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Negar Mansouri and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín eds., "Ways of Seeing International Organisations: New Perspectives for International Institutional Law" (Cambridge UP, 2025
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- [00:03]
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to have both of the editors of a very interesting book for us to discuss titled Ways of Seeing International New Perspectives for International Institutional Law, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. That takes a sort of interesting combination of disciplines to illuminate an area that actually seems to be kind of neglected a little bit. So there's obviously loads of studies of international law, there's loads of investigations of international organizations, but international institutional law actually turns out there's not necessarily a lot going on, even though there's been all sorts of cool things happening in law and theory. We've got feminist theory, post colonial, political economy oriented things. We're familiar with that in so many other aspects of international relations or political science or legal theory, but not here. Well, until now. So we clearly have a lot of things to discuss in this book. We're going to try and do our best to give listeners a sense of the many contributions of the volume. And in order to do that I'm very pleased to have both of the editors with me today. So we have Dr. Negar Mansouri and Dr. Daniel Kuroga via Marine to tell us all about this project that they have spearheaded. Negar and Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the POD podcast.
- [03:03]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Great. Thanks for having us.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could we start off with each of you introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to take on the project and of course, do it together, maybe starting with Daniel, of course.
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
Miranda, thanks again for having us. So, just very briefly, I'm originally from Colombia, but I went onwards to do my master's and PhD in Geneva, Switzerland, where actually I had the great opportunity to meet Negar. We were both PhD students together, and I think that was a big part of the story behind this project. And now I'm a postdoctoral fellow at New York University. I think that this project came out of a joint frustration in a way. I remember meeting at one of the little cafeterias in the International Law department to discuss how we felt, and I'm sure Negar has much more to say about this, but how we felt that the people we were reading, the questions we were posing, the answers we were imagining in relation to international institutional law were quite limited. And we thought that as PhD students, we were in a good position to try to shake the field a little bit. And this is, I think, the outcome of that.
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Dr. Negar Mansouri
Great. Now maybe I can just introduce myself. Negar Mansouri, Iranian by origin. And I'm also, like Daniel, a postdoctoral researcher in historical sociology and law at Copenhagen Business School here in Denmark. And yeah, I think as Daniel described, it was special conjuncture, beginning of pandemic. Exciting projects were also happening in parallel with the European Journal of International Law, also picking up a special issue on untold stories of civil servants that work in this international organization. So we thought about organizing an international conference, and this book is the result of that very interesting conference that happened in 2021, actually.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always interesting to hear the backstory behind projects. Thank you both for those introductions. Thinking a little bit more about frustrations because often they are such generative places for us to be in as scholars. So there was a very striking phrase in the book that the law of international organizations is stuck in a rut. So what is the rut and why is that a problem?
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Dr. Negar Mansouri
Great. So I think at a broad level, asking questions and forming opinions about international organization and their work can be challenging considering really their complexity as social entities, especially when we compare them to more homogeneous organizations such as national bureaucracies or even multinational corporations. As you know, iOS are always composed of these plenary bodies with hundreds of member states and then secretariats, where hundreds of staff function detached from their national belonging, and all decisions are always made within rigid structures of global politics. And the moment you question the success of iOS in realizing their mandates, in a way you're ignoring those longest standing, long lasting mark they have had on on what democratic governance should look like since the post World War II era. For example, at this very moment one can say the Office of High Commissioner for Refugees has something around 40 million people under its protection mandate. And probably the same can be said about World Health Organization and so on. But when it comes to law for Yoza specifically being in Iraq, I think this has to do with the broader and persisting dominance of positivism and liberalism in social science and humanities, where in a way social progress is treated as detached from historically accumulated material structures, but also the internal politics of these knowledge categories, such as democratic government or competitive market, as crucial to the health of national economies. In a way, they depoliticize from the politics these knowledge categories where ISOs really base themselves on. And for decades, the scholarly focus of liberal international lawyers in a way has been how to improve norms and standards. Even now, at this very current conjecture of neoliberal crisis within most of the legal disciplines in academia, asking this more substantial question of why many things in a way have gotten worse despite an increase in norms and control mechanism, is very unlikely to come up outside the circle of a small number of elitist schools and what we call creeds or critical scholars in law and international law. Of course, there has been a rise of critique of work and ideology of both the general cooperation organizations such as the United Nation or Organization of American States, to these more technical international organizations, such as International Monetary Organization or technical International Organization. At the same time, we really think that both structuralists, meaning Marxist political economy scholars of international law, and post structuralist those who write from the perspective of Foucault Bourdieu, they remain very much focused on the critique of normative regimes and legal craft at the expense of more sociological approaches that the study of ielts would require. In other words, these dynamic debates you might see in critical international relations, where everything is studied in a more sociological way, is still missing in legal disciplines due to the separation of the juridical sphere from the more social sphere. In a way, that's why we think iOS law was structurally in a rot and there seems to be a syllosa structures in place. But we are hoping the book would open the discussion in a way that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is a very helpful introduction. Daniel, is there anything you'd like to add?
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
No, absolutely. Maybe I'll just talk a little bit later about the four areas of the book in response to that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, in fact, that's exactly where I'd like to go next. So what are the four areas, and how did you decide on this structure?
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
Yeah, basically what we wanted to do was to just think questions in a completely different way to how a traditional textbook on international institutions would usually post them. So Negar knows this much better than I do. But typically we would encounter a very fixed set of questions surrounding, I don't know, how to hold international institutions accountable, what is their mandate, and how it expands over time. And of course, we were interested in those sorts of questions, but we wanted to reach them from a slightly different angle. And what we did then is to group our chapters together around four kind of main themes, some of them more familiar to legal audiences and some of them a little bit less so. And that was quite deliberate. The first one has to do with matters of expertise, authority and knowledge production. And I think this is one of the areas that is most familiar to international lawyers. We were building on a traditional work and has tried to think about the role of expertise in international affairs. But we also wanted to engage with maybe scholars that were coming from outside the discipline, and in particular, science and technology studies were the forefront of this conversation. So what we did, and this is true for all the sections, is to group groups of non lawyers and lawyers together to see how they looked at a similar problem. For instance, in this section we have the work of Richard Clements, a colleague who teaches at Tilbrook University and comes very much from the critical international law milieu, as Negara described it. But we put him in conversation with people coming from international relations or science and technology studies, such as Annabelitos, Monet and Juanita. The next section deals with structures, spaces and jurisdictions. And again, here there's something familiar to international lawyers. We typically speak quite often of jurisdictional politics when we do our work, but here we wanted to take that in a slightly different direction. So we are understanding jurisdiction in a very kind of limited legal sense. What is the space of operation of, for instance, an international court to engage with a case that is jurisdiction? It's narrowest sense. But we also wanted to think about jurisdiction spatially, how the international organizations imagine the world and act upon it. And we also wanted to think about jurisdiction as something not only, I would say, abstractly constructed as a space, but something very concretely that is also constructed as a space, that is the spaces of these international organizations themselves. And we'll talk a little bit more about the study of architecture, materiality and what we think it brings to the picture. The next section deals with people, practices and performances. And there I think that the main protagonists in a way were perspectives that were coming from for instance, the anthropology of international institutions, the ethnography of international law. And what we wanted to foreground there is that international law and institutions are not only these abstract kind of entities, they are very concrete places in which people have to perform a certain sort of discipline orientation. And the chapters in that section trace historically, contemporarily, in different places, that process of performing, let's say, a professional role. And then finally, and the section that is maybe the least familiar to an international legal audience we wanted to foreground was questions of capitalism, class and political economy, broadly understood. And I'm very happy to say that I think this is something that is very innovative in our volume. While there's been a rise of a low on political economy kind of scholarship tradition, especially here in the US where I'm connecting right now, but more broadly in certain parts of Europe and Latin America, we felt that very few of that actually reached the world of international organizations. And that's why in that section, which both me and Negar have chapters, but also our colleague Claire Cutler really tried to kind of foreground what kind of critique of of the production and consumption of goods in a global economy be linked to the operation of these international organizations. And in particular in my own chapter, I want to talk a little bit about race and the role that race, or what other people have called racial capitalism might play in all of this. And we'll talk about that a little bit later as I understand. And finally, the book is closed by a conclusion by Guy Fitti Sinclair, a wonderful colleague who I am happy to say has been also at the fellow forefront of kind of thinking international organizations and more Broadway that tries to think or bring everything together and reflect what has this approach, where has this volume allowed us to see differently that a more mainstream, a more limited, a more as Negar well quoted positivist, or often as we call it in law, doctrinal or internal perspective cannot capture in the work of these institutions.
- [13:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that is a very helpful description of the many things in the book, the contributions there. Obviously we're not going to be able to talk about every chapter in detail, but I think that gives us a way in to talk about at least some of those ideas in a bit more depth. So I wonder if we can start perhaps again with this idea of seeing and kind of what's happening in international organisations that may not always be visible. So thinking particularly about ideas of expertise and the kind of black boxes of expertise often found in the more kind of technical or doctrinal ways of dealing with this sort of information, why might some ways forward be to open up those black boxes? And what are some of the ways through which this could be done?
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Dr. Negar Mansouri
Great, maybe I can take that one. So I think it's very important to problematize, really knowledge categories that appear as politically neutral and inherently conducive to social progress, but also actively undermining these functional divisions in liberal policymaking in favor of social totality. I think a great historical example in the work of international organization, the Post World War II era, is the move from, for example, the holistic notion of what was known in the UN system in the 1970s as limits to growth, which actually captured both industrial production and its ecological externalities to notion of sustainability, which separate them from the 1980s on in international organization. So on the surface, who would have problem with sustainability that international organization began to base themselves up? It sounded like a great idea until we hear about this other range of international treaties that were signed by something around 200 states at the time, and that was the World Trade Organization was established after adoption of the General Trade and Tariff Agreement, where countries in fact commit themselves to give market access to their natural resources and left themselves very limited leeway to restrict that market access in favor of environment. So in that sense you can really see the politics of moving from limits to growth to sustainability. And of course, the rise of knowledge categories in iOS are not the product of the neoliberal era. The Canadianism and welfare state are of the UN agencies also built around those certain notions of a state, market, citizen. What was a good society, always a society where there's a high division of labor and many aspects of life should be met in the market, what is good life, nuclear family, perfect market, and so on. So, even in 1950s and 60s, they would exercise an immense epistemological authority through their technical reports around developing countries and how their governance should look like. And in doing that, they would really isolate issues in a functionalist way, without attention to issues such as very unjust trade terms between developing countries and developed countries, which were developed countries at the time, were really experiencing unprecedented growth rate in the 1950s and through 1970s, which the rest of the world was not Experiencing exactly connected to the way iOS were isolating specific issue areas without attention to the broader context of global economic order at the time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can we talk a little bit more about the consequences of this sort of functionalist approach? Like what happens if we don't open up these black boxes or if we do just kind of go, oh, this person calls themselves a technical expert, we're not going to sort of question that, we're just going to kind of go with it. What happens if we keep those things unquestioned?
- [17:39]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Right. So I think two things really. At one point you might lose on the outright political interest. For example, post 911 counterterrorism, many UN agencies were put in charge of developing, developing certain policies which were essentially in US interest. The idea was to tame certain parts of the world. So that was really outright political interest wrapped in certain technical terms. But I think you would also might lose sight of the more ordinary but equally important liberal politics, which tends to prescribe social development detached from real neocolonial or capitalist structures in a way. And I think what Claire Cutler in the book describes as the neo resilience talk is quite telling. And by the way, she wrote that chapter in 2020 and now five years on, you see in academia a lot of new jobs are being open, a lot of journal articles being published on the concept of resilience, and the whole scholarly world in a way undergoing a total reform around geopolitics and resilience. But what is this politics of resilient stock? It's really a short termist politics at the core of the term that is the direct result of this stagnant economic growth and loss in legitimacy of liberal politics that really successfully contained antagonism for several decades after the Second World War. What does that mean specifically is that abandoning the liberal promises international organization, they have lost their raison d' etre in a way. They have become the tools of more ad hoc and short termist programs around the idea of resilience in short term. Geopolitics of trade, geopolitics of health, and so on. What does it mean? For example, you ask about certain areas that the book covers, food policy. Juanita Urubia, for example, explains how isolating nutritional deficiency in the developing world from the broader dominance of agro industrial models became so crucial to turning the very complex topic into a technical question. And fast forward to the present. The new unctad report explains how several major food trading companies obtain more than 75% of their income from financial operation rather than physical movement of goods. So you really see a continuity in these knowledge categories, which helps international organization govern by depoliticizing from the politics of each era.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful link between what might seem like only a theoretical concern to like really quite clearly practical ones there. So thank you for helping us understand those connections. I'd like to now move to another section of the book, one that maybe if I had to pick a favourite, I found this one really intriguing. When we're thinking about ways of seeing, of course there's questions around expertise and who gets to make those kinds of judgments. Negara you've just been telling us about, but I was really intrigued to see in this collection also considerations about the spaces in which those experts are operating in the. The literally like the boring spaces in many cases, right. The basements, the offices, where is the coffee, that kind of thing. All those sorts of mundane aspects often come up in my research. So I was wondering if the both of you could maybe tell us a bit about why examining these spaces in this context of how international organisations operate is also relevant to these questions that we've been discussing around knowledge and information and kind of critically examining these facets.
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
Absolutely. I mean, as PhD students that were really working very close to these institutions geographically, it was clear to us that the spaces, the way, the physical infrastructure, but more broadly, the way in which their technologies of knowledge, of representation played a very important role in their operations. And I think in a way, ironically, this became even clearer in the pandemic. I mean, as Negor mentioned. And in a way this is very much a pandemic, baby. And we both were in Geneva in a moment in which this kind of whole institutional setup that is constantly moving people from around the world into Geneva suddenly came to a standstill. And these meetings either had to occur online or had to occur in very limited sanitary conditions. So I think that was very illuminating in many ways about how well really to offer a global governance really requires you to go to spaces, meet with people, have coffee breaks, discuss, lobby, bring a report, shuffle around, et cetera. And I think the three chapters of that section of the section of Structure, Space and Jurisdiction really show that kind of importance of the spatial in very different ways. And especially we try to link it to the idea of jurisdiction. So for a non legal audience, jurisdiction is one of those kind of very weird legal terms that means a lot. I mean, I mean, taken literally, it's just the competency to say the law jurisdicticide in Latin. But in many ways it can mean a range of function or it can be used for a range of functions encompassing both. For instance, what is the competence of a court to engage with a case to, for instance, what are the substantive matters that are under the jurisdiction of an institution? But more broadly, it's also a way to think about territory. We also think about the state having jurisdiction over a certain territory. And do international organizations also exercise territorial jurisdiction, for instance? That's a question that one of our colleagues, Gay Liszio, has been thinking quite a lot about. So with that in mind, I think these three chapters really think of that relationship between jurisdiction and the space of decision making in very interesting ways. On the one hand, Tommaso Suare, who himself not only did his PhD in Geneva, but also worked work quite a bit in the world of international courts here in Geneva. It really tries to think this in a very personal, maybe even phenomenological way. What is the personal space that judges have to decide a case? How do they manage the pressures that in a way, come into their own space and jurisdiction and their competence then? Our colleague Kitty Santer from the University of Berne comes from the world of anthropology and not of international law. And she was really thinking about this very spatially. She wanted to see how do institutions think about the Mediterranean Sea as a jurisdictional space in which you have to draw borders between the open seas, the Libyan authorities, the Italian authorities, above all of them, the European Union, as a kind of supranational institution. So I think that was quite interesting. She's trying to think spatially about the production and contestation of jurisdiction. And then finally, in my own chapter, or my first chapter in the volume what, as you will mention, Miranda, I really tried to think about this in terms of the improvisational spaces of Internet organizations. I'm very interested in their very fancy buildings, and the ones that were very carefully designed were architectural competitions. But at the same time, international organizations rarely work in those very luxurious environments. You talk to anyone in Geneva, in Vienna, in Nairobi nowadays, and they'll tell you that the UN is always kind of bursting at its seams. It's growing, it's expanding. You have to accommodate people. Interns come and go. Some people have nicer offices with windows. Some people work in the basement. So in a way, that's the kind of questions I was trying to think, very tentatively, how does the kind of precariousness of the built environment tell us something about the work of international organizations? And I think, sadly, this is an issue that maybe echoing Negar's point, has only gotten more traction in the public debate. Think of US President Trump very recently at the atheist United Nations General assembly, complaining about the broken escalators and this kind of thing. So there's a real kind of politics to the precariousness of infrastructure. International organizations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's really interesting to think about. Kind of the bursting at the seams idea and the influxes of people as different topics become important as summer interns come in and out. Right. There's kind of a lot more chaos in those sorts of examinations of it than maybe we think if we just look at kind of the words of the laws themselves or the UN resolutions. But what about how these people are behaving right sort of standards of professional behavior in these sorts of spaces, both the really shiny ones and maybe the less shiny ones. Why is that also an aspect worth examining?
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Dr. Daniel Kuroga
So that is something we really wanted to foreground in the People, Practices and Performance section. And again, the three chapters there, one written by a historian, Jan Aykin, one written by an anthropologist, but who is very conversant with international law, Miya halmithomisadi. And finally one last chapter by a proper international lawyer, let's say, Dimitri van der Meersch, I think in different ways think about the performance of disciplinary or professional expertise in these institutions. So Jankin's chapter really trifling to kind of go back and tell us the story about how in the 19th century, international organizations surrounding telegraphic standards were created. And a big part of the chapter is really tracing how do experts kind of mobilize their authority in these spaces in a moment in which both the idea of what constitutes an expert who represents a government were still quite very much in the making. Mia Halme Tomisade's chapter in turn, I think, is one of the more methodological. And what she tries to do is to kind of provide those cues. In her view, as an anthropologist, and in particular as an anthropologist who's been working quite a long time around the Human Rights Council in Geneva, how can we study the way in which little kind of rituals are performance, what she calls standards, in a way are enacted and reenacted in these international institutions? And finally, Dimitri St in this section, and he has now since published his own monograph, which I think traces with more detail some of the things he was concerned in this initial chapter, where he tries to look at the way in which in the World bank group, similar professional practices are performed. And he tries to counterpose more legal professional practices to maybe more bureaucratic, managerial ones. And I think that resonates with some of the debates we've been having broadly in the discipline relation to how formalist is law. Should we adhere to what Marti Koskanemi has famously called a culture of formalism? More, how do we engage with less formalist traditions that are perhaps more bureaucratic and more problem based? And how do they open some of the assumptions of the discipline?
- [30:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I think this is a really interesting aspect of the book, right? Going back to the title, Ways of Seeing, this is obviously the section where the collection has expanded. Literally where we are looking and literally what we are looking at, right? Where people are working, how they're interacting with each other. There's of course, other ways of expanding our ways of seeing which the book grapples with too. So, for example, looking at using different methods to examine the field, there's examples in the book looking at the power of ethnography, of anthropology, of historicization, what opportunities might expanding our ways of seeing through those kinds of lenses.
- [31:20]
Dr. Daniel Kuroga
Yeah, this was a central kind of commitment at our volume, and you see it quite early in the first part, after our introduction, we have two chapters, one by B.S. chibney, a kind of luminary of what is typically called Third World Approaches to International Law, in dialogue with a chapter by Jan Clavers, perhaps himself one of the most important authors in the field of international organizations today, which precisely deals with these questions of an interdisciplinarity. So I think both me and Negar, especially in the International Law department at the Granite Institute in Geneva, were amongst the most kind of interested, engaging interdisciplinarily in our scholarly practice, in my case with history and perhaps to a lesser degree anthropology and ethnography, and Negar, certainly with international relations and especially the historical tradition within international relations. And I'm sure she'll have much more to say about this later. But at the same time we didn't want to just kind of promote the idea that what we needed was just to import kind of foreign methods, to use that metaphor, into international law. We really wanted to promote a kind of two way conversation in which also the anthropologists and the historians and international relations scholars can learn from such of debates that have been happening in relation to international law. And I think that Jens Claver's chapter is very good in that sense. I think he highlights some of the pitfalls of thinking that just adding a little bit of IR of international relations is going to make the scholarship per se better. And it's a concern I share. I see nowadays a lot of doctoral students that maybe because of this pressure to do interdisciplinary empirical work, have now kind of been in the bandwagon of doing interviews for their work. And I mean, I have nothing against that, but you know, you just cannot. It's not about just adding a little bit of a different method and calling it interdisciplinary. It requires a kind of engaged thinking about how do the two disciplines come into contact, what are their limitations, do they have mutually reinforcing biases? Those are the kind of questions that we want wanted to foregone in the podium. And that's why at the end of the day, I think we show that thinking interdisciplinarity is important and it offers opportunities. But at the same time, we didn't want to just propose that this is a silver bullet that is going to change the discipline, because we know that of course, each of the other disciplines also have their own disciplinary biases, blind spots, preferences, predilections. So that was the kind of concern we had that. But I don't know if, Negor, you would like to say more about international relations in this context, because I know you've been thinking quite a lot about it and about economic history more broadly.
- [34:05]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Yeah, I think despite that era of international law where there was a lot of discussion about international lawyers, cousin being international relations scholars, have come to an end. And if I want to really think about how much is happening in the relation between two disciplines, both of which tend to study the world order, I would say we haven't gone far in terms of engaging with them and how much they themselves engage with sociology and ethnography and so on.
- [34:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But yeah, that's definitely an interesting contribution of the book. So thank you both for speaking to that aspect of it. Of course, there's also engaging with other ideas, so the evil or evolutions of capitalism, neoliberalism as being ways of understanding developments in international organizations. Can we maybe talk about that aspect of the collection for a moment, please?
- [34:58]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Sure. I mean, of course the last chapter on capital and political economy, both my chapter and Claire Carter's chapter engage with these what we call as regimes of accumulation. But even Dimitri van Dimiesche in his chapter on how the culture, the legal culture of World bank changed in the 1980s, that also becomes relevant still this connecting the structural change in the world of international organization and changing regimes of accumulation. For example, the current state of affairs, there is still gap in that regard in international law, meaning that because of lack of dominance of historical sociological approach in the discipline, there is not much said about what is really at the core of crisis that happens with every regime of accumulation. What happened to Kenin, what are the internal contradictions of neoliberalism and so on. So to answer your question, in general, the emergence of iOS was closely connected to a state led capitalist industrialization in continental Europe. But as Craig Morphy explains in his highly still highly relevant book, International Organization and Industrial Change, the history of iOS should not be understood as the direct product of capitalism, meaning that they have always been relatively autonomous from the capital for the purpose of ensuring the long term interest of the capital. So as such, iOS should not be understood as just mirroring the interest of the capital. But of course, the early and late iOS they came into Being to enable integration of markets, but also enable life saving activities. As social live was being in a way influenced by changing modes of accumulation, they came into being to mitigate the life of masses in a way. And any structural change that follows in global capitalism there will be, for example, decolonization, there will be a change in the IO system. And how about the current conjuncture of no liberal crisis? I think since the 1970s we have been experiencing this long downturn of profitability rates, meaning that that sort of liberal politics that builds upon growth in the capitalist core. Now we are dealing with the global industrial overcapacity which has ended the previous politics or has delegitimize it. And again, what happens with iOS? They have to abandon this over encompassing vision of the world order that they gave their member states and the world population, and they have to become the tools of more fragmented plans. So that is how one can think of what is going to happen with ielts when the previous promises of liberalism is being challenged at the core of neoliberalism. In a way.
- [37:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, definitely. Lots to think about there. And of course, as you mentioned, these discussions are towards the end of the book. So following that lead, I'd love to ask about the very end of the book where the discussion turns to a stained glass triptych, which is quite an evocative image given that of course the title Ways of Seeing. We're talking about imagery throughout. But why end with that?
- [38:15]
Dr. Daniel Kuroga
Well, it's a great question, Miranda. And what I wanted to do in that specific chapter, and it has a complicated history, to be very honest. We and Agar struggled because at some point one of the altars that had had commissioned that we had asked to write this chapter for personal reasons, had to abandon the project and had to step in at the very last minute. But what I did is that I wanted to use that stained glass window which is called the Total Liberation of Africa, made in the context of the 1960s, to adorn Africa hall, the building that functions since as United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Abe Tofia, to try to think a little bit about the relationship not only between what Nick already mentioned of global capitalism, international organizations, but to also try to think that more specifically in terms of race. And of course there's good reasons to do so. There's been a wild kind of interest of literature, not only in international law, in relation to the way in which the distinction between civilized and uncivilized kind of has had a structural kind of functioning in the discipline, but more broadly it Resonates, I think, with conversations also happening in other disciplines surrounding or how do we think about the racial biases that international relations. How do we think of the implications of capitalism and slavery in a context like the American, for instance? And of course, this is just a kind of very introductory overview of that conversation. I mean, we could think more carefully about race. We could think much carefully about what Africa is. This kind of what African continent is this specific triptych representing. I mean, of course, what I try to really highlight it is it's telling an Ethiopian story. And that Ethiopian story might not be necessarily recognizable to Africans elsewhere. I mean, I know you do quite a lot of work on Angola, Mozambique. I'd be curious to know what you think about it. But what I've often talked about, talk about Ethiopia to colleagues from South Africa or Western Africa. It's not necessarily a history they see as their own. But for the purpose of this chapter, I wanted to see how did Ethiopia engage with international organizations and in particular, how did what Duboisi called the global color line became a problem or an opportunity for Ethiopia in those engagements? And I do so by putting the experience of Haile Selassie, the first emperor of Ethiopia, in relation to the League of Nations all the way to basically the end of his life, the coup d' etat that happened in 74, but right before a very important meeting he held in Addis Ababa of the United nations security council in 72. And as you all said, at the center of all of this is the triptych. And why I like the triptych is because it really portrays the liberation of Africa. Again, that's the title. At the forefront of the composition lies Ethiopia. You really see the kind of main character is wearing a typical Ethiopian dress. And by Ethiopian, I really mean the kind of, let's say, culture of the hegemonic, Amharic speaking, Christian peoples of the highlands. Of course, there are many Ethiopias in that sense. But what I find interesting is that towards the corner of the composition, you see a figure fully cladded in European clothes, and not only that European armor. He's like some sort of white armored knight, and he has at the center of his chest the shield of the United Nations. And I use that to try to think that that's how people in Ethiopia, and perhaps around the colonized world came to think about the UN as this kind of pesky European institution. But that nonetheless was, for very worse, an ally or at least a resource they could rely on in their struggles for decolonization. So that's a little bit what the work at that triptych is trying to do in the chapter.
- [42:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think a very interesting way to end our discussion about the book because it's kind of doing so many different things at once and offering ways forward, just like so many aspects of the collection are doing. So a good place to stop then leaving me with just the question of what you each might be working on now that the book is done. Anything currently on your desk desk, whether related or not, you'd each like to give us a sneak preview of.
- [42:28]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Sure. Maybe I can say something so really, since defending my PhD I have in a way taken a national turn to the study of international organization. So I have started writing about the journey of certain developments from national level into international organization. Tracing them, I've written about for example, the rise of competitive corporate capitalism in Japan and estate developmentalism in Malaysia, and how these two countries came to to shape the tropical timber trade regime at International Tropical Timber Organization, which is an organization based in Japan. I've also written about the move from imperial to global Britain and urban policy in London and also about the rise of US oil shipping and what that meant for the political economy of marine transport. International Maritime Organization I have also recently become interested in the functioning of these less known technical international organization which are created not by what we know as the capitalist core, but actually created by certain estates that wanted to not didn't want to integrate their markets in a way wanted to insulate their nationally organized economies from free competition. And I think BRICS is a good example. But of course there are these very small organization that in a non hegemonic were created by developers helping board in a way to set the standards that would insulate their national economy from market competition in a retreat from the no liberal logic in a way.
- [43:56]
Dr. Daniel Kuroga
And on my end I have to say that after the Ph.D. the lion's share of my time has been devoted to the publication of the book. Things are moving well, slowly but well in that direction. And just to say two words about it, I wrote my PhD not about the improvised spaces that I mentioned mentioned in the first chapter of this volume, but rather the very carefully planned spaces. So spaces like the United nations headquarters here in New York City, the Valle de Nation in Geneva, United nations office in Vienna, Africa hall, which I already mentioned, these very carefully designed spaces that want to work as parliament of nations. And well, I'm still in negotiations with a leading university press, but I am optimistic, optimistic that perhaps the book will come out this decade. All of you know how long these processes take. And other than that, I think that moving forward I want to kind of change direction also in a little bit of a way that has a very institutional kind of reason. I am pursuing what in the German speaking world is called an ablitation thesis, some sort of second thesis you do after your doctorate. And it's very complicated and the details don't matter. But. But I'll say that actually the substance of it is related to alliances and it's related to the work we did with Negar and that I did in my PhD. I mean something I kind of noted quite a lot when I was working on international organizations on the League of Nations, on the UN is that there's this kind of strange kind of split personality of these institutions. On the one hand they are the peace loving, universal international organizations that, that all of us want to work in and people do internships in Geneva, New York, et cetera. That's like the happy face of the internationalizations. But it also became quite clear to me while I was doing work, archival work in Ethiopia and in Austria, that we often forget that these were also military alliances, especially the United nations, but to a lesser degree the League. They really were concerts of powers operating jointly, sometimes occupying jointly or occupying, let's say, on behalf of a nebulous, some sort of alliance. And that's something I want to work more on. How do we understand these institutions of alliances as alliances, but more broadly, what does the history and the theory of alliances, especially treaty based alliances, the most famous of them of course being the NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. How can looking at that also tell us something different about international order? That's a little bit of where I like to go, at least for the purpose of my next book and my Abelife. That's your thesis.
- [46:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, you sounds like you're both going to be pretty busy going forward with lots of interesting projects. So while you are off pursuing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Ways of Seeing International New Perspectives for International Institutional Law, published by Cambridge University Press Press in 2025. Negor and Daniel, thank you so much for you both being here to join me on the podcast.
- [46:57]
Dr. Negar Mansouri
Thank you Miranda for having us. Excellent. Thank you.
- [47:00]
Dr. Daniel Kuroga
It's been a pleasure. And I also wanted to conclude by thanking of course the Swiss National Science foundation that as Negor mentioned, not only generously funded the original conference in October 2021, but also funded the publication of the book in an open access format, which means the that any listener can just go now and download any chapter, regardless of institutional affiliation, regardless of where they're based, in the global north to the global South. So we're very, very grateful for that. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [48:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.