The World Bank's lawyers : an inquiry into the life of law as institutional practice

Abstract

In the landscape of global governance, international institutions have emerged as productive sites for the incubation, circulation and mediation of international law. Legal labor and imagination have often appeared as essential to the manner in which the powers of these potent actors are rationalized or legitimized and to the ways in which their (reformist, operational, political or epistemic) practices are conceptualized, enacted or – occasionally and increasingly – contested. International law, as both a domain of legal knowledge and a (variable) set of material practices, thereby produces artefacts and value objects that perform pivotal roles in international institutional life. Yet, the academic field of international institutional law – marked by a doctrinal and normative inclination – has traditionally underplayed (or ignored) the constitutive importance of legal practices and the performative effects these engender in concrete institutional spaces. The vector of intellectual engagement in this domain of scholarship, in other words, has traditionally pointed towards abstraction, comparison or aspiration. In contrast – drawing on a largely unexplored archive and a Latourian methodological apparatus – this dissertation provides an original empirical account of the evolution in legal thinking and practice inside one specific organization at the heart of global governance: the World Bank (the ‘Bank’). At the heart of this narrative are the Bank’s lawyers. It is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the postures they adopt, the influence they seek and the intellectual tools they employ – from the inner workings of their syllogisms down to the material manifestations of their institutional interventions. It is a story of the practices they cling to and the ways through which these practices gain meaning and traction in a potent international bureaucracy – or how they fail to do so. In a broader sense, it is thereby also a story on the phenomenological life of international law, as it is imagined, constructed and applied. It is a story of an office space inhabited by General Counsels who have intervened in the operational and political practice of the Bank in myriad different ways, wielding diverging degrees of bureaucratic power and employing varying legal vocabularies and techniques. It is a story of evershifting structures of discourse and authority that are assembled and mobilized through these institutional interventions of legal expertise. In narrating this story, the dissertation reveals a profound transformation in the conceptual repertoire, ideology and professional sensibility of legal practice in the Bank, where the (liberal) trusteeship ideal of international law(yering) gradually disintegrated in corporate, managerial modes of evaluation and decision-making. In this sense, the story unfolds as a rise-and-fall tragedy of public international law’s fate as a performative enterprise and authoritative discourse inside the Bank. Yet, the narrative is not aimed at nostalgia. Its aim, rather, is to disentangle the relational effects engendered by legal practices and performances in their continuously evolving manifestations. In that sense, this is a story of the ever-changing politics of legality in the Bank.