Lauri Mälksoo
2009 - 2014 • Starting Grant
How has receiving an ERC grant influenced you as a scientist?
I was the first person in Estonia to receive an ERC grant, so it gave a further boost to my academic career in my home country. The experience gave me insights into contemporary project management, team-building, research communication, etc. I would imagine that my academic profile among peers is still defined through the topic of “Russia and international law”.
International law and non-liberal states: the doctrine and application of international law in the Russian Federation
The central research question was: what impact does the increasingly non-liberal orientation of the government of the Russian Federation have on the Russian doctrine and practice of international law? As the West and Russia hope to further build their relationship on international law, do they understand it the same way? The team aimed to provide systematic empirical evidence on the use and conceptualisation of international law in the Russian Federation. The team analysed the situation in Russia as an example of something beyond Russia itself: how non-liberal states understand and practice international law. Whether non-liberal states “behave worse” in respect to international law than liberal states do is one of the most important debated issues in post-Cold War international legal theory. The research method included IR theories of constructivism and liberalism, as well as interviews with Russian judges, politicians, and legal academics.
Result
The most important finding was that the consensus about international law in Russia differs from Western understandings in several ways. This concerns, for example, the relationship between the principles of state sovereignty and human rights. The differences not only result from the impact of the “communist” ideas of the Soviet period but also reflect the Russian domestic debate and arguments that Russia represents a civilisation separate from the West. In some sense, the project’s academic contribution was essentially a “translation”: not a mere grammatical translation but an analytical one.
Impact
The project took place from 2009 to 2014, a tranquil period in Western-Russian relations between Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas. It was possible to travel to academic conferences in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics. One of the most valuable aspects of the project was the opportunity to interact with Russian international law academics all over Russia, which contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the subject matter. Mälksoo wrote a monograph “Russian Approaches to International Law” (Oxford University Press, 2015), which continues to be his best-cited academic work and has influenced the global academic discourse on how we think about regional and national limits to the universality of international law. Awareness about Russian approaches to international law enables practitioners to approach the current Russian Federation in a realistic way, without the pink glasses of unrealistic expectations.