The topics discussed in the previous chapter have in common that they all relate to the relationship between the organization and its member states, and therefore come within the purview of functionalist theory. This makes eminent sense: the law of international organizations has always been conceived (if conceived in theoretical terms to begin with) as having something to do with the links between the organization and its member states: those members set up their organizations for certain purposes, and create the legal environment to help the organization realize its functions: they provide them with powers, grant privileges and immunities, and often pay a membership contribution.

Since functionalism has always revolved around the relationships between the international organization and its member states, not much attention has been given to the various types of relations taking place within international organizations. The previous chapter suggested that there is a considerable lack of clarity concerning relations between organs of international organizations – it is a rare organization where checks and balances have been put into place, and, where this has happened, it somehow seems to have occurred by accident rather than by design.

The introduction sets the scene for Articulating Security, providing a snapshot of post-Millennium global security under the aegis of the United Nations, and focusing on the organization’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. It explains that the principal intervention the book makes is to show that, even though this managerial security strategy has not been very effective in countering security threats, it is not without effect: specifically, it is affecting the ability of law to speak out against injustice. The Introduction sets out the three key interventions made in the book. First, it transplants Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power to a globalized and flexibilized twenty-first-century context. Second, it introduces the book’s key idea of infra-law, a concept that makes sense of the relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. Finally, it presents law with a stark choice between articulating security and articulating justice, arguing that law must relocate its force from authority to anger if it is to serve those rendered insecure by security measures.

Traditionally, public international law has long been thought of as largely a law of coexistence:1 rules of international law were created, either by custom or by bilateral treaty, for the purpose of delimiting spheres of influence between states, but not much else. For the most part, international law regulated the practical aspects of sovereign states living together on Planet Earth, dealing with such issues as the jurisdiction of states, access to each other’s courts, delimitation of maritime zones, and other similar issues.

International organizations are heavily involved in global governance, for better or for worse. The global health situation would be different (and most likely far worse) without the WHO, as Covid-19 has so vividly illustrated, and air traffic safety is due, at least in part, to the work of the ICAO. The IMF’s austerity policies have been linked to populist politics all over the world, and, while this may suggest that organizations can no longer be seen, in Singh’s glorious phrase, as contributing to the ‘salvation of mankind’,1 it nonetheless also suggests that organizations play an important role in the governance of the globe. It is, arguably, no coincidence that the two most pressing global crises concern issue areas which are not the subject of activities of any single organization: the financial crisis and global warming.

International organizations are generally counted among the subjects of international law, together with states, individuals, and perhaps some other entities as well.1 Thus, in accordance with the standard definition of ‘subject’, they are deemed capable of independently bearing rights and obligations under international law.2

One of the classic branches of international law is the law of immunity. States, their (political) leaders and their diplomatic representatives claim, and are usually granted, privileges and immunities in their mutual relations. Diplomats cannot, generally, be sued unless their immunity is waived, and diplomatic agents are exempt from certain forms of taxation and civil duties in the state where they are accredited. Moreover, diplomatic missions and belongings are generally inviolable. As far as the privileges and immunities of diplomatic agents go, these are usually explained with the help of the theory that, without immunities and privileges, diplomats cannot freely do their work. If a diplomat risks being arrested on frivolous charges at the whim of the host state, international relations can hardly be maintained.

Taking the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy as its focus, Chapter 3 discusses strategic planning, a managerial technology of composition and arrangement. It shows how the UN organizes and manages a swarm of counter-terrorism efforts by nation-states, UN specialized agencies, and other security actors. Strategic frameworks, the chapter explains, generate a shared aesthetic that lends integrity to a profuse swarm of ever-increasing ‘thematic’ aspects of terrorism (financing, radicalization, violent extremism, critical infrastructure, and so on) and cascades of fine-grained technical guidance about how best to ‘operationalize’ counter-terrorism. One way frameworks lend a sense of order to this swarm of initiatives is by organizing different themes into discrete, tessellating modular work-packages, and the chapter shows how these are related to ‘quasi-legislative’ Security Council resolutions. The chapter describes a second way that frameworks lend a sense of order to the cascades of technical guidance by using matrices of best practices. These open out UN resolutions into Mandelbrot-like sets of micro-prescriptions generated by specialized agencies like the International Civil Aviation Organization, whose work on biometric travel documents this chapter explores.