This groundbreaking book uses the idea of experience to investigate the various ways in which international organizations are understood and captured by judges, legal practitioners, legal researchers, legal theorists, and thinkers of global governance.
Adopting a unique phenomenological approach, Jean d’Aspremont questions the key patterns of thought that inform the legal practice of international organizations, arguing that said organizations are the product of five specific experiences: affection, insulation, edification, restriction, and conciliation. Through this critical lens, d’Aspremont highlights the limits of the current conceptualizations of international organizations which populate legal practice and legal literature. In doing so, the book crucially develops contemporary discourse on how international lawyers build their claims about the status, rights, duties, responsibilities, failures and falls of international organizations; and assesses how international organizations are thought about in relation to international law, international relations and studies of global governance.
