1 ‘The law is not born of nature . . . the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day.’: Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, New York 2003 [1997], p. 50.
2 Perry Anderson, ‘The Standard of Civilization’, nlr 143, Sept–Oct 2023.
3 From a plethora of works, some of them now classics, see Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge 2005; B. S. Chimni, International Law and World Order, 2nd ed., Cambridge 2017; Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis, Manchester 2000; Rose Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance, Cambridge 2019; China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, Leiden 2005; Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilization: A History of International Law, Cambridge 2020; as well as the collections Susan Marks, ed., International Law on the Left: Re-Examining Marxist Legacies, Cambridge 2008; and Prabhakar Singh and Benoît Mayer, eds, Critical International Law: Postrealism, Postcolonialism and Transnationalism, Oxford 2014.
4 The terms come from Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’, The Yale Law Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, November 1913.
5 David Kennedy, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy, Princeton 2016, p. 11.
6 Studies of the institutional role of lawyers include Mikael Rask Madsen, La genèse de l’Europe des droits de l’Homme: Enjeux juridiques et stratégies d’État (France, Grand-Bretagne et pays scandinaves, 1945–1970), Strasbourg 2010; Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, The World Bank’s Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice, Oxford 2022; Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order, Chicago 1996, and The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, Chicago 2002; Antoine Vauchez, Brokering Europe, Euro-Layers and the Making of a Transnational Policy, Cambridge 2015; Päivi Leino-Sandberg, The Politics of Legal Expertise in eu Policy-Making, Cambridge 2021; Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Princeton 2019.
7 Hence why, Anderson notes, the idea that international law might be ‘no more than opinion’ is ‘deeply shocking to the liberal outlook of the overwhelming majority of today’s international jurists and lawyers’: ‘Standard of Civilization’, p. 17.
8 David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi, Of Law and the World: Critical Conversations on Power, History and Political Economy, Cambridge ma 2023.
9 See Anne Orford, ‘Locating the International: Military and Monetary Interventions after the Cold War’, Harvard Journal of International Law, vol. 38, no. 2, 1997, and ‘Food Security, Free Trade and the Battle for the State’, Journal of International Law and International Relations, vol. 11, no. 2, 2015.
10 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Hegemonic Regimes’, in Margaret Young, ed., Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation, Cambridge 2011.
11 Henri de Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, Paris 1640 [1638].
12 This is a key point in Marcel Gauchet, La nœud démocratique: Aux origines de la crise néolibérale, Paris 2024.
13 I defend this thesis in To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870, Cambridge 2021. On the ‘company-state’, see Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of British Rule in India, Oxford 2011.
14 Georg Friedrich von Martens, Précis du droit des gens moderne de l’Europe fondé sur les traités et l’usage, 3rd edn, Paris 1864 [1789].
15 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960, Cambridge 2002.
16 See especially E. H. Carr, The Twenty-Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edn, London 1946 [1939].
17 On the us turn to imposing arbitration on Latin American states as the preferred strategy of property protection, see Alan Tzvika Nissel, Merchants of Legalism: A History of State Responsibility 1870–1960, Cambridge 2024.
18 Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States and the World, 4th edn, Oxford 2013 [1997], pp. 51–6.
19 See Kathryn Greenman, State Responsibility and Rebels: The History and Legacy of Protecting Investment Against Revolution, Cambridge 2022; and Andrea Leiter, Making the World Safe for Investment: The Protection of Foreign Property 1922–1959, Cambridge 2023.
20 Statistics from ‘Investment Dispute Settlement Navigator’, unctad Investment Policy Hub; available online.
21 ‘Compensation and Damages in Investor-State Dispute Settlement Proceedings’, unctad iia Issues Note, no. 1, September 2024.
22 ‘Compensation and Damages’, p. 3.
23 Jeffrey Sachs, ‘How World Bank Arbitrators Mugged Pakistan’, Project Syndicate, 26 November 2019. The case was settled after partial payment and reorganization of the project.
24 Próspera and others v. Republic of Honduras, icsid Case No. arb/23/2. For commentary see Guillaume Long and Alexander Main, ‘How a Start-Up Utopia Became a Nightmare for Honduras’, Foreign Policy, 24 January 2024; and Ladan Mehranvar, ‘Sidelining the Lived Realities of Those Most Affected by Investment Projects and Disputes’, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Blog, 3 February 2025.
25 Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield, ‘Revealed: How Wall Street Is Making Millions Betting Against Green Laws’, Guardian, 5 March 2025.
26 un Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change, un Doc A/77/226, 26 July 2022, para 15. The Energy Charter Treaty was a 1991 instrument to boost cooperation between the West and transitional economies. Although the Treaty Secretariat made efforts to universalize the treaty, many countries have been critical of it and in 2024 the eu declared that it would withdraw from it.
27 See Brook Guven and Lise Johnson, ‘The Policy Implications of Third-Party Funding in Investor-State Dispute Settlement’, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Working Paper, May 2019.
28 The costs of participating in an arbitration are on average $8 million, sometimes much higher. See Kyla Tienhaara, ‘Regulatory Chill and the Threat of Arbitration: A View from Political Science’, in Chester Brown and Kate Miles, eds, Evolution in Investment Treaty Law and Arbitration, Cambridge 2011.
29 See, for example, Julian Arato, ‘Corporations as Lawmakers’, Harvard Journal of International Law, vol. 56, no. 2, 2015.
30 Gus Van Harten, Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints: Judicial Restraint in Environmental Treaty Arbitration, Oxford 2013, p. 10.
31 Tsilly Dagan, International Tax Policy: Between Competition and Cooperation, Cambridge 2017; Sol Picciotto, ‘Technocracy in the Era of Twitter: Between Intergovernmentalism and Supranational Technocratic Politics in Global Tax Governance’, Regulation and Governance, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2022. A ‘Global Tax Deal’ of a minimum 15 per cent tax on companies had been proceeding under the auspices of the oecd. The process is now frozen as President Trump has promised to retaliate against countries applying it to us firms: Daniel Bunn and Sean Bray, ‘The Latest on the Global Tax Agreement’, Tax Foundation Blog, 27 February 2025.
32 World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, Oxford 1997, p. 1.
33 Christopher Casey, Nationals Abroad: Globalization, Individual Rights and the Making of Modern International Law, Cambridge 2020, p. 186. Casey continues: ‘By the 1970s, the end of Bretton Woods, the ratification of the New York and Washington Conventions, and the spread of bilateral investment treaties had liberated international commerce from the state while simultaneously putting the executive organs of the state at the command of the private commercial courts of the world’, p. 188.
34 The 1958 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (‘The New York Convention’) today has 172 state parties.
35 For one recent report, see unctad, Attracting Pharmaceutical Manufacturing to Africa’s Special Economic Zones, Geneva 2025; for analysis, see Patrick Neveling, ‘Special Economic Zones: The Global Frontlines of Neoliberalism’s Value Regime’, in Don Kalb, ed., Insidious Capital: Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle, New York 2024.
36 difc Statistics 2024. See further, Atossa Abrahamian, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, New York 2024, pp. 81–111 and 133–57.
37 See generally, Kevin Sobel-Read, ‘Global Value Chains: A Framework for Analysis’, Transnational Legal Theory, vol. 5, no. 3, 2014. On the ‘regulatory arbitrage’ practised by large firms such as Apple or Starbucks to secure the most beneficial protection of their intellectual property laws, see Darren Rosenblum, ‘How Firms and Nations Compete through Intellectual Property Laws’, in Horatia Muir Watt et al., eds, Global Private International Law, Cheltenham 2019. As Anna Beckers points out, the regulation of value chains is conceived differently depending on whether it is viewed from the perspective of company, consumer or trade law: Anna Beckers, ‘Global Value Chains in eu Law’, Yearbook of European Law, vol. 42, 2023.
38 See, for example, Lise Smit et al., ‘Human Rights Due Diligence in Global Supply Chains: Evidence of Corporate Practices to Inform a Legal Standard’, International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 25, no. 6, 2021.
39 Benoît Frydman, Petit manuel pratique de droit global, Brussels, 2014, pp. 43–4.
40 See Dan Danielsen, ‘Local Rules and a Global Economy: An Economic Policy Perspective’, Transnational Legal Theory, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010.
41 Layna Mosley and Peter Rosendorff, ‘The Unfolding Sovereign Debt Crisis’, Current History, vol. 122, no. 840, January 2023, p. 11.
42 For nml versus the Republic of Argentina in the context of private debt contracting, see Giselle Datz, ‘Ties that Bind and Blur: Financialization and the Evolution of Sovereign Debt as Private Contract’, Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, vol. 2, no. 3, December 2021, p. 578.
43 London Court of International Arbitration, ‘Annual Casework Report 2023’.
44 Duncan Kennedy, ‘Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–2000’, in David Trubek and Alvaro Santos, eds, The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal, Cambridge 2006. Kennedy’s influential argument is discussed from a wide variety of angles in Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins, eds, Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought, Cambridge 2017.
45 For a recent discussion, see Tamar Herzog, A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia, Cambridge ma 2018.
46 See the essays by Hitoshi Aoki and Amr Shalakany in Annalise Riles, ed., Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law, London 2001.
47 For Britain, see Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire’s Courts, Oxford 2013.
48 Sara Dezalay, Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy, Cambridge 2023, p. 26.
49 Kennedy, ‘Three Globalizations’.
50 As Kennedy writes, each mode of thought provided ‘a conceptual vocabulary, organizational schemes, modes of reasoning and characteristic arguments’: Kennedy, ‘Three Globalizations’, p. 22. I used the notion of ‘sensibility’ to address the larger set of assumptions about the political and legal world that was shared by the men involved in the professionalization of international law from the late 19th century onwards: Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations.
51 For a good description of the legal theories and preferred types of rule during the ‘Washington Consensus’ and its modified aftermath, see Kennedy, ‘The “Rule of Law”: Political Choices and Development Common Sense’, in Trubek and Santos, The New Law and Economic Development.
52 See the editors’ opening essay in Bryant Garth and Gregory Shaffer, eds, The Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective, Oxford 2022, p. 14.
53 See Dezalay and Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars, pp. 47–58, 163–171. The authors trace the ascent of business lawyers working for corporate law firms in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America in the late 1980s as foreign investors needed experts with an international education and competence to deal with issues of debt, privatization, nafta negotiations, election reform and corruption: pp. 198–219.
54 For details, see ‘rule of law’ entries on the European Commission and un websites.
55 For a review, see Trubek and Santos, The New Law and Development. On the creation of the ‘developmental state’ by law, see also Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonization and International Law, Cambridge 2011, pp. 195–213.
56 Ralf Michaels, ‘“One Size Can Fit All”: Some Heretical Thoughts on the Mass Production of Legal Transplants’, in Günter Frankenberg, ed., Order from Transfer: Comparative Constitutional Design and Legal Culture, Cheltenham 2013.
57 See Peer Zumbansen, ‘Transnational Legal Pluralism’, Transnational Legal Theory, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 141, 152.
58 Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World, Oxford 2020. On the value chain: Jaakko Salminen, Mikko Rajavuori and Klaas Eller, ‘Global Value Chains as Regulatory Proxy: Transnationalizing the Internal Market though eu Law’, in Anna Beckers et al., eds, The Foundations of European Transnational Private Law, Oxford 2024.
59 Errol Meidinger, ‘Beyond Westphalia: Competitive Legalization in Emerging Transnational Regulatory Systems’, in Christian Brütsch and Dirk Lehmkuhl, eds, Law and Legalization in Transnational Relations, London 2007, p. 121.
60 Ana Ruiz Rivadeneira, Tenzin Dekyi and Lorena Cruz, ‘oecd Infrastructure Governance Indicators’, oecd Working Papers on Public Governance, no. 59, June 2023.
61 oecd, The Governance of Regulators, Paris 2014.
62 Frankenberg, Order from Transfer, p. 3.
63 As argued in Gauchet, Le noeud démocratique.
64 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge ma 1977.
65 See further Frédéric Mégret, ‘Human Rights Populism’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development, vol. 13, no. 2, 2022.
66 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Rights and the Bourgeois Revolution: The Rise of Political Economy’, in Dan Edelstein and Jennifer Pitts, eds, The Cambridge History of Rights, Volume IV: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge 2024.
67 Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, London and New York 2019.
68 See David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism, Princeton 2004.
69 Zumbansen, ‘Transnational Legal Pluralism’, p. 155.
70 One critique came from French doctrines wedded to the liberal ideology of ‘social solidarity’ for which individuals, not states, were the ultimate subjects of international law. As the Paris Professor Georges Scelle argued, states were simply the administrative organs of an international society of which every individual was a member. See further, Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 327–42.
71 Wolfgang Friedmann, The Changing Structure of International Law, New York 1964, pp. 19, 376.
72 For a thorough analysis, see Umut Özsu, Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization 1960–1982, Cambridge 2024.
73 For a good summary, see J. A. Lindgren Alves, ‘The un Social Agenda against “Postmodern” Unreason’, in Kalliopi Koufa, ed., Might and Right in International Relations, Athens 1999.
74 World Development Report 1997, pp. 1–2, 6, 62.
75 Andrew Lang, World Trade Law after Neoliberalism: Reimagining the Global Economic Order, Oxford 2011; Anne Orford, ‘Theorizing Free Trade’, in Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann, eds, Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, Oxford 2016.
76 For the burgeoning literature, see Judith Goldstein et al., eds, Legalization in World Politics, Cambridge ma 2000; and Nikolas Rajkovic, Tanja Aalberts and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, eds, The Powers of Legality: Practices of International Law and Their Politics, Cambridge 2016.
77 The un took note of this. See ‘Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law: Report of the Study Group of the International Law Commission’, finalized by Martti Koskenniemi, un Doc. A/ cn .4/L.682, 13 April 2006.
78 See, for example, Margaret Young, ed., Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation, Cambridge 2012.
79 As extensively analysed in Kennedy, A World of Struggle.
80 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge ma 2000.
81 See Helena Alviar Garcia and Günter Frankenberg, eds, Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Comparative Analysis and Critique, Cheltenham 2019; and Frankenberg, Authoritarianism: Constitutional Perspectives, Cheltenham 2020.