The World Bank’s Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice

The World Bank’s Lawyers gives an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law from liberalism to managerialism. Informed by months of participant observation, dozens of interviews, oral archives, informal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests. It tells a previously untold story of the World Bank’s legal department. 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, the 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 into law’s shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as 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.