International Law, we are often told, ‘moved to Institutions’ in the early twentieth century. While recent literature has (masterfully, to be sure) explored the intellectual trajectories of some of the leading lawyer-diplomats or legal doctrines entangled in these international organisations, most accounts divorce their analysis from the seemingly banal histories of the ‘buildings, staffs, and letterheads’. This is particularly true for the history of the interim headquarters of international institutions. For the towering edifices specially erected to host these organisations, just like Rome, were not built in one day. For this reason, the early years of these institutions were shaped by the spatial constraints that their improvised and temporal dwellings imposed on them. For that reason, in this piece I shed light on the interim function of the Hotel National (1920–1937) and the Lake Success complex (1947–1952), as, respectively, placeholders for the League of Nations and the United Nations. By situating the everyday geographies of international law-making in these two precarious and unstable venues, I explore the tensions and hierarchies embedded within parochial modes of organisation that claimed the mantle of the international.

This concluding chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions to how we see, think, and do international organisations. The editors of this volume draw a sharp distinction between doing international organisations law and thinking about international organisations, and propose that the discipline must ‘start seeing international organisations differently’. Yet the sequence could just as easily be reversed: what one sees will inevitably be shaped by what one thinks, how one imagines the world, what one expects to see. This chapter begins with ‘ways of doing’ scholarship on international organisations – crudely divided into ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘(re)constructivist’ approaches – and proceeds to reflect on the diverse ways of seeing and thinking suggested by the preceding chapters, before making some tentative suggestions about possible ways forward.

If our aim is to pluralise the ‘subjects, methods, and aims’ of the academic study of international organisations, then one fairly obvious route to follow is that of historicisation. Historians of international organisations have elected a variety of avenues to relate the creation and the design of international institutions. Building on their work, this chapter offers another tool to the methodological palette the present volume offers; on the other hand and more specifically, I want to reflect on what international organisations are from the point of view of their making. To do so, I zoom in on one important moment in the history of modern international organisations: the 1865 international telegraph commission in Paris that convened to determine the scope and purpose of the first formal and permanent international organisation, the International Telegraph Union. I approach this case through the lens of micro-politics, combining biographical and sociological methods. Methodologically I study international organisations by means of biographical membership analysis; theoretically I argue that international organisations cannot be fully understood in separation from the situated political motives of their makers.

In the shifting context of global policy making, International Organisations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorise certain solutions as the only ‘viable’. This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNICEF acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of ‘hidden hunger’ as a ‘matter of fact’ – or as a medicalised and economised object of governance. It shows how this problematisation largely validated the prioritisation of short-term responses and easily measurable programmes such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ ‘ways of seeing’ are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

By focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, chief among them – in this chapter I explore the problem of the ‘global colour line’ in relation to international institutions. In particular, I trace the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the United Nations (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge a racialised and hierarchical global order. The result is neither a blind celebration of the United Nations’ anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage. Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other. For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the United Nations and its family of international organisations will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient.

This chapter begins from the premise that vocabularies matter in international law and organisation, as ideologies that can reify and make seem necessary and neutral contested and structurally biased means of governance, and in international relations, as disciplinary mechanisms of control. It advances a critical political economy approach to the language of resilience in global governance. By asking the critical political economy questions of ‘who gets what’ from resilience talk and just ‘whose resilience’ are we talking about, the chapter explores resilience as an ideology of new constitutionalism governance. Resilience talk is deconstructed as the language of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the individualisation of responsibility for crisis management. This language obscures the deep class, gender, racial, and intersectional implications of global governance initiatives. The chapter makes the case for destabilising and disrupting this discourse and practice as a necessary move in humanising important institutions of global governance.

This chapter proposes to study the making and stabilisation of expertise in global governance. While doing so, it questions mainstream approaches in international law and International Relations, which see international organisations’ reliance on expertise as a rationalisation of global politics. The approach taken here proposes, instead, to examine the political processes and decisions that participate in the production and assembling of ‘expertise’ in global governance. It proposes that the power–knowledge nexus in global fora can be explored by taking the following (complementary) entry points: focusing on sites and networks of knowledge production, studying infrastructures of knowledge production, or analysing relations between people and/or between people and the material.

The chapter underscores aspects of the study of international organisations (IOs) that are neglected by critical approaches to international law. It calls for an integrated approach that combines external and internal critiques of IOs with proposals for their reform. The chapter argues that the existing literature essentially advances an external critique of IOs with a focus on issues of biased design, the lack of adequate participation of weak states, and unjust distributional outcomes. This critique needs to be strengthened by factoring in the emergence of institutional complexes; by offering a detailed account of the participation of individual postcolonial nations in IOs; by advancing an appropriate theoretical framework that enables spatial, class, gender, race and intersectional critiques; and by suggesting ways to fill gaps in the prevailing accountability regime. The chapter goes on to contend that an external critique must be accompanied by an internal critique of IOs that appraises rules and practices related to membership, withdrawal, suspension, expulsion, voting, finance, and dispute settlement; the changing interpretations of mandates; over time and the role of leadership, staff recruitment policies, knowledge production, and organisational culture. Finally, the chapter calls for an active debate on the need for and ways of reforming IOs.

Like any other institutions, international courts are both constrained and free, structured and open-ended in their production of legal outcomes. Yet, after decades of investigation, the driving forces behind international adjudication remain somewhat elusive. If international norms are textually indeterminate, then what guides their interpretation and application to concrete cases? To what systemic pressures are courts subject? And what forms of discretion do they enjoy? This chapter begins to answer these questions by focusing on the micro-level practices, relationships, and struggles of the legal experts populating international judicial institutions. On the one hand, these socio-professional dynamics are constrained by existing social arrangements, including the institutional design of courts, the networked interactions among individual actors, and the competent performances that punctuate the adjudicative process. On the other hand, existing social arrangements are open to contestation, renegotiation, and contingency, thereby creating opportunities for unorthodox and creative lawyering. As such, the socio-professional dynamics that take place inside international courts are both the vehicle of reproduction of legal outcomes and the source from which legal change originates.

This chapter offers three historical accounts from the post-World War II flows of manufactured products and raw materials, but also the machinery of such flows, i.e., marine transport, focusing on the role that four international organisations played in these processes. The three histories are: liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The chapter argues that these three histories, but also the broader history of international organisations since the mid-nineteenth century, embeds impersonal struggles between two modes of organizing capitalist social relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. While the former is grounded in de-territorialised capitalist expansion, the latter is geared towards territorially confined regimes of accumulation – itself a reaction to the peripheralising effects of laissez-faire capitalism.