Hovell: Theories of Collective Security: Asking the Wrong Questions

Devika Hovell (London School of Economics - Law) has posted Theories of Collective Security: Asking the Wrong Questions (in Research Handbook on International Legal Theory and War, Tom Dannenbaum & Eliav Lieblich eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Long-standing debates about collective security recur around a single question: why does it fail? This chapter argues that the questions we ask shape what we are able to see, and that mistaking some questions for the only ones worth asking can obscure more productive lines of inquiry. Using the classic interrogatives-why, what, who, when, where and how-as an organising device, it examines how international legal theory has approached collective security: as a matter of ideology, description, community, selectivity, and process. Surveying liberal, Marxist, realist, institutional, constitutional, feminist and Third World traditions, it shows how different questions can open up avenues of inquiry or collapse them into a search for hidden coherence, a single culprit, or an inherited ideal. Theory serves collective security best, it concludes, when it resists explanatory closure and attends to the contingent processes through which legal authority is constituted and contested.