International law and international politics are closely linked. Despite this, the phenomena are most often studied in isolation, not only within the sub-fields of e.g. International Law and International Politics but also within multi- or interdisciplinary fields such as Global Studies, International Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Peace as well as Peace and Development Studies. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as the understanding of today’s increasingly globalized international society then becomes compartmentalized and, by extension, fractured and incomplete. The starting point in this book is that international law must be understood in its political context and that international politics must be understood in its legal context.

With the ultimate aim of seeking to understand law and politics in the current international society, this book contains theoretical discussions of the entanglements between law and politics as well as analyses of a number of international political and legal issues. The book not only introduces the most productive theories of international law and politics existing today, but it also seeks to integrate some of them into a multi-disciplinary framework to study law and politics in the current international society. The book also introduces a method for practical legal problem-solving: “the method of social welfare”. More detailed analyses are provided of, among other things, (the differences between) American and European foreign policy, human rights, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. The various issues are analyzed from historical, contemporary and forward-looking perspectives.

Mikael Baaz is an Associate Professor in International Law as well as an Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies. He currently works as a Senior Lecturer in International Law at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. Baaz is also an affiliated Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the University West. He is the author of several books, including, The Use of Force and International Society, 2nd edition (Jure, 2017) and, together with Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, Researching Resistance and Social Change: A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017). Baaz is also widely published internationally and his papers appear in the following journals: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political; Asian Journal of International Law; Asian Politics and Policy; Conflict and Society; European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology; Global Public Health; International Journal of Constitutional Law; International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society; International Studies Review; Journal of Civil Society; Journal of International Criminal Justice; Journal of International Relations and Development; Journal of Law and Society; Journal of Political Power; Journal of Refugee Studies; Journal of Resistance Studies; Journal on the Use of Force and International Law; Leiden Journal of International Law; Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice; and, Scandinavian Studies in Law.