Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
12-12-2025
Editor(s)
Daniel Stockemer, Stephen W. Sawyer & Audrey Gagnon
ISBN
978-3-032-06918-4
Publisher
Springer, Cham
Language
en-US
Abstract
International law has, historically, been best understood as a body of principles and rules that govern the interactions between sovereign states and regulate how sovereign states can behave outside their borders. Over time, international law has evolved to regulate a broader range of subjects than just exterritorial activities—including the treatment of citizens or migrants within a country’s borders—and to regulate a greater range of actors than just sovereign states—including private individuals, corporations, and other nonstate actors. This body of principles and rules comes from several sources, including treaties and conventions, customary international law, judicial opinions, and academic articles and treatises (although whether particular sources should be considered binding sources of international law can be contested). Research on international law within political science, and related social science disciplines like economics and empirical legal studies, has largely focused on understanding how international law develops and evolves, exploring whether international law could be utilized to solve unaddressed global problems, and investigating the impact that international law has on preferences and behavior. Methodologically, there has been a rise in the use of large-N statistical analyses, text-as-data approaches, and survey experiments in studying these questions.
Recommended Citation
Adam Chilton & Weijia Rao,
International Law
,
in
IPSA Companion to Political Science: A Practical Introduction to the 200 Most Important Concepts
1
(Daniel Stockemer, Stephen W. Sawyer & Audrey Gagnon ed.,
2025).
Available at:
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06918-4_109-1
Comments
This open access book provides a comprehensive reference work for political science, detailing the actual usage of the 200 most central concepts in the discipline over the past 10 years. The respective contributions demonstrate how each concept has been used in the most cited contemporary works by political scientists from around the world and are complemented by a bibliography with the 20 most cited texts in the field from the past decade. Written by leading scholars and experts in each area, the entries provide a comprehensive, comparative, and accessible overview of the different uses of the concept.
Developed in collaboration with the International Political Science Association (IPSA), the book offers an authoritative and indispensable open resource for the interested public, policymakers, and students and scholars of political science and related disciplines.