The contemporary values of operadiction regimes

Regimes of operadiction simultaneously produce both their own governance scripts and the ontology of their operation, the realities in which they apply. Regimes of operadiction and veridiction share aspects of open-ended and adaptive modes of governance. The veridiction regime operates as a sort of knowledge tool, to produce a governmental truth capable of affirming the powers appropriate to manage a population, to maximize the population's productivity under competitive conditions that constantly require more production. As a descriptor of the utility of data in neural network processes, value is a function of accuracy and signal strength. Critique of classical regimes has been organized around the representations made by or associated with international legal regimes and instruments, seeking out the space between the representation and reality, between the guiding norm and the concrete institutional effect, to demonstrate divergence there

The Critical Subject and the Subject of Critique in International Law and Technology

The making of legal subjects has long been a crucial terrain for critical theory, also in relation to international law, where both emancipatory promises and expressions of power or discipline are tied to how subjects are recognized and enacted. International law's modes of subject-making have therefore been an important site of aspiration, struggle, and critique. While some have celebrated the rise of the individual on the stage of international law, the liberal ideal of legal and political subjectivity lingering in these celebratory accounts has been confronted by different strands of feminist, post-colonial, and Marxist critique. With proliferating use of digital technologies in practices of (global) governance, the making of legal subjects has taken novel forms. Big data manufacture subjects in ways that spark new legal anxieties and destabilize or problematize established patterns of critical engagement. In data-driven practices that we will describe, subjects are no longer exclusively enacted as abstract autonomous entities or classified along stable criteria (of difference or enmity). Sustained by tools of pattern recognition and technologies for the “unsupervised uncovering of correlations,” nascent forms of global governance by data produce subjects as transient clusters of attributes and data points within transient clusters of attributes and data points—bundles of vectors within vectors, only tentatively and temporarily tied together. In this essay, we map out how this mode of subject-making has become prevalent in different domains of international legal practice. We trace these dynamics to changes in the exercise of state sovereignty and the technoscopic regimes—assemblages for information flow, processing, retention, and surveillance—that states rely on

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

Defence date: 27 September 2019Examining Board: Professor Nehal Bhuta, University of Edinburgh and European University Institute(Supervisor); Professor Claire Kilpatrick, European University Institute; Professor Benedict Kingsbury, New York University; Senior Lecturer Guy Sinclair, Victoria University WellingtonIn 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.Part of the PhD thesis draw on fragments of an earlier version published as an article 'Performing the rule of law in international organizations : Ibrahim Shihata and the World Bank’s turn to governance reform' (2019), in the journal 'Leiden journal of international law'Part of the PhD thesis draw on fragments of an earlier version published as an article 'Scholars in self-estrangement (again) : rethinking the law of international organisations' (2017), in the journal 'London review of international law'Part of the PhD thesis draw on fragments of an earlier version published as an article 'nternational organizations and the performativity of measuring states discipline through diagnosis' (2018), in the journal 'International organizations law review

The evolving mandate of the world bank : how constitutional hermeneutics shaped the concept and practice of rule of law reform

Published Online: 22 April 2017International organizations (IOs) today contribute to international and transnational law-making in ways that were not anticipated by their constituent charters. The paper analyses this phenomenon of competence creep with regards to the expansion of the World Bank's (the Bank) mandate to the field of Rule of Law (RoL) and governance reform. Two innovative and intertwined conclusions are formulated. First of all, on a general level, the paper argues that the constitutionalization of RoL reform in the Bank exemplifies the path-dependency generated by the constituent charter with regards to the substantive expansion of operational practices in IOs. The legal memorandum by which General Counsel (GC) Ibrahim Shihata introduced and legitimized the expansion of the Bank's mandate to the field of RoL reform, the paper shows, employs a specific constitutional hermeneutic, grounded in the balancing of institutional teleology with charter constraints. Secondly, and most importantly, the paper exposes how Shihata's reliance on the constituent charter shaped his RoL concept, thereby delineating the substantive expansion of the Bank's mandate and operational practice. In light of the inclusion of the RoL as a distinct Sustainable Development Goal, this substantive inquiry into the nature of the Bank's RoL concept is most needed. The paper develops the innovative argument that Shihata's constitutional hermeneutic resulted in a sui generis Bank-specific RoL concept, which cannot-despite persistent attempts in literature-be tied to any legal doctrinal position. The analysis highlights two important features of Shihata's RoL concept: (1) its substantive roots in statistical regression analysis and (2) its dual functionality across the public-private divide. Combined, the two conclusions ameliorate the understanding of constitutional change in IOs and the substantive orientation of RoL reform in the Bank

International organizations and the performativity of measuring states discipline through diagnosis

Published online: 01 May 2018This article explores how the World Bank's engagement with governance reform has sparked a practice of measuring, ranking and diagnosing countries based on an epistemically constructed ideal-type of the modern state. With Foucault, I define this praxis of normalisation as a 'transnational discipline of diagnosis'. The contribution of the article is both empirical and doctrinal. On an empirical level, it weaves together an innovative assemblage of three different technologies in the Bank's epistemic governance praxis: the axiomatic dimension (World Development Reports) the statistical dimension (Worldwide Governance Indicators) and the diagnostic dimension (Systematic Country Diagnostics). On a doctrinal level, drawing on critical sociology and performativity theory, the article categorises this epistemic praxis as a world-making socio-political enterprise. It thereby rejects both the categorisation of epistemic power as a mode of public authority (to be integrated in a public law framework), as well as the respresentationalist idioms that inform ideology critique

The World Bank's lawyers : the life of international law as institutional practice

The World Bank's Lawyers provides an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law. Informed by oral archives, months of participant observation, interviews, legal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, it tells a previously untold story of the World Bank's legal department between 1983 and 2016. This is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the influence they seek, and the tools they employ. It is an account of the practices they cling to and how these practices gain traction, or how they fail to do so, in an international bureaucracy. Inspired by actor-network theory, relational sociologies of association, and performativity theory, this ethnographic exploration multiplies the matters of concern in our study of international law (and lawyering): the human and non-human, material and semantic, visible and evasive actants that tie together the fragile fabric of legality. In tracing these threads, this book signals important changes in the conceptual repertoire and materiality of international legal practice, as liberal ideals were gradually displaced by managerial modes of evaluation. It reveals a world teeming with life—a space where professional postures and prototypes, aesthetic styles, and technical routines are woven together in law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as a contingent cultural technique enriches our understanding of the discipline's disenchantment and the displacement of its traditional tropes by unexpected and unruly actors. It thereby inspires new ways of critical thinking about international law's political pathways, promises, and pathologies, as its language is inscribed in ever-evolving rationalities of rule.1:Introduction: The Life of International Law - On People, Practices, and Performances Part I: Ibrahim Shihata - The Performative Power of Liberal Legalism 2:The 'Force of Law' Under Construction - Sensibility, Authority, Performativity 3:The 'Force of Law' Performed - The Institutional Politics of Legal Practice Part II: Roberto Dañino - Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of the 'How to' Lawyer 4:Law's Metamorphosis - Rupture, Reconstruction, and Recollection 5:'Of course we are bound by those' - Dañino's Human Rights Agenda Part III: Anne-Marie Leroy - The General Counsel as 'High-Level Administrator' 6:Law as Management - An Agenda of Cultural Change 7:'A new normative architecture' - Risk, Resilience and Deformalization 8:Conclusion: Assembling the Actants of International LawPublished version of EUI PhD thesis, 201