The landscape of the contemporary theory of public international law may be envisioned as comprising a rambling choir group of teachers, judges, lawyers, governmental and international agents, as well as philosophers and other thinkers of social sciences. This imaginary group has no settled choirmasters. It combines voices of widely recognized virtuosi, tenors, sopranos, prima-donnas, basses and sotto voce chanters, imitators, and those who only hum or sing in languages not understood by the others. The choir features soloists and ensembles singing separately or in counterpoint; it sometimes performs madrigals (where different people use different melodies), but also splits into three or four main groups, and as the case might be, decomposes in more than thirty subgroups. When it chants a cappella, it risks losing the exact tonalities. Notwithstanding their differences, most choristers succeed in chanting harmoniously, singing and playing joyfully; but some contribute to dissonance, obscure the music, and hence the choir cannot avoid giving a semblance of disarray. It also sometimes happens that choristers, although performing on the same stage, have never heard of each other and thus may ignore the performance of one another.

The book aims at providing a sample of such a choir and bringing under the realm of some theoretical issues, voices of a number of scholars. It strives to keep a reasonable balance among harmonies, cacophonies, convergences, disagreements and contradictions. Despite the many setbacks, the challenge to seize a momentum of a contemporary theoretical image of international law has proven attractive.

The book cannot address the mystery of when a voice becomes a theory. It takes however the latter in a broad sense, as a precondition to every intellectual achievement, ubiquitous even to those who pretend to ignore it. The concept is closely related to practice and nourishes hopes for continuity and change. From whatever strand we choose to contemplate it, theory is an exercise of freedom or, to borrow Sigmund Freud’s perceptions, a surrogate for desire.

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Part 1 of the book deals with issues that are preliminary to the drawing of any theoretical landscape. It examines first, the impact of theory on international law and the significant characteristics of the former: ideology, language, history, limits, methodology and the important (but not attracting the interest it deserves) problem of the relationship between international and domestic law. In framing the current picture of scholarship, it touches upon the ways authors express spontaneously or implicitly their affiliation with schools, movements and trends. Moreover, before entering the discussion on the contemporary theory, the book refers to the traceability of antecedents through the meanders of positivism, natural law, normativism, sociological anxieties and other trends that paved the way to the present. In this vein, a reminder of regional and national theoretical traditions from the end of the Second World War to the late 1970s might explain continuity and break with today’s scholarship.

Part 2 contains a tour d’horizon of thirty-two schools, movements and trends that dominate or simply appear in current international legal thinking. It offers an illustrative picture of the saga of tools that the choir of international lawyers, master or pretend to master. It explains basic orientations like liberalism, naturalism, positivism, realism, pragmatism, idealism, rationalism, empiricism and formalism mixed with modern and post-modern approaches, policy-oriented, structuralist, constructivist, critical, Third World, feminist, institutionalist, instrumentalist, regime and other theories. It also discusses universalism expressed by cosmopolitan and constitutional visions attenuated by pluralist and relativist trends. Finally, this Part reserves places to rational choice, general systems theory, chaos theory, as well as to Marxist, Middle Road, and sociological approaches.

Part 3 moves beyond generalizations and seeks to scrutinize how the relevant literature meets basic chapters of international law. Sometimes the presentation illustrates main trends but also contradictions, without excluding that similar characteristics, not mentioned in the narrative, are met elsewhere in the domestic legal scholarship. The narrative could not avoid discussion of same issues in different chapters of the book as it is a usual practice for authors to mix up different questions in their same text.

Part 3 is devoted firstly to writings on important aspects of the system of international law: it discusses inter alia the notion of international community/society, ontology and general theory, the legal basis of international obligations, legitimacy, compliance, unity and universality of international law, the problems of fragmentation, jurisdiction and competence as well as the fictitious constructions of the law, hegemony and the international dimension of the rule of law. The input of legal scholarship extends to the fundamental issues of human rights, use of force, international humanitarian law and touches upon the “new” discipline of international economic law.

The enquiry in Part 3 further pinpoints the theoretical trends regarding the addressees and the fabrication of international law. Emphasis is given to the users of that law, that is the state, international organizations and “individuals”, and to the fabrication of the law: law-making, custom, treaty, general principles of law, soft law, standards, unilateral state acts, transnational law, the intertwined duo of jus cogens and obligations erga omnes, the problematic of hierarchy, the handling of successive, parallel and conflicting commitments as well as the issues of transtextuality and interpretation.

Part 3 widens the discourse in two directions. First, in the direction of progress in international law, democracy, ethics and morality, justice, globalization, governance, law and politics, and the relationship between international law and international relations (IR) theories. And second, in that of the way certain distinguished non-international lawyers and renowned political scientists perceive international law.

To my knowledge, the method adopted in this book has not appeared before in scholarly analysis. In exploring the ways fundamental issues of international law are dealt with by contemporary scholarship of more than five hundred authors in about one hundred and forty themes it seeks to offer to the greatest extent possible a global picture of the contemporary theoretical landscape. The citation of brief excerpts might become tiresome for the impatient reader. It is nevertheless done with the purpose of illustrating how, and to what extent, the texts and teachings referred to, correspond to the show-case of the schools, movements and trends described in Part 2. It intends to permit the reader to evaluate strengths and weaknesses, repetitions and truisms in the inflationary panorama of international law writings. On the other hand, whereas the risks of such coverage are inevitable, specialists in particular fields might find the coverage not comprehensive.