I have a paper in the most recent (12:1) issue of the Journal of International Law and International Relations, in which I apply Habermas’s concept of communicative action to make sense of the role of law in international politics. I back up my theoretical musings with two historical case studies from the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, using archival sources to recover political and diplomatic deliberations around the role of law in politics at the United Nations, and in a case under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The full issue is available open-access from the journal’s website:

(Open Access)

Full citation: “Law as Deliberative Discourse: The Politics of International Legal Argument – Social Theory with Historical Illustrations” (2016) 12:1 Journal of International Law and International Relations 151-203