The difficulty in identifying the contours of the international regulation of the use of force is not merely the product of the highly politicized character of this area of international law, let alone of the divide between theory and practice. This paper submits that the problem rather lies in the fact that the interpretive community that produces the official discourse on the use of force is no longer able to agree on the way in which legal categories and interpretive techniques should be used to identify the applicable law. A reflexive consideration, by all actors involved, of the method by which the discourse on the use of force is formed seems to be necessary in order to establish or restore, within that interpretive community, the societal consensus needed to provide the international community with a common understanding of the extant regulatory framework and its scope of application.
