Fifteen Eighty Four

What do international institutional lawyers see when they peek out from a window? If, as David Kennedy argues, public international lawyers see a “world of nation-states and war” while trade lawyers see “a world of buyers and sellers,” it is likely that international institutional lawyers see a world of delegated competences. They dream of inter-state cooperation —and they fear the nightmare that might come with the abuse of institutional power. Indeed, for the mainstream international law scholarship (MILS) on international organisations (IOs), these institutions represent one of the highest summits in the history of the rational organisation of global life in the “long march of mankind from the cave to the computer.” Accordingly, the sub-discipline has been organised around a series of stale dichotomies and pre-defined research questions that frame its field of vision.

For this reason, during the last decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of IOs ——also known as ‘international institutional law’— has been marked by an intellectual quietism. Most of the scholarship tends to focus on providing ‘legal’ answers to ‘legally formulated’ questions. Traditional accounts are usually restricted to a fixed list of topics (such as legal personality, normative status of rules developed by these institutions or, application of international norms to them, etc.) and methods (interpretation of constituent instruments of these institutions or the study of rulings of international and domestic courts on them, among others). Functionalism, as the dominant theoretical lens of lawyerly inquiry into IOs in international law, has been ‘developed by practitioners, responding to practical challenges, often in piecemeal fashion and through mimicry or comparison.’ In other words, problem-solving has overshadowed the conceptualization of world institutions as sites of socio-technical struggles or vessels for different visions of global ordering.

Our volume, Ways of Seeing International Organisations: New Perspectives for International Institutional Law, challenges this narrow gaze of the field by bringing together authors from across disciplines to interrogate international organisations as pivots in processes of world-making.  The volume posits that “looking” at international institutions is not a neutral operation. It opens vistas to four cluster of issues that have been overlooked to different degrees in the mainstream literature on international organizations in international law: expertise and authority, structures and spaces, people and performances, and capital and race. It does so by bringing together voices from international law’s neighbouring disciplines such as International Relations (IR), history, or anthropology, among others, to explore critical approaches to international organisations in international law. The goal is not only to promote diversity objects and methods of enquiry, but to actively challenge the current “common sense” way of doing things within the subfield of international institutional law.

The volume begins with two interventions on ways to move away from problem-solving in international institutional law towards mapping power relations. B.S. Chimni advances an ‘integrated approach’ that combines an external critique of deep power structures within which international organizations function with an internal critique that investigates design feature of IOs and their composition as encasing the dominance of certain interests over others in the processes of global ordering. Jan Klabbers, in turns, sheds light on the limitations of the functionalist approach, proposing a move towards understanding international organization not only as ‘inter-national’ but also as ‘organizations’ with distinct and fundamental distributional effects beyond their delegated functions. He proposes a ‘supra-functionalist alternative’ to investigate structural patterns of allocating costs and benefits, institutional biases and how they explain the ‘law’ that IOs make. 

These methodological interventions are followed by substantiative reflections on concrete objects and modes of enquiry in and around specific international organizations. In ‘Expertise, Authority and Knowledge Production,’ Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Richard Clements, and Juanita Uribe probe into the processes of assembling, exclusion and inclusion of knowledge in global policy institutions and in specific bodies such as the World Health Organization and the International Criminal Court.

Tommaso Soave, Kiri Santer, and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín follow with the section ‘Structures, Spaces and Jurisdictions’ where they explore, respectively, the contours of structure and agency in international adjudication, the ethnography of conflictual claims by two global institutions to authority in the Mediterranean Sea, and spatial histories of interim structures that housed headquarters of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

In ‘People, Practices and Performances,’ Jan Eijking, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche explore, respectively, the micro-politics leading to the creation of the International Telegraph Union, the performance of the Universal Periodic Review within the UN Human Rights Committee and shifting cultures within the World Bank’s legal office as connected to diverging ‘communities of practices’ taking charge of the office.

Finally, in ‘Capital, Class and Political Economy,’ Negar Mansouri, A. Claire Cutler, and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín explore the discourses and modus operandi of certain international institutions as closely connected to shifting regimes of accumulation but also transformations in relations between colonial powers and their peripheries in the 20^th century.

While the volume has no aspirations of comprehensiveness (as it cannot realistically cover all IOs nor does it provide space for every discipline or perspective), it provides both experts and newcomers a compelling overview of what interdisciplinary and critical methods can bring to the study of the “international”. It opens the space for what Guy Fiti Sinclair in the concluding chapter calls ‘connecting the materiality of international organisations to the affective lives of the people who work in them… the gulf between the high ideals and projects of imperialist domination or capitalist exploitation.’