300422 Non‑State Influence on International Law: A Critical Reflection (S) (SoSe 2026)

What is agency? How does it influence social structures? Can actors other than states influence these structures? This course revolves around these questions and aims to provide answers through the analysis of historical events.
Throughout history, non‑state actors have played an increasingly important role in addressing rising global challenges, including (but not limited to) climate change, violent conflicts and mass atrocities, financial crises, and pandemics. In accordance with the global governance shift, there has been a greater emphasis on the role of these actors in conflict resolution and peacekeeping efforts, coupled with their initiatives to uphold international humanitarian law and international human rights law. However, their capacity to influence structures still attracts a relatively modest attention in the literature.
An example of these structures is international law, which is considered in the English School of International Relations literature as an established set of shared values, rules, and practices in a society of states. Indeed, although scholars have different opinions regarding the number and extent of social structures, there seems to be some consensus on the idea that states are the principal agents of rule‑making and enforcement, as well as the following set of five structures: diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war, and the role of great powers. International law is thus regarded as crucial for the maintenance of cooperation and order among states. With these aspects in mind, what constitutes international law has historically been reduced to states, with the capacity to influence this structure mainly attributed to these actors through their treaty‑ and policy‑making practices. Therefore, there is limited empirical work on the agency of actors other than states in influencing this social structure. For instance, when one thinks about the Hague and Geneva Conventions, one mainly imagines states uniting to ratify rules on the means and methods to be resorted to in conducting warfare and on limiting its negative impact on civilians and non‑belligerents. This process is thus considered in a mechanical way, with discussions held among legal experts and civil society organisations, and their contributions to the formulation of the legal texts , which have been crucial in the law‑making phase, being pushed to the background. This course focuses on this gap; it analyses the way actors other than states, such as legal, political, and religious experts, theorists, CSOs, and academics, have become involved into the development of international law throughout history. This occurred mainly in four means: advocacy-lobbying, norm entrepreneurship, contribution to law-making and enforcement. These means all include the upholding of core ideas that they believe will help achieve justice.
The course first aims to introduce participants to the fundamental theoretical knowledge to reflect on this relationship between agency and structure. It provides an overview of the characteristics of the society of states in its English School sense, including the ways in which its sets of shared values, rules, and practices develop and become embedded as social structures. It then deals with a range of individual case studies from legal history. These cases will shed light on the mutual agency of state, non-state, and hybrid actors in the development of international law as a structure, with an emphasis on the core ideas that they upheld. The students are expected to engage with these cases and, where possible, to do further research on them. They are encouraged to reflect on how these actors became involved in international law by engaging in justice, conflict‑resolution, and peace‑building initiatives, and to share their thoughts on how international law as a structure stretches beyond the state level to encompass non‑state and hybrid actors as agents.