While international organizations are generally created for longer periods of time, indeed usually even without any definite time period in mind,1 not all of them manage to survive indefinitely. Some simply disappear without being succeeded to in any way; prime examples are the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, both of which were dismantled after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On 26 June 1991, a ministerial meeting of Comecon members decided to dissolve the organization; the Warsaw Pact was disbanded at a meeting of its Political Consultative Committee in Prague on 1 July 1991.2

The constituent documents of international organizations are strange creatures, often said to occupy a special place in international law. On the one hand, they are treaties,1 concluded between duly authorized representatives of states, and as such no different from other treaties.2 Thus, one would expect, they are simply subject to the general law of treaties.

This chapter uses Freud’s understanding of the uncanny to interrogate the ambivalent relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. It suggests that managerial infra-law can appear uncanny from an international legal perspective: it looks like law, it sounds like law, but its documents, statements, speeches, and dialogues are empty words and dead letters. Infra-law is uncanny because it is inarticulate. The chapter refrains from using this insight to nostalgically affirm juridico-political government. On the contrary, international lawyers’ attempts to abject management (in Julia Kristeva’s sense) are symptomatic of deeply rooted problems within juridico-political systems. The chapter argues that juridical authority stifles law’s responsiveness and ability to articulate grievances against the status quo. The chapter uses this insight to argue for a version of legal advocacy capable of articulating complaints against the injustices of security measures. The force of law, on this model, derives not from its own authority but from the anger generated by injustice. Law can shift its horizon of responsiveness, the discussion concludes, by learning to listen to those whose security is sacrificed to collective security, and to articulate their complaints.

The very idea of international organizations suggests that those entities are capable of performing acts; creating an entity with a separate identity only makes sense (instrumental sense, at any rate) if that entity can subsequently do certain things. In order to do those things, the organization must be able to adopt or create legal instruments.1

It is one of the more settled principles of international law, as authoritatively formulated by the Permanent Court of International Justice in the classic Chorzów Factory case,1 that a violation of international law entails responsibility and the obligation to make reparation in one form or another.2 When it concerns the activities of states, the basic rule is, all sorts of difficulties notwithstanding, relatively straightforward: states are responsible for internationally wrongful acts that can be attributed to them.3

The managerial technology of performance review is an indispensable tool in rendering decentralized managerial governance coordinated and coherent, and Chapter 4 discusses the effects of the UN’s system of results-based management on its counter-terrorism strategy. The chapter shows how performance review is driven by both carrot and stick. As to techniques of gratification, it looks at how the UN uses capacity-building programmes to address deficiencies in nation-states’ counter-terrorism practice on the basis of Counter-Terrorism Committee assessments. On the one hand, nation-states in receipt of such assistance are supposed to realize their sovereign status by exercising responsible leadership over their development; on the other hand, the UN agencies which run capacity-building programmes are gratified by the award of funds for demonstrating value for money. Performance review is only driven by the threat of punishment when gratification fails, and the chapter uses the Financial Action Task Force’s system of mutual evaluations to illustrate this. It shows how the practice of imposing counter-measures on recalcitrant nation-states serves to reiterate the importance of responsible leadership, rather than insist upon the implementation of a specific measure to counter-terrorist financing.

Chapter 6 explores the anti-law quality of the UN’s managerial governance of security threats. Foucault explained that disciplinary power is incompatible with juridico-political commitments to rights and equality. Such critiques are often made of global governance, especially when it takes security as its object, but they often assume that managerial technologies can be redeemed by making them more juridico-political. This chapter shows that they cannot be redeemed. It discusses the UN's redemption strategy of imbuing its counter-terrorism strategy with human rights. The second redemption strategy is the Global Administrative Law project which, taking managerial technologies of accountability and transparency as imperfect juridical forms, sees them as ripe for improvement along juridico-political lines. The third redemptions strategy discussed is the Global Experimental Governance project, which affirms constellations of governance that valorize participation, especially by civil society, as a step in a democratic direction. The chapter concludes that none of these redemption strategies can succeed because, as Foucault foresaw, articulating juridico-political forms into management’s mechanics of power supresses radical structural criticism. The best law can do is mitigate the harm caused by security management.

Usually, the constituent treaties of international organizations control who can join the organization, under what conditions, and following which procedure. This makes, in principle, perfect functionalist sense: this way, organizations and their member states may screen applicants in terms of whether or not they are able to contribute to the organization’s functions. In practice, needless to say, decisions on membership do not always follow a functionalist logic: as it turns out, such decisions are often influenced by, for example, human rights considerations, or considerations relating more generally to the politics of the state concerned.1

Whatever activity one wishes to engage in, be it the sending of a postcard to a friend abroad or the purchase of a television set produced in a foreign country, it is more than likely that the activity is in one way or another regulated by the activities of an international organization. Indeed, there are few, if any, activities these days which have an international element but which are not the subject of activities of at least one, and quite often more than one, international organization.1 International organizations have developed into a pervasive phenomenon, and, according to most calculations, they even outnumber states.2