The world bank's lawyers : the life of international law as institutional practice /
Dimitri van den Meerssche.
- First edition.
- xvi, 320 pages ; 24 cm
- The History and theory of international law .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Introduction: The Life of International Law -- On People, Practices, and Performances -- 2. The 'Force of Law' Under Construction -- Sensibility, Authority, Performativity -- 3. The 'Force of Law' Performed -- The Institutional Politics of Legal Practice -- 4. Law's Metamorphosis -- Rupture, Reconstruction, and Recollection -- 5. 'Of course we are bound by those' -- Daņino's Human Rights Agenda -- 6. Law as Management -- An Agenda of Cultural Change -- 7. 'A new normative architecture' -- Risk, Resilience and Deformalization -- 8. Conclusion: Assembling the Actants of International Law.
"The World Bank's Lawyers gives an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law. Informed by months of participant observation, dozens of interviews, oral archives, informal memoranda and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, it tells an untold story of the World Bank's legal department. This is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the influence they seek and the tools they employ. It is an account of the practices they cling to and how these practices gain traction, or how they fail to do so, in an international bureaucracy. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory, relational sociologies of association and performativity theory, this ethnographic exploration multiplies the matters of concern in our study of international law(yering): the human and non-human, material and semantic, obscure and evasive actants that tie together the fragile fabric of legality. In tracing these threads, the book signals important changes in the conceptual repertoire and materiality of international legal practice, as liberal ideals were gradually displaced by managerial modes of evaluation. It reveals a world teeming with life - a space where professional postures and prototypes, aesthetic styles and technical routines are woven together in law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as a contingent cultural technique enriches our understanding of the discipline's disenchantment and the displacement of its traditional tropes by unexpected and unruly actors. It thereby inspires new ways of critical thinking about international law's political pathways, promises and pathologies, as its language is inscribed in ever-evolving rationalities of rule"--