A question such as this one usually results in a slightly incredulous smile on the addressee's face, as if it implies an assumption that there is time to spare in the life of an international lawyer faced with a myriad of interesting-looking publications. For a long time, writing a monograph used to be the keystone, the ultimate test, to join the academic ranks – yet today, universities grant PhD titles based on the writing of separate articles on a common theme and doctoral researchers are increasingly encouraged to choose this option, so as to ensure their ideas actually reach the intended audience. Arguably, today's academic audience is assumed not to have, or at least not to make, the time to read an entire book.

The Leiden Journal of International Law (‘LJIL’) has always endeavoured to promote diversity and interdisciplinary enquiries in the international law epistemic community. Interdisciplinarity and diversity, albeit necessary in the long-term to refresh and update the discipline, raise numerous questions and epistemic challenges in the short-term. On the initiative of Jean d'Aspremont and Larissa van den Herik, today continued under the present editorship, these challenges have been at the heart of past LJIL editorials.

Like international legal scholarship, LJIL is in transition. Our colleagues, Larissa van den Herik and Jean d'Aspremont, who have shaped much of the role and plural identity of the journal over the past decade, in collaboration with our different sections, have passed leadership on to us, the new team of (co-)editors-in-chief. This editorial reflects on the changing role and function of scholarship in international law, a theme important to our predecessors and ourselves. This is to some extent a niche area. It has not received much attention in discourse. With some notable exceptions, legal journals are typically reluctant to address overarching meta-issues of discourse, i.e. issues of production of scholarship, the role of journals vis-à-vis other media, or the broader direction of the development of international legal scholarship. Such issues might be perceived as non-scientific by some. We feel that it is important to include such dimensions, including critical self-reflection on our discipline, in international legal discourse.

This article examines the evolution of military operations by the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) and the South African Development Community (SADC) over the last three decades. By looking at constitutional (treaty) developments and organizational practice, it questions whether these sub-regional organizations have displaced the primacy of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in matters pertaining to international peace and security, as foreseen in Articles 24(1) and 103 of the United Nations Charter (the UN Charter). The relevance of this question is underscored by the fact that ECOWAS and SADC have engaged in various peace operations since the 1990s. The article concludes that, since all the interventions under discussion were underpinned by the consent of the recognized government, it would be premature to suggest that the practice of African sub-regional organizations amounts to the emergence of a new customary right to engage in ‘first-instance enforcement action’.

International criminal law has made impressive strides over the past twenty years. The 1990s and 2000s saw the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR), the coming into being of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), and the birth of several internationalized ‘hybrid’ jurisdictions, notably the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). However, the dynamic development of international criminal law into a new branch of public international law has also led to some problems and confusion. The rules and principles developed by the newly founded international criminal tribunals have sometimes seemed at odds with accepted views on public international law more generally – raising fears about the ‘fragmentation’ of the law. Perhaps the best-known example of this is the controversy over the ‘overall-control’ test developed by the ICTY Appeals Chamber in the Tadić case to determine under which circumstances armed forces may be considered to be acting on behalf of a third state, rendering an internal armed conflict international. The Tadić test differed from the ‘effective-control’ test developed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Nicaragua case and confirmed in the Bosnia Genocide case, where the ICJ specifically rejected the ICTY approach. Also more generally, the discussion on ‘fragmentation’ and international criminal law continues; recently, Elies van Sliedregt set out in these pages her vision of legal pluralism in international criminal law.

In the previous editorial, Larissa van den Herik and Jean d'Aspremont referred to LJIL's ‘special plural identity’. On the one hand, this plurality shows in its table of contents; on the other hand, the plural identity is equally – if not even more – treasured in terms of appreciating the plurality of voices within the legal discipline, as the editors-in-chief also highlight. Diversity and heterogeneity are an asset for academic debate, and LJIL as such seeks to provide a forum for scholars from different ‘paradigms’. The appreciation of diversity and plurality is also reflected in the interest of LJIL to look beyond the confines of the legal discipline itself and engage with external perspectives to foster discussions about international law. It is in light of this open-mindedness and the wish to reach out to non-legal audiences, and to the international relations community in particular, that I was invited to join the LJIL team some years ago. Whereas there is a growing audience of IR scholars genuinely interested in (theorizing) international law, LJIL is not very well known as a journal with that profile for its International Legal Theory section. As a leading scholar in IR once remarked: ‘LJIL is the best kept secret in IR’. So when the request came for me to write an editorial, it seemed only apt to reflect upon some of the perils and promises of interdisciplinarity from my experience as an IR scholar within the LJIL editorial board.

In the process of selection of articles for the International Court of Justice section at the Editorial Board of the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL), we tend to be seduced by those manuscripts which are effective in making use of the jurisprudence of the Court as an instrument to engage in an in-depth examination of substantive legal issues of a general nature. This reflects our conviction – hardly an original one, since it appears to be shared by our entire legal community – that the Court has a fundamental role to play in the advancement of international law as a legal system. It also echoes an idea that is present in the mission statement of our journal, which is conceived as ‘a forum for two vital areas, namely international legal theory and international dispute settlement’, thus establishing an intrinsic link between them. But how is the Court's contribution to the development of international law to be assessed? And what do we expect from a scholarly piece examining its case law in this respect?

Since the demise of philosophical foundationalism and that of the Aristotelian idea of an inner meaning of words, scholarship about international law is no longer perceived as a mining activity geared towards the extraction of pre-existing meaning. Rather, international legal scholarship is in a state of fierce competition for persuasiveness and semantic authority. This does not elevate persuasiveness into the determinant of legality, nor does it lead to a total rejection of the internal point of view. The configuration of that competition for naming is informed by the current structure (and the membership) of the interpretative community of international law. In this competition for naming, words constitute semantic weaponry. Mention is made here of uses of words in international law to create textual economy, generate semantic instability, rough out and hone scholarly ideas, enhance textual aesthetics, yield empiricism, create straw men and preserve the argumentative character of scholarly idea, gratify oneself, boost fame and careers, and intimidate peers. It is also argued that there is nothing to rein in in the use of such semantic tactics in the interpretative community of international law, for paradigmatic revolution is meant to be permanent. It is only if international legal scholars were to lose their social identity that the competition for naming and the interpretative community of international law would vanish altogether.