Sinclair: State Formation, Liberal Reform, and the Growth of International Organizations

Guy Fiti Sinclair (Victoria Univ. of Wellington - Law) has posted State Formation, Liberal Reform, and the Growth of International Organizations. Here's the abstract:

This article argues that the growth of international organizations (IOs) over the past century has been imagined and undertaken as necessary to making modern states on a broadly Western model. The proliferation of IOs and expansion of their legal powers, through both formal and informal means, raise profound questions regarding the relationship between international law’s reforming promise and its imperialist perils. The article proposes a new analytic framework for understanding these phenomena, focusing on the rationalities of IO powers and the technologies through which they are made operable. It argues that both the growth of IOs and the cultural processes of state formation are impelled by a particular dynamic of liberal reform that is at once internal and external to law. That dynamic and the analytic framework proposed here are both illustrated and exemplified through an analytical account of the emergence of IOs in the 19th century.