Critical International Law Speaker Series

Abstract:

Even before the US President Harry Truman famously urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance had already proven to be fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. In the collective imagination of both practitioners and scholars, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a structure with its own “architecture” that overlooks areas of governance sustained by normative pillars. And yet, international law’s castles were not built solely in the air. The metaphorical use of architectonical language in the existing literature only hides the discipline’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which international law is produced, contested, and disputed. Architects of the Better World is the first book-length analysis of the architecture of international cooperation as a central component of international legal history. It studies the intersections between the built-environment, democratic ideals, and the institutionalisation of international law in the twentieth century. During this period, multiple international institutions designed and sponsored the construction of a series of purpose-built edifices to give the international community a room of its own. I follow this process from the first Hague Peace Conference (1899), through the Versailles settlement (1919), all the way to the end of the Cold War (1998). I analyse these new edifices in relation to the promise of democratising interpolity relations throughout the century: from Geneva to New York City; from Bogotá to Addis Ababa; and from Vienna to Rome.