International Relations as Politics Among People: Hermeneutic Encounters and Global Governance by Hannes Hansen-Magnusson

Author:Hannes Hansen-Magnusson [Hansen-Magnusson, Hannes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Psychology, Social Psychology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429588969
Google: qBTADwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 50039967
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Outline of the case study: data and the process of analysis

What is at stake in contemporary ocean governance, and how can IR make sense of it? As a precursor to understanding the ongoing development of the Law of the Sea and its relevance to ocean governance, the study presented in this chapter centres on the topos of “Comtean Positivism”, which I reconstruct from data drawn from a range of textual sources. The enquiry aims to explain the play of performances regarding the Law of the Sea as a result of politics among people and the hermeneutic encounters between them. This chapter differs from the following one in that it focuses on horizons as well as the general “grammar” of performances, in particular the codification of UNCLOS as well as its trajectory since. Which kind of performances can explain the trajectory of UNCLOS, and what conclusions can be drawn regarding the normative constitution of contemporary ocean governance? I argue that the core features of Comte’s positivism, namely humanity, objectivity, and expertocracy, help us in answering this question.

This section explicates the underlying assumptions of the study. It thereby speaks to the criteria of validity discussed in Chapter 3, making transparent the sources of data and the heuristics used for the analysis, as well as the conclusions that can be drawn from the study.

Data from which the topos is reconstructed can be found from a range of publicly available sources. They include, for instance, specialised journals, but of course these have to be handled with the appropriate amount of care as required with any use of sources.8 Participants in the convention annually summarised what they considered the main trends of the negotiations in the American Journal of International Law, and more recent developments are covered in Ocean Development and International Law. Other, more immediate statements by people involved in shaping UNCLOS that did not pass through review processes are rare, the famous exception being Arvid Pardo’s speech at the UN General Assembly in 1967 and more recent speeches in commemoration of the event by close friends and colleagues of his, which are retrievable online. Clyde Sanger (1986) has compiled a book that contains interview excerpts and anecdotal descriptions of how different aspects of the convention were formulated. In order to trace, interpret, and reconstruct the development of knowledge resources, I treat these sources as if they contained data collected in interviews conducted by myself. Alongside the accounts of the conference published in law journals, they provide interpretable empirical material related to open-ended performances.

I contextualise the statements by joining them with background information which I obtained from interviews with Renate Platzöder, who played a pivotal role in documenting the convention and its aftermath, and Karl Hinz, who served as a member on the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Further information was obtained from rulings by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In methodological terms, I treat these rulings as quasi-settled social facts on the basis of which speech acts are possible.9 They form heuristics for the interpretation process.

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