Ian Hurd

Ian Hurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research is on the interaction between states and international rules, norms, and laws. He has projects in international relations theory, international law, research methods, and international organizations.

His current project is about the law and politics of rule-violation in the international system. It begins with the gaps between what countries agree to in international law and what they do in practice. These gaps represent non-compliance but are also the location for interpretation, contestation, and politics. The book looks at international laws on humanitarian intervention, preemptive war, the use of force, and torture to see the productive aspects of non-compliance.

He also has recent articles on the law of humanitarian intervention, changing practices of diplomacy, the international whaling regime, and IR methodology. These reflects interests in both the theory and the practice of international politics.

His most recent book is International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines the legal foundations of the main international organizations in the world today. It shows how the political impact of international organizations is a function of their legal structures, but also that the law and politics are these organizations must be understood together. It considers the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, the African Union, ASEAN, the ICJ, and the ICC.

Past work has been on the International Criminal Court treaty, Security Council reform at the United Nations, the concept of legitimacy in international relations, labor standards and international criminal law, as well as the constructivist school of thought in IR theory.

Ian Hurd is on the editorial board of the Journal of International Organization Studies and is an affiliated scholar at the Center on Law and Globalization at the University of Illinois and the American Bar Foundation. His book After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the UN Security Council won the Chadwick Alger award and the Myres McDougal Prize in 2008. He taught at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1999-2001, and in 2010-11 was a visiting fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. In 2011, he taught in the Cosmopolitanism course at the European Inter-University Center Venice School of Human Rights.