Ways of Seeing International Organisations

For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations – also known as international institutional law – has been marked by an intellectual quietism. Most of the scholarship tends to focus narrowly on providing ‘legal’ answers to ‘legal’ questions. For that reason, perspectives rarely engage with the insights of critical traditions of legal thought (for instance, feminist, postcolonial, or political economy-oriented perspectives) or with interdisciplinary contributions produced outside the field. Ways of Seeing International Organisations challenges the narrow gaze of the field by bringing together authors across multiple disciplines to reflect on the need for ‘new’ perspectives in international institutional law. Highlighting the limits of mainstream approaches, the authors instead interrogate international organisations as pivots in processes of world-making. To achieve this, the volume is organised around four fundamental themes: expertise; structure; performance; and capital. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Negar Mansouri is a postdoctoral researcher at Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD (with the highest distinction) and an MA in international law from the Geneva Graduate Institute, an MA in public international law from Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran, Iran), and an LLB from Imam Khomeini International University (Qazvin, Iran).

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín is currently an Ernst Mach Fellow at the University of Vienna (Austria). He holds a PhD in international law with a minor in international history and politics with the highest distinction from the Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland). He also holds a MA from the same institution and a BA in law from the University of the Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).