Subjects and actors in international lawmaking: the paradigmatic divides in the cognition of international norm generating processes

With an emphasis on subjects and actors, this chapter seeks to shed some light on the choices made by scholars in modelling and cognizing international lawmaking processes. After a brief outline of the mainstream descriptive frameworks used to cognize and model normmaking processes in international law, this chapter elaborates on the driving forces at work behind each of them. In doing so, this chapter draws attention to the politics of empiricism and cognition with a view to offering some critical reflection on how international legal scholars and practitioners have been making sense of international lawmaking.