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6 - Toward an Anthropology of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2021

Harlan Grant Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
Timothy Meyer
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

With the growing importance of global legal institutions, new forms of global law, and transnational social movements around legal issues, anthropologists are studying the multiplicity of sites where international law operates. By drawing on anthropological literature and applying ethnographic tools in their own analysis, legal scholars can gain insights into how international law is produced and operates in practice. An anthropological approach can be applied to study a range of legal phenomena, including the organizational behavior of international institutions, the internalization of international legal norms in local communities, and regulatory tools of global governance. It can uncover the reasons why certain laws are adopted and internalized, the process by which laws are enforced, the interaction between legal and non-legal norms, and the internal decision-making of legal institutions. This chapter analyses the unique insights that anthropology contributes to our understanding of international law behavior and illustrates the value of an anthropological approach by providing a case-study of the culture of the World Bank, based on extensive ethnographic research.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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