Date: 2019
Type: Article
International labor law and its others : governance by norm versus governance by knowledge
American journal of international law (AJIL) unbound, 2019, Vol. 113, pp. 402-406
MCHUGH-RUSSELL, Liam, International labor law and its others : governance by norm versus governance by knowledge, American journal of international law (AJIL) unbound, 2019, Vol. 113, pp. 402-406
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/65745
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
Domestic laws are shaped by myriad global governance projects, which may attract the support of different organizations, promote contrasting socioeconomic visions, and operate at diverse levels and scales.1 Beyond differences in their whos, whats, and wheres, governance projects are also differentiated by their hows: they may embody different ways of imagining relations between order, authority, and legitimacy;2 operate through different styles;3 or deploy different technologies.4 International legal regimes, which function through a logic of governance that applies norms sanctioned by the political consent of states, have long operated alongside “systems of management and control” drawing their legitimacy from claims of “objective, disinterested scientific knowledge.”5 This essay explores how such “governance by knowledge”6 interacts with international law’s “governance by norm,”7 through a case study of the World Bank’s Doing Business project and the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s responses to it. I contend that Doing Business ultimately rests on “bad science,”8 and thus offers a potent illustration of the power wielded by actors who claim “technical” knowledge. I argue that those who fail to engage with the technicalities of the knowledge claims that ground projects like Doing Business, and who instead meet such projects primarily through the idiom of (international) legal normativity, may have already lost the battle for influence.
Additional information:
Published online: 9 December 2019
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/65745
Full-text via DOI: 10.1017/aju.2019.73
ISSN: 0002-9300; 2161-7953
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
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