This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

Carla Bagnoli takes up a worry about Kant’s version of constitutivism about moral norms, which says that the norms of rationality are too abstract to account for the exercise of rational agency and fail to do justice to the significance that the consequences of action have for moral assessment. Bagnoli argues that: (i) the constitutive norms of practical reason are not meant to provide normative reasons for action by themselves. So, the incompleteness of constitutivism about practical reason is not a bug, but an essential feature of the constitutivist agenda; (ii) the full story about determining rational action includes reference to the consequences, which are importantly comprised in the Kantian account of the agent’s description of the action under assessment; (iii) to explain how this works, it is best to deploy a strategy that deserves to be called Aristotelian – that of placing action in its circumstances.

This chapter analyses efforts within the United Nations to develop legal and normative frameworks for transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights, beginning in the 1970s. It first considers the UN Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations and explains why this initiative failed to materialise despite many years of negotiation. It then examines the Global Compact, which reflects emerging trends in legalisation through its emphasis on implementation, participation by non-state actors, and reliance on consensus-building and norm promotion. The chapter next reviews the rise and fall of the Draft Norms, before turning to the development of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This section highlights the innovative nature of Ruggie’s constructivist approach to generating new legal and social norms. A new treaty process, initiated in 2014, remains ongoing and suggests that traditional legalisation strategies continue to retain relevance in certain contexts.

This chapter aims at exploring how normative beliefs and interests inform inter-state relations and, thereby, the law of regional economic community. In so doing, this chapter will provide the basis for the key claim of this book – that is, that the idea of prosperity underpinning RTAs in the Global South as they currently exist is more of a mirage than reality. Trade has undoubtedly been crucial to economic prosperity throughout history. However, simply creating ambitious trade rules with neighbouring states is not enough; without robust institutions to implement these rules, economic benefits remain largely theoretical and mythical. This is so because codifying ambitious rules without strong institutions that will engender implementation of those rules is a proposition without concreteness that is grounded on utopian hopes. This chapter zeroes in on the idea that by focusing only on trade rule codifications, the architects of RTAs in the Global South may be constraining their approach on how they envisage the notion of prosperity. Thus, accordingly, both normative beliefs and interests are indispensable for any RTA that can generate meaningful prosperity.

Constructivism emphasizes the role of ideas, identities, and norms in shaping state behavior and international politics, as well as the intersubjective and relational nature of these ideational factors. Social relations “make or construct people – ourselves – into the kinds of beings that we are. Conversely, we make the world what it is, by doing what we do with each other and saying what we say to each other” (Onuf, 1998, 59). Constructivism therefore highlights the intangible yet relational aspects of our reality: a world in which the meaning of objects and actions is not fixed but socially constructed through our interactions; states are held together by collective belief and actively participate in the social construction of anarchy. Norms play a significant role by defining appropriate behavior and enabling action by providing a framework for actors to understand and interact with the world.

Rather than thinking of nature versus nurture it is better to think about interactions between genes and the environment. The Santa Barbara School of evolutionary psychology proposed that human cognition is the result of innately specified domain-specific mental modules. Babies have certain expectations of the way that the physical world operates. Infants of at least three months of age have the knowledge that objects exist independently of their ability to perceive them. Babies have preference for face-like stimuli from birth and learn the details of human faces rapidly. Young children have an understanding of the role of mental states as a cause of behaviour. This skill, known as theory of mind, becomes more sophisticated as children develop. It is measured by a number of tasks such as false belief task and the eyes test, in which participants are required to judge how people feel from looking at their eyes.

Chapter 4 discusses the different modes of teaching that teachers can employ in class: direct, discussion, activity, enquiry, collaborative and group approaches are all examined in detail, with the advantages and disadvantages of each mode considered and practical advice given on when and where to employ them within a pupil-centred environment. The predominance of particular modes in class is examined, and the importance of teachers using a wide range is stressed, in addition to a discussion of what each mode is particularly suited to achieving. The chapter also examines Resource-Based Learning and Task Based Language Teaching in detail.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework. It defines international orders as configurations of authority. It then conceptualizes representants as effectively integrating material and ideational features, while being irreducible to either. It explains how representants relate to discourses, and material resources, and highlights the value-added of representants in relation to cognate concepts, like Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, status symbols, or Pitkin’s representation. Representants do not come alone, but are embedded into semeiotic webs. On this basis the chapter develops four mechanisms through which representants constitute international orders: they characterize the units of international politics, they legitimize them, they position them in power relations towards each other, and they serve as tools for governing. Representants are constitutive of international orders, while also being the building blocks political agents use to change orders. The chapter develops two mechanisms of changes in representants. One focuses on struggles between actors over getting specific representants socially recognized. The other is an unintentional change in representants themselves. It outlines why some artifacts, practices, and language become socially recognised representants. The last section develops a semeiotics of materialism to study representants and capture the constitutive effects of material reality on a par with those of language.

The chapter starts with empirical teasers. The reliance on maps during the Congress of Vienna, Sanskrit poetics in premodern South Asia, the coronation in the Middle Ages, and the European Parliament’s staged plenary votes in the absence of formal competencies all find a mention. The chapter then defines representants as those practices, artefacts, and language that stand in for the units of the international system in international interactions. In comparison to existing theories of changes of international orders, a focus on representants carries some advantages. Approaches studying material capabilities omit how highly centralized orders can exist even if capabilities are widely distributed. Constructivists could do more to identify the transmission mechanisms through which abstract ideas affect practical politics. How exactly ideas are materially instantiated leaves its mark on historical events. Theoretically, the book’s aim is to anchor the macro-processes of international order’s stability and change in everyday and extraordinary embodied encounters. The focus is on scaling up (from new materialist and much of practice scholarship) and scaling down (from traditional scholarship on transformations of international order) at the same time. The chapter briefly summarizes the theory of change of international orders, and it provides an outline of the monograph.

The chapter starts from the premise that peaceful change can only be regarded as peaceful if it is founded on the shared understanding that the change being instituted is “good” – meaning that it is not incompatible with the vision of the “good life” of those who will be touched by the change. The chapter uses constructivist insights to establish if international organizations can be seen as agents of peaceful change, and if so, how and with what opportunities and limitations they are able to undertake action that can lead to peaceful change? The chapter focuses – perhaps counterintuitively – on NATO as an agent of peaceful change, demonstrating that even though NATO is widely perceived as an agent of repressive – even violent change – it has played an important role as an agent of peaceful change in the relations of its members and within the liberal international order. However, the chapter finds that the prospects of international organizations acting as agents of peaceful change outside their own domain are hampered by them being “sticky” and more likely to be guardians of the status quo rather than agents of change.

United Nations (UN) peace missions are meant to foster peace. However, slim progress has been observed in the states in which they have been recently deployed. If peace misions are effective in alleviating the suffering of the population on many fronts, the puzzle remains: To what extent are UN peace missions powerful instruments of peaceful change, given the persistent political coups and ensuing protests and violence in the receiving countries despite their presence? In this chapter, a constructivist, multilevel analytical approach is used to discuss how peace missions factor in peaceful change. A three-fold argument is made: While it can be demonstrated that UN peace missions are powerful instruments of peaceful change at the international level all the while mitigating crises on a regional basis, they do little to prevent/alleviate the continuation of violence at the national level. Using the examples of Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cyprus, this chapter examines how UN peace missions are instruments of change, yet their peaceful effect depends on whether one takes into account the national, regional, or international level factors.

Simon Grand, Widar von Arx and Johannes Rüegg-Stürm argue that real practice research needs to be accompanied by constructivist epistemologies. They show that while there are many variants of constructivism, they all share four central concerns: (1) they question a concept of ‘reality’ as something that is ‘objectively given’; (2) they study the status of knowledge and the processes through which it is constructed; (3) they treat agency in the construction of reality as distributed among heterogeneous actants; and (4) they challenge the predominance of unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences, like micro vs. macro or situated activities vs. collective practices. After introducing and comparing the three most central constructivist perspectives, Grand and his co-authors discuss the implications of the four central assumptions of strategy as practice research, useful for the study of strategizing practices, the understanding of strategy and the conduct of strategy research. Above all, they emphasize that the very notion of strategy and strategizing practice contains nothing that can be taken as given, but is instead the result of continuous (re)construction by the activities of the practitioners and researchers involved.