International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World

The first comprehensive study of international legal positivism and how this theory operates in twenty-first-century international legal scholarship.

Legal positivism in its various forms remains at the forefront of theoretical debates in scholarship. This book engages with contemporary international legal positivism after decades of critique and discusses its cogency and sustainability. It also looks at how we can apply today's positivism to the problems of our post-modern world.International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World provides fresh perspectives on one of the most important and most controversial families of theoretical approaches to the study and practice of international law. The contributors include leading experts on international legal theory who analyse and criticise positivism as a conceptual framework for international law, explore its relationships with other approaches and apply it to current problems of international law. Is legal positivism relevant to the theory and practice of international law today? Have other answers to the problems of international law and the critique of positivism undermined the positivist project and its narratives? Do modern forms of positivism, inspired largely by the theoretically sophisticated jurisprudential concepts associated with Hans Kelsen and H. L. A. Hart, remain of any relevance for the international lawyer in this 'post-modern' age? The authors provide a wide variety of views and a stimulating debate about this family of approaches.