Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Goodman and Jinks’ Socializing States

Abstract

Goodman and Jinks’ forthcoming book, Socializing States, is a tour de force of international relations (IR) theorizing. The authors’ revised tripartite scheme of socialization mechanisms, their sophisticated theorizing of an “acculturation” mechanism, and their firm grounding in the sociological and psychological literatures set a standard of excellence as much for IR theorizing. The comments in this paper therefore focus on the authors’ empirical claims about the existing evidence for state socialization, and on the legal aspects of their analysis. The paper is organized in five parts. The first section discusses the relationship of the book to contemporary IR theory, focusing on the authors’ value-added contribution and encouraging them to make the links between their own work and existing IR scholarship a bit more transparent. In the second section, I move from theory to empirics, suggesting that recent IR scholarship is more equivocal about international socialization of state actors than the authors suggest. The third section moves from IR to IL, asking what is specifically legal in the authors’ analysis and in their hypothesized socialization mechanisms. Section four inquires briefly into the question of “how international law comes home,” asking questions about the domestic-level mechanisms and especially the agents of socialization in domestic legal systems. A fifth and final section very briefly discusses issues of regime design, noting the sharp differences between the mechanism-based guidelines of this book and the situation-structural approach of other studies in IL and IR.

Keywords: international law, socialization, acculturation, human rights, regimes

JEL Classification: K33