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 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,
DURHAM UNIVERSITY 
 

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   GLOBAL GOVERNANCE | INTERNATIONAL LAW | ETHICS

Dr._Dennis_Robert_Schmidt_009_®Fotostud

I am an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Durham University, UK. My work on global order, international law, and world politics combines social theory with ethics and history to explore ideas and practices of global governance. I am a frequent contributor to media on current international events. read more

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New book chapter

Global Power Shifts and International Law

This chapter assesses how power transition affects and is affected by, international law. It reviews the complex relationship between global power transition and international law, understood as one of international society’s key ordering institutions, showing the constitutive nature and ‘productive power’ of international law and legal practice. read more

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New book review

International lawyers continue charging into the complex debates about the foundations and evolution of global order. Two recent books show the different ways in which we can take up this challenge. While Ntina Tzouvala's Capitalism as civilisation shows how inequality and racialized tropes from the age of empire have informed the development and use of international law from the nineteenth century to the present, Anne Orford's International law and the politics of history sets out the wider methodological context in which debates about the study of history in international law take place. read more

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Latest article

On the meaning(s) of norms: Ambiguity and global governance in a post-hegemonic world

Together with Thomas Linsenmaier and Kilian Spandler, I offer a new conceptualisation of the meaning of norms in world politics. We start from the observation that existing norm scholarship in International Relations has underestimated the role of ambiguity in the constitution of norm meaning. To address this shortcoming, we advance a conceptualisation that sees norm polysemy – the empirically observable plurality of norm meanings-in-use – as resulting from the enactment of inherently ambiguous norms in different contexts. read more

© 2022 Dennis R. Schmidt