LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Staging international law: order and disorder in an inter-agency meeting' - Prof Guy Fiti Sinclair, Auckland Law School

Lecture summary: A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship explores overlaps and interactions among different normative and institutional branches of international law. This lecture contributes to this scholarship through a case study of relations among international organizations in the mid-1960s, when several emerging political fault lines – between East and West, between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, and between the established specialized agencies and newer institutions – brought the coherence of the international legal order into doubt. Drawing on original archival research, the lecture focusses on a single inter-agency meeting, held in Geneva in early July 1966, where these fault lines were exposed and debated at length.

Through this case study, the lecture aims to expand our understanding of the impact of international organizations championed by actors in the Global South in this period, the reactions they provoked from others, and the potential and limits of international legal reform through such institutional means. As a technology for representing, knowing, and managing inter-organizational relations, the study of inter-agency meetings offers insights into both micro- and macro-level processes in international law, and the links between them. To this end, the lecture develops a concept of ‘staging’ to analyze the work of assembling and choreographing heterogeneous elements with the aim of producing a particular performance of international legal ordering. As a multilayered concept, ‘staging’ invokes and enables the study of international law’s material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. The lecture shows that, as much as staging international law implies scripting, direction, and rehearsal, it also inevitably entails improvisation, accident, and error.

Guy Fiti Sinclair is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean (Pacific) at Auckland Law School, The University of Auckland. He holds first degrees in law and history, and a Doctor of Juridical Science (JSD) from New York University School of Law. His research and teaching focusses on the doctrine, theory, and practice of international law, often in historical perspective and with particular focuses on international organisations law, international economic law, and law and global governance. His first book, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), was awarded the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2018. Guy’s current research includes a project on institutional interactions in the construction and contestation of international economic law, funded by a Marsden Fast Start Grant from Te Apārangi | Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2023, he began work on a major research project on international legal ordering in Oceania/the Pacific, supported by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand.