If there has ever been an issue which caused a sort of disciplinary anxiety among international lawyers, it will probably be the question as to whether international law is law at all. While it may be true that this question has attracted less attention in recent decades, with post-Cold War optimism, flourishing of international institutions, and mushrooming of international courts and tribunals, it does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that the question as to whether international is international has been asked by few people engaged in the field. The assumption that international law is a universal, cosmopolitan, Esperanto-like lingo is rarely questioned. It is no accident that Anthea Roberts titles the first chapter of her book ‘The Divisible College of International Lawyers’Footnote ¹ in a nod to the phrase ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ coined by Oscar Schachter, which has been considered a fitting verbalization of the idea that international law represents a universal language and practice which connects various actors from around the globe.Footnote ² Although there have been approaches which question this claim to universality, inspired by Third-World Approaches to International Law, Critical Legal Studies, Marxist approaches and others, the mainstream liberal international law doctrine still adheres to it. At least that is how I, as an academic based in one of the centres of the thought-hegemony uncovered in the reviewed book, perceive it. It is precisely by challenging this assumption of universality that Roberts embarked upon the project of which the reviewed book is the fruit. And, again, it would not be a hyperbole to say that no one interested in the field of international law can ignore this work.

In this book, Roberts takes us on a journey through the international legal academy writ large (or one should perhaps say international legal academies in plural). To properly answer the question posed in the title of the book, Roberts approached international law as a transnational legal field; a field which is socially constructed and constituted by ‘flows of people, materials, ideas, and approaches moving across borders’.Footnote ³ In the chapter discussing the project´s design, Roberts explicitly draws on theories of social fields, developed most prominently by Pierre Bourdieu, and on other sociologists studying transnational legal fields and legal globalization.Footnote ⁴ The inclusion of such a chapter is indicating that we are dealing with a book with a social-science bent. Taking into account the widely positive reception of the book, Footnote ⁵ this also attests to the growing acceptance of the evolving variety of approaches and methodologies used in international law.

Roberts´s work has never been purely doctrinal but rather it has been characterized by the author´s ease in combining external and interdisciplinary approaches with more traditional doctrinal legal analysis.Footnote ⁶ Roberts´s work has typically taken a particular technical legal issue or phenomenon and asked a question as to what this issue or phenomenon is a manifestation of in a broader and more systemic sense. Hence, it is not such a surprise that for her latest project she put on a Bourdieuan sociologist´s hat and tackled a no-smaller question than the one in the book´s title. Still, being an international lawyer par excellence allows her to add nuance which, I suspect, many sociologists by trade would miss. This comes across with particular force in the chapter comparing contents of international law textbooks,Footnote ⁷ where Roberts shows her deep knowledge of the legal doctrines, sources and theories discussed in the analyzed textbooks and her ability to compare them.

Roberts limited the object of her study to only certain actors and materials which play a role in the construction of the transnational legal field.Footnote ⁸ She comprehensively analyzed international law academics (professors, but also global students´ flows) and major international law textbooks. Mainly for feasibility reasons, her study was limited to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (´P5´). Additionally, the law schools studied were elite law schools from the five selected states.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, on many occasions she referred to other sources, materials and countries.

The results of her study are eye-opening, revealing, and perhaps disturbing for some. The book shows a field of international law that is far from being a universal vocabulary, a unified discipline with globally shared assumptions, a cosmopolitan language free from foreign accents.Footnote ¹⁰ Roberts´s project reveals consistent ‘patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption’.Footnote ¹¹ These three concepts play a crucial role in her project, which she labels a comparative international law study.Footnote ¹² It is with this book that Roberts puts comparative international law – an interdisciplinary approach to the field of international law – confidently on the proverbial map.Footnote ¹³

There is no doubt that the reviewed book is a major and innovative contribution to international legal scholarship. It puts into question many sweeping assumptions about the cosmopolitanism and universality of international law, its education, practice, and accompanying discourses. What some members of the ‘divisible college of international lawyers’ might have experienced as anecdotes of momentary ‘dislocation’, or what others might have merely felt at the level of gut intuition, is revealed in this book as a fairly accurate portrait of the field. The book lays bare that what count as the ‘international’ in this field are very often simply ‘globalised localisms’.Footnote ¹⁴

First, there are many differences among international law academies in the five selected countries, which range from university hiring processes, educational profiles of the faculty, trans-border flows of students, publication placements to links with practice.Footnote ¹⁵ These differences work as nationalizing, denationalizing and Westernizing influences. The first two tend to make academies and textbooks either more parochial or transnational, as the case may be, by their focus on different actors, materials and fora.Footnote ¹⁶ The latter influence concerns the nature of the transnational and the extent to which ‘denationalizing influences end up involving Western orientation’.Footnote ¹⁷

Second, the differences among the main P5 international law textbooks are equally striking.Footnote ¹⁸ Roberts demonstrates this by looking at the cited sources and whether they originate from national courts, domestic or foreign, or from international courts and tribunals. A similar exercise is carried out with respect to cited academic authorities. Thus, we find highly nationalized as well as denationalized textbooks. The tendency to look for Western sources when searching for foreign court decisions or authorities is also marked. Emphasis on different substantive topics among the five countries is evidenced as well.

Notwithstanding some outlier academies and institutions,Footnote ¹⁹ the differences between international law academies may reach such levels that they contribute to creating entirely parallel discourses about international law, as Roberts demonstrated on the debates about the Crimean conflict and the South China Sea arbitration. Equally important, Roberts has shown that what counts as the ‘international’ is by and large Western, English-speaking, and common law inspired. This pattern of dominance is evidenced by authorities cited in the studied textbooks, representation of various regions and nationalities in major international institutions, composition of the international law bar, of editorial boards of major transnational law journals, and even in student moot court competitions.

Roberts argues, however, that the current dominance by the West, and English as the lingua franca, is being challenged by new actors, mostly China and Russia, leading to what she terms a ‘competitive world order’.Footnote ²⁰ This is not fuelled only by the shifts in geopolitics, she argues, but also by technological innovation and changes in domestic politics of many Western states.

When it comes to downsides of the work, the author recognizes most of the limitations of her project herself. Even for a project which aims at revealing many common disciplinary ‘blind spots’, the methodological choices made at its outset create blind spots of their own. However, Roberts is aware that ‘every one of the measures looked at in this book has limitations and tells only part of the story’.Footnote ²¹ The focus on the P5 is understandable and justified in order to keep the project manageable. Yet, it leaves out of the picture some important core-periphery dynamics. For one thing, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking academia and practice is mentioned only tangentially, and sources in Arabic are almost never referred to. Yet, German academia is analyzed rather in depth, despite it not being a P5 country. It is not surprising that Roberts also includes analysis of her home country – Australia. To be fair, Roberts analyzes some of the data relating to South Africa and India, as the other ‘BRICS countries’.

Links to practice are explored to the extent they exist vis-à-vis the selected academies. Roberts´s book analyzes, quite extensively, lawyers working in the main international adjudicatory bodies. However, the world of international legal practice is much wider than international dispute settlement. One can think of further possibilities of extending Roberts´s research. For instance, a question this study leaves open is what would be the picture revealed by a similar study focusing on international lawyers working in various international organizations and national foreign ministries. Would we see similar patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption among the lawyers in international organizations or lawyers negotiating treaties on behalf of their governments? Or would we see something closer to the idea of the invisible college of international lawyers? From reading Is International Law International?, one would not expect an affirmative answer to the latter question. But someone is yet to put the flesh of data on the bones of intuition.

When discussing the sources of disruption, the main narrative is focused on the US-China axis: US being the current hegemon, China being the main contender of the hegemony. While this may be the most important geopolitical constellation at the global level of high international politics, the reader is left with a feeling that this contestation is almost all there is; possibly adding Russia and other BRICS to the picture. I am not suggesting that it is necessarily otherwise but merely wondering whether it is possible that international law is made and influenced in important ways beyond the relationships between the major powers.

Even though Roberts reveals stunning patterns of Western influence on what counts as the international in international law, she avowedly avoids taking a normative stance towards it, as her book is decidedly empirical and explanatory. She often operates with the concepts of hegemony, core-periphery, and imperialism, yet she uses them rather as descriptive tools. She acknowledges, in the context of the rise of populism in Western states, that ‘part of the explanation lies in the economics’Footnote ²² and in this vein mentions the globalization-fuelled economic inequality, while stressing especially the inequality ‘within states’.Footnote ²³ Without delving into the subject, Roberts settles on references to the narratives common to the public debates in the US or in Europe (i.e., the rise of right-wing populism blaming other states, international organizations, ethnic minorities or migration, on the one hand, and the left-wing adage blaming the neoliberal elite, multinationals, and the global rich). Whereas this may be entirely unobjectionable, taking into account the aim of the book, one can take Roberts´s data a step further and enquire into the extent to which the influence on the production and reproduction of international law sources concentrated within a handful of Western actors may contribute to the production and reproduction of some of the hierarchies and inequalities outside the realm of international law. This is not a critique of Roberts´s work but rather an invitation to international law scholars to take Roberts´s work as a starting point in further questioning not only the avowed universality of international law, but also its potentially constitutive role in reproducing core-periphery dynamics and the economic inequalities.

At the same time, Roberts´s excellent case studies on the uses of international law for emancipation (e.g., the strategic uses of international law scholarship by China) may serve as an example as to how international law may be used to contest and potentially overcome the hegemony. However, one should add, with Roberts, that the point should not be to create a new hegemony in the place of the old one.

In fact, one can see Roberts´s methodological choice not to embrace the calling for the normative as a potentially effective tool in challenging the status quo. I would venture that by not associating her work explicitly with any critical schools of international law (be it Marxist, Critical Legal Studies or Third-World Approaches to International Law), despite their inspiration being evident in the text, Roberts seems to have achieved a much wider audience for and deeper engagement with her work. One may call this efficient emancipatory politics, and in this sense an inspiration for other projects with similar aspirations.

However, this raises a few questions for those who wish to expand on Roberts´s research. Roberts has achieved wide readership with a book which is critical in its outcome although not in its outlook. Those who want to follow her steps and use the data or framework she developed may be now more limited in adopting a neutral normative stance – as the hegemony and dominance in the construction and re-production of international law have been laid bare. At the same time, potential followers should take into account a possibly limited impact of their work when positioning themselves as critical scholars.

However, an equally important question is what is the audience the scholar wants to talk to: is it the Western Anglophone international law academy? Other international law academies? Practitioners at the international law bar and bench? Domestic lawyers or policy makers? If so, in what countries? Roberts´s book helps in understanding what the composition of these different academic or professional silos is. However, their reflexes will most likely vary among as well as within these silos. At the end of the day, the issue of positioning is always contextual and should be carefully weighed by the scholar.

With her typical modesty, Roberts is aware that her project does not identify causes and consequences of the picture she paints.Footnote ²⁴ Her goal is, rather, to create a framework of analysis which can be used by others as a platform to dig more deeply into the issues discussed or touched upon in her book.Footnote ²⁵ It is an invitation for more conversation. It challenges our own assumptions and invites us to see the world through the eyes of others. The fact that Roberts´s book has already reached a wide audience in Western academia, its dominance veiled in the language of transnational and universal it challenges the most, may be a reason for optimism. It can be a sign of increased introspection and self-reflexivity in the Western academia. At the same time, this self-reflexivity may cause anxiety about one´s disciplinary identity and as such it may lead to pushback by those who happen to hold the reins of the hegemonic dynamics identified in the book. Therefore, in spite of its immediate popularity, its real impact on the field may indeed go in numerous directions. This factor contributes to curbing of the initial optimism.

All in all, this work should be followed by others building on its impressive methodological framework and the wealth of collected data. Roberts´s contribution to the establishment of comparative international law is a major one and no matter how unsettling this could be for some, it will be difficult to look at international law the same way after the publication of her work.