국제법과 국제관계학 학제간 연구의 중간 평가 -반학제성 주장은 필요한 것인가?-

Abstract

Nearly 30 years ago, a gesture of reconciliation was provided by international relations to international law after the long period of mutual neglect. Despite sharing the big picture of “international”, international law and international relations have been fighting each other to win recognition in the international society as the disicpline better suited to international affairs. Because the explanatory power of international relations tends to be more easily understood by the international society than the normative power of international law, this battle seems to be favorable to international relations. During the interwar period, international law is regarded as a toothless tiger for its incapability to maintain international peace and security due to its obsession with the normative approach based on legal positivism. However, after the bridge between international law and international relations is built, the possibility of international law to maintain international peace and security is emphasized by various interdisciplinary researches mainly driven from international relations. In this context, the resurrection of international law’s importance is actually owed to the robust contribution of international relations. At first glance, the marriage between international law and international relations is likely to last a long time because they have “international” in common with. However, the strong request for velvet divorce has been made from international law because the balance between international law and international relations is severely broken. Under the name of interdisciplinary researches, international law is endangered to be a peripheral discipline because international relations has an seemingly disrespectful attitude towards international law based on instrumentalism. Since international relations defines international law as the tool for realizing the interest of powerful States, international law is on the verge of losing its core nature that represents the legal praxis in the international society. In this context, there has been a growing voice that international law should find its right place. This movement is strongly supported by the argument of counter-disciplinarity. It is hardly possible to expect the final scene on the battle between interdisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity because each camp has its own merits and demerits as a discipline of international affairs. In this sense, a third way is needed to conduct a true interdisciplinary research on international law and international relations. Just combining international law with international relations does not make a substantial contribution to interdisciplinarity. Counter-disciplinarity also has a strong tendency to exaggerate the dark side of the interrelationship between international law and international relations. In this context, an epistemic community would be needed for paving the new way for vitalizing interdisciplinarity. Without prejudice to the nature of respective disciplines, an epistemic community with shared issue areas could make a huge contribution to interdisciplinarity between international law and international relations in true sense. It would be interesting to predict how an epistemic community will overcome various challenges from both interdisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity.