power, rights and rules to broaden our understanding of the status of law in world society. As yet another contribution to Fritz’s rich repertoire, The Status of Law once more shows how interdisciplinary research can be a non-imperialist, enriching and stimulating conversation. ³¹ In that sense the book as a whole, in my view, does a better and excellent job for future engagements between lawyers and IR scholars than the meditation about interdisciplinarity itself. There are no short-cuts or Procrustean solutions to overcome conceptual perplexities, and from the reflexive perspective that informs The Status of Law this is indeed a good thing. After all, the world itself does not present itself, or lets itself be represented according to our disciplinary categories and boxes for truth. ³² Taking a final cue from Wittgenstein, who instructs us ‘“to go on” by patiently examining language games and the forms of life they engender’, the ultimate methodological message of The Status of Law is that we should ‘engage in “redescriptions” of things that puzzle us’ and that we should embrace contestation as productive for dialogue and focus on self-reflection to replace the Cartesian quest for certainty and truth. ³³ The book in this regard provides plenty of food for thought on ‘how to move on’ when studying the status of law in contemporary world society, without dictating this in the form of a set research agenda with a delineated roadmap that limits our creativity by keeping us on track. As such it provides a refreshing therapy, that highlights the scholarly merits of posing questions, being puzzled and having contestations as more important and productive features for our academic endeavour and interdisciplinarity itself, than exporting rigorous methodology, providing universal truth claims and seeking clear-cut answers to solve contemporary problems.