Chapter 2 positions the book within the interdisciplinary literature on international law and develops its theoretical framework and the concept of intersubjective legalism, borrowing insights from ‘practice’ studies. The research framework builds upon the works of Kratochwil, Brunnée and Toope, and Johnstone, situating the meaning of legal rules within the ‘community of practice’ of international law, which enforces a set of shared understandings about what constitutes sound legal reasoning. Next, Chapter 2 integrates insights from critical legal studies and sociological studies of the juridical field to elucidate the power inequalities shaping interactions inside the community of legal practice. The centrality of expert knowledge as a source of power inside the juridical field suggests a reordering of the traditional perception of international politics: Inside the community of international legal practice states lose their central position, and actors such as judges, legal scholars, and non-governmental organizations gain leverage. The framework presented in Chapter 2 enables the investigation of the politics of the legal field, which take the form of competition over the authority to determine the meaning of legal rules. Finally, this chapter discusses the methods of analysis, namely discourse analysis and interviews.

In a short outline, Ranke’s dictum is being used to question a chronological historiography of a positivst nature. Instead, the book suggests a retrospective cautioning against an apologetic writing of Christian origins. None of the authors of the first millennium intended to write history in the modern sense of ’Ranke’, very few of them made use of the canonical New Testament for making historical claims - quite contrary to our modern and contemporary text books. And it is questionable whether they were ever written and collected to produce such modern narratives. Instead, when authors of the first millennium used sources for evidence, they mainly relied on Jewish authors or non-canonical writings that are rather neglected or disregarded and understudied today, despite the continuous rise of research in these over the past decades.

In Chapter 7 I move onto the case study of Botswana, which in contrast to Somalia and Uganda has experienced structural transformation due in large part to its diamond industry. Industrialization in Botswana has led to a sectoral shift out of agriculture as workers have left rural areas to move to cities and join the modern workforce, thereby leading to a decline in the relative value of rural land. I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that ethnic fractionalization has declined in Botswana since the mid-twentieth-century and examine parliamentary debates around ethnic identity. Moreover, I show that this shift has happened not because of but largely despite efforts of the Botswanan state, which has both discouraged rural-urban migration and failed to alleviate institutional ethnic inequalities that persist to the present day. Finally, I consider alternative explanations for ethnic homogenization in Botswana and find them all wanting.

With the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2008, the ASEAN member states articulated their vision of an economic community. This ambitious vision tracks economic reality around ASEAN. The ASEAN region has recently been one of the most popular destinations for FDI across the globe. Despite a temporary decline due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the region’s share of global FDI rose from 11.9 percent to 13.7 percent that year. Against this auspicious background, this book calls for a new framework through which we can conceptually embrace the ontological autonomy of the ASEAN Investment Regime (AIR), beyond an aggregation of the interests of its individual member states. A sociology-led approach, especially constructivism, emphasizes ideational factors, such as culture and norms, that guide state actions from within. The main goal of the book is to explore the manner in which ASEAN’s history and culture has fundamentally shaped its foreign investment policies, leading to outcomes that often depart from the external structure and script of Global Investment Law.

The main contribution of this book lies in narrowing the existing research gap on the accountability of transnational corporations from emerging and developing states. In addition, it provides a new perspective on the widely documented poor track record of EU Member States in terms of holding ‘their’ corporate nationals, which are directly competing with these corporations for the same ‘share of wallet’ in the globalised marketplace, accountable. Any legal study of a level playing field requires the study of mandatory requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance. This book thus needs to study ‘hard law obligations’ in business and human rights. It assesses how regulation (in laws and trade agreements) and civil judicial remediation in the EU and its Member States function in relation to corporations from emerging and developing states in our globalised world. This book relies on two models of international law-making: constructivism and rationalism.

The book’s introduction explains why the years 1963 to 1975 were a period of tremendous experimentation in German foreign relations. A succession of relatively weak chancellors gave scope for cabinet members to push in various directions, whether this involved voracious weapons procurement, a single-minded battle against inflation, more generous development aid, or a tighter commitment to European integration. Even in periods of political instability, developments in West Germany had great import for Europe and the world beyond. Historiographically, the introduction stresses the broader historical relevance of German foreign relations: its study reveals the contested values of postwar Germans and how those priorities came to shape the international environment. Methodologically, the chapter presents a brief discussion of constructivism as outlined by political scientists Alexander Wendt and Susan Strange. International relations theory informs the book’s core question – how West Germans shaped and were shaped by the international system.

Chapter 8, The Individual Human Being as a Category – A Conclusion and an Outlook, returns to theory. To this end, the chapter weaves together the results of the case studies and the theoretical and methodological considerations. The chapter, serving as a conclusion to the book, simultaneously summarises the book, revisits the issue of interdisciplinarity, and presents its results. It also discusses the book’s contribution and value added. Most importantly, it demonstrates how the results of the empirical case studies are relevant for IR theory and what implications for IR theory, IL scholarship, and the study of global politics can be derived from these results. Finally, the chapter outlines future research based on the book’s results.

Chapter 2 – Humanisation in IR Theory and International Law – critically reviews the relevant IR and IL literature. The objective of this chapter is to identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of several approaches in both disciplines concerning the book’s objective, arguments, and research questions. In addition, it provides an answer to whether alternative approaches to the chosen framework provide a viable pathway to conceptualise the humanisation of global politics. Regarding alternatives approaches in IR, I discuss realist and liberal approaches, the literature on human rights and human security, and literature dealing with concepts such as self, identity, and agency. Regarding IL, I discuss, for similar reasons, the notion of mediation and how the individual human being, the international community, and the state relate to each other. And I offer a discussion of international law and the individual human being.

This chapter lays down the conceptual foundations of Institutional Status Theory. It situates IST in the literature on status in world politics, and on social identity in particular. It elaborates on the concept of status as an intrinsic value and as a role that entails symbolic equality with higher-status actors, as distinct from status as a set of valued attributes. It discusses the psychological and social foundations of IST, in particular its relationship to and difference from constructivist theory. Finally, the chapter theorizes the great-power club and international institutions as sites of status struggles.

The small and somewhat fringe praxis of processual self-esteem research is described with respect to its enactment of a process ontology. The chapter shows that a process approach has resulted in a focus on ‘how’ questions in self-esteem research (rather than on predictive validity, for example) and a more pluralistic approach to the operationalization of self-esteem. What the various processual-studies reviewed have in common is a conceptual and methodological approach to self-esteem as a situated and action-based process, rather than a thing that individuals have to different degrees. Here, the central role of situational affordances is highlighted. This processual praxis often relies explicitly on complex dynamic systems principles, such as self-organization, emergence, variability, and attractor landscapes. With processes and actions as its focus, this praxis constructs self-esteem knowledge that emphasizes one’s agency in the world and the centrality of our actual context-bound actions and experiences as we move through it. This chapter ends with a discussion of how a process approach is beneficial for the lived reality of self-esteem, where individuals are encouraged to embrace and reflect on their situated and fluctuating experiences of self, rather than a pursuit of ‘high’ self-esteem.

The Introduction first highlights the value added of practice approaches to international relations, and demonstrates how a practice perspective differs from other IR theoretical approaches. The chapter then offers a contextualization of practice theories in IR through a historical discussion that highlights the foundations of practice theoretical thought, its connections to, and shared assumptions with preceding IR scholarship, but also the ways in which it fundamentally differs from other theoretical approaches. With this narrative we respond to some allegations and misunderstandings within the discipline that the practice talk is plainly a reinvigoration of old ideas, that there is little new about practice approaches, or that they present us with a new version of constructivism. Third, we proceed in discussing the scope and contours of practice-driven research by discussing how the practice debate might be ordered. Arguing against pitching discrete practice approaches against each other, we draw attention to a number of fault lines that run through the practice debate, such as stability and change. We then showcase how each chapter in this volume engages with broader IR scholarship, and how it provides a new practice-driven vista on relevant IR questions.