When Roberto Dañino, former World Bank General Counsel, arrived in the institution, he found a department perceived to be at the verge of ‘marginalization’ – a dire state he diagnosed and soon attributed to the rigid ‘culture’ of legal practice. In tracing Dañino’s efforts to ‘make the department relevant again’, we get a glimpse of the situated, material, embodied institutional life of international law: the changes Dañino instilled were not manifested in formal legal sources but in the introduction of new cultural codes, professional prototypes (the ‘how to’ lawyer) and technical routines of risk management. In the domain of international institutional law – often oriented towards abstraction, comparison, or aspiration – such prosaic legal practices tend to be underplayed. This chapter signals two productive entry points for a turn to practice: (i) a focus on the shared and contingent criteria of competence – the ‘social grammar’ – that mark professional postures and performances, and (ii) a heightened attention for the practices of relationality, translation, and materiality through which law is composed – the string of ‘people and things’ that it assembles. This methodological orientation to professional scripts and material routines also offers a perspective on ‘critique’ that differs from familiar structuralist modes of analysis and intervention.

In the post-World War II era, international lawyers have occupied the front seat in the study of international organisations (IOs). During the past decade, this disciplinary hierarchy has grown to feel increasingly unsatisfying. This chapter offers an anthropological take on the study of IOs building both on the past decade of anthropological work and my ethnography at the UN Human Rights Committee. IOs are frequently accused of ineffectiveness embedded in endless paper-pushing techniques. In this chapter, I engage with these criticisms and ask: can we find another perspective from which to assess effectiveness? What happens if we stop investing our analytical attention in what we think IO operations and their desired ‘impacts’ should be and instead engage in non-normative inquiries into what IOs actually do? I explore what can we learn about IOs’ visions for world improvement by focusing on the legal technicalities and material forms that define their operations. I propose that, instead of a hindrance or distraction, these forms embody ‘standards for a better world’ that are an essential component of IOs’ civilising mission.

This chapter addresses the role of, and prospects for, interdisciplinary scholarship in the law of international organisations. It argues that collaboration between scholars only works when those scholars share similar intuitions and sensibilities, and more generally adopts a broad approach: scholarship in the law of international organisations is at its best when informed by insights from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Yet (and this is often a problem) it should remain recognisably legal scholarship, if only because political and economic developments inevitably are channelled through law and legal procedure. Inter-disciplinarity means more than bowing to insights from International Relations scholarship, and should be driven by curiosity rather than theory or method.

Ethnographic approaches to transnational legal conflicts (TLCs) can provide key insights into the material and symbolic manifestation of the authority of international organisations (IOs) within global governance. TLCs emerge due to the differing pursuits and ambitions of actors in a pluralistic global society. In global governance, the multiplication of international institutions and the fragmented legal frameworks to which they refer raise questions as to the legitimation of IOs’ authority. This contribution builds on ethnographic observations of the TLCs around migrant rescues at the external maritime border of the EU in the Central Mediterranean. The emergence of the Libyan Search and Rescue Region (SRR) in the International Maritime Organization’s Global Search and Rescue Plan in June 2018 legitimised European authorities’ handing over of responsibility to Libyan authorities to coordinate the rescue of migrants and to thus disembark survivors in Libya. This, in turn, clashed with the international principle of non-refoulement and the duty to disembark rescued people in a place of safety according to the 1979 Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue. By describing the dilemmas posed to NGOs involved in rescues of migrants in the Libyan SRR, this contribution shows how IOs’ transnational authority materialises in the on-site hierarchisation of legal provisions within TLCs.

What does it take for international institutional law to break away from its problem-solving tendencies and fixed list of subjects and methods, and explore international organisations as sites of socio-political struggles over the shape of local and global life? This editorial introduction discusses ethos and epistemological boundaries of the mainstream international law scholarship, and the prospects of critical and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of international organisations in international law. It offers an overview of the objectives of the volume and its five sections, and argues that combining macro and micro critique, as reflected in the volume chapters, offers a promising pathway for mapping power, stability, and change in the world order.

This chapter takes the example of the International Criminal Court’s ‘Independent Expert Review’ (IER) of 2020 to reflect on the theory and practice of expert reform work. Taking actor-network theory’s prompt that systems – like international organisations – are neither static nor fixed, but ‘in a perpetual state of forming and reforming’, I read reform neither as rational science nor as a mere reproduction of hegemony, but as the expert reassembly of the ICC’s context, problems, resources, and priorities. In the IER example, the expert work of reform and reassembly effected nothing less than the recalibration of the relationship between the Court and its states parties. Through their work, experts knit together ideas of autonomy and accountability, their training, investigatory processes, documents, and resource and time constraints to centre the efficiency concerns of wealthy states parties in the judicial and prosecutorial function. In this way, expert reform work illustrates the power of expert articulation by putting abstract expectations, ideas, ‘realities’, constraints, and materials into organisational action in deeply distributive ways.

In this chapter, we review the physical processes that affect the elevation of coastal settlements relative to the sea, and identify current and projected rates of change, describe the impacts of MSLR on coastal settlements and on small island states, provide rough estimates of the number of people exposed, identify options for in situ adaptation, describe common challenges in implementing planned relocations of communities at risk, with case studies from the Carteret Islands and Fiji, and conclude by reviewing the cascading risks faced in Bangladesh.

This chapter provides an introduction to climate-related migration and displacement in the distant and more recent past, an overview of the basic natural science processes behind anthropogenic climate change for readers that require one, a review of how the impacts of climate change in a general sense present risks to individuals, households and communities, and how vulnerability and adaptation shape these risks, a summary of the social science on how migration decisions are made and the general types of patterns and outcomes that emerge, and a consolidated picture of how climate hazards interact with non-climatic processes to shape migration and displacement.

The present chapter focuses on migration and displacement associated with events that are directly linked to hotter air temperatures and/or an associated lack of moisture experienced at local and regional scales: droughts, increased aridity, desertification, heat, and wildfires. With the exception of wildfires – which share many characteristics comparable to rapid-onset extreme weather events – the hazards assessed in the present chapter are gradual in their onset and impacts. Their impacts accumulate with each passing week, month, and/or year, steadily eroding the water, food and/or livelihood security of households and communities. The slow rate of onset allows exposed populations an opportunity to adjust and adapt through means that do not require changes to existing mobility practices and patterns, sometimes referred to as in situ adaptation responses. It is only after hot and/or dry conditions persist beyond a particular threshold of duration and/or severity that in situ adaptations no longer prove to be sufficient and changes in migration decision-making and outcomes emerge.