It has never been more important to understand how international law enables and constrains international politics. By drawing together the legal theory of Lon Fuller and the insights of constructivist international relations scholars, this book articulates a pragmatic view of how international obligation is created and maintained. First, legal norms can only arise in the context of social norms based on shared understandings. Second, internal features of law, or 'criteria of legality', are crucial to law's ability to promote adherence, to inspire 'fidelity'. Third, legal norms are built, maintained or destroyed through a continuing practice of legality. Through case studies of the climate change regime, the anti-torture norm, and the prohibition on the use of force, it is shown that these three elements produce a distinctive legal legitimacy and a sense of commitment among those to whom law is addressed.

The authors of “Legalization and World Politics” (International Organization, 54, 3, summer 2000) define “legalization” as the degree of obligation, precision, and delegation that international institutions possess. We argue that this definition is unnecessarily narrow. Law is a broad social phenomenon that is deeply embedded in the practices, beliefs, and traditions of societies. Understanding its role in politics requires attention to the legitimacy of law, to custom and law's congruence with social practice, to the role of legal rationality, and to adherence to legal processes, including participation in law's construction. We examine three applications of “legalization” offered in the volume and show how a fuller consideration of law's role in politics can produce concepts that are more robust intellectually and more helpful to empirical research.

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We have previously argued that international environmental law does not adequately promote environmental security because it has failed to adopt an ecosystem orientation. In this paper we suggest that environmental security in the context of freshwater resources can only be achieved through a sophisticated understanding of regime formation and elaboration, linked with a determined pursuit of ecosystem orientation. Our underlying assumptions are twofold. First, the protection of shared water supplies is a “good” worth promoting, whether for intrinsic or instrumental reasons. Second, whenever a resource is shared, particularly a resource that can easily be exhausted or degraded,disputes between the states involved are inevitable. Perhaps surprisingly, we have suggested that the security dimension of the problem relates not only to the potential for disputes, but also—even primarily—to the first of our underlying assumptions. Thus,scarcities of resources should also cause concern when they threaten to undermine either the way of life of a given human population or internal structures of governance and activity through the fostering of subnational conflict and the significant reduction of options for action. In this sense we agree with Richard Ullman's now-famous attempt to redefine the very concept of security. In his view, and ours, a threat to security includes [any] action or sequence of events that (1) threatens drastically and over a relatively brief span of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a state, or (2) threatens significantly to narrow the policy choices available to the government of a state or to private, nongovernmental entities (persons, groups, corporations)within the state.