In the post-World War II era, international lawyers have occupied the front seat in studying not only international organisations (IOs) but human rights as well. Thus, it is both understandable and sensible to frame insights from international law as dominant, and those from other disciplines as offering alternative, perhaps somewhat subordinate viewpoints. During the past decade, this disciplinary hierarchy has grown to feel increasingly unsatisfying, including to an increasing number of international lawyers who are ‘losing faith’ in their discipline, both as an analytical framework and as a tool for world improvement.Footnote ² From the perspective of empirical reality, this disciplinary hierarchy has likewise outlived its usefulness: in the continued proliferation of IOs accompanied by various regulative frameworks, mandates, and normative orders, what exactly makes them ‘legal’ has grown increasingly unclear.

In this chapter, I enter the debate using perspectives from my ethnographic fieldsite, namely, the UN Human Rights Committee,Footnote ³ embedding my discussion in a decade of anthropological work on IOs.Footnote ⁴ One of ten treaty bodies monitoring state compliance with the main UN human rights covenants, the Human Rights Committee monitors how states comply with the obligations they have assumed by becoming parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In the continued – and perhaps permanent – absence of an international human rights court operating under the UN, the committee is often called the most ‘lawlike’ and authoritative of all the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms.Footnote ⁵ At the same time, the Human Rights Committee, similarly to other UN treaty bodies, suffers from under-reporting and lacks influence, raising concerns over whether the committee’s work really matters.Footnote ⁶

This chapter anchors its inquiry in an ethnographic glimpse from 2013 when the committee first held a Constructive Dialogue session ‘with itself’ concerning the state report of Belize, a small state bordering Mexico. Belize’s initial report to the committee was due circa fifteen years before Belize finally submitted it in 2013, but then it did not send a state delegation to the committee’s session as is the usual practice. The committee has since examined a great number of reports in abstentia. These sessions form a noted contrast to the expectation that processing state reports constitutes an active verbal exchange between members of the international community, that is, Human Rights Committee members and state representatives. These sessions offer an illuminating vantage point for reflecting on the diverse ways in which IOs’ forms and practices ‘keep up standards’ for a better world.

Klabbers notes the dominant idea is that ‘international organisations are apolitical and cost-effective, doing things states cannot do on their own (or are reluctant to do on their own)’.Footnote ⁷ Further, ‘while apolitical, they nonetheless contribute to world peace or, at the very least, the “salvation of mankind”’.Footnote ⁸ Hence, IOs are widely perceived as ‘inherently good and benign, and their functioning should accordingly be facilitated – they form the benevolent alternatives to nasty states’.Footnote ⁹ Particularly in the past decade, questions have increasingly arisen as to whether IOs are realising these expectations and whether international law is actually effective.Footnote ¹⁰

One recurring source of criticism is that, instead of actually acting in the world, IOs ‘generate documents that heighten obscurity, while producing ideas and policies behind closed doors’.Footnote ¹¹ Frequently, the generation of ‘obscure’ documents seems to ‘hinder’ IOs doing things that actually matter and which IOs should be doing. In part, these accusations can arise from IOs leading a ‘life of their own, distinct from that of their member states’.Footnote ¹² In this ‘life of their own’, talking appears to have replaced doing, and meetings have increasingly become a substitute for action. What were supposed to be the means to an end seem to have become the end in itself.

People working in IOs take these criticisms seriously. Many actively question the direction and continued legitimacy of their operations and invite anthropologists to conduct ethnographic studies of their organisational cultures.Footnote ¹³ Some IOs revisit their foundational visions and significantly revise them to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. One example of this is Amnesty International’s increasing shift towards ‘sustainability’, a new concern in the field of human rights.Footnote ¹⁴

In this chapter, I engage with these criticisms and ask: can we find another perspective from which to assess effectiveness? What happens if we stop investing our analytical attention in what we think IO operations and their desired ‘impacts’ should be? What kind of insights can we gain from non-normative inquiries into what IOs actually do? I reflect on these questions by asking: What can we learn about IOs’ visions if we focus on the legal technicalities and practical materialities that define their operations and the ‘mundane forms through which these work’,Footnote ¹⁵ the seemingly ‘thin’ documents and the ‘boringly, even achingly, familiar routines’?Footnote ¹⁶ I link these questions to ethnography by asking: According to what kind of logic does it make sense for a high-profile UN human rights monitoring body to have a ‘dialogue with itself’?

The Flourishing Anthropology of IOs

Since 2010, the anthropology of IOs has grown into a vibrant field of research. Anthropology was once characterised by geographically distant, elusive fieldsites and the study of exotic tribal customs. This created an inevitable division between those who did the studying and those who were studied, a distinction graphically captured by the still-circulating images of Bronislaw Malinowski, often called the founder of ethnography, clad in impeccably white attire amongst his ‘natives’, inhabitants of Trobriand Island.Footnote ¹⁷ Much of early anthropological work was embedded in the kind of evolutionary thinking likewise characteristic of international law: for example, many early works in legal anthropology were premised on ‘advancement’ from informal modes of dispute resolution to formal law.Footnote ¹⁸ The distinction between the western ‘civilised’ ethnographer and the ‘savage’ subjects of inquiry created a legacy that the discipline has attempted to reckon with, even if not with completely satisfactory results.Footnote ¹⁹

Simultaneously anthropology has a long tradition of ‘studying up’,Footnote ²⁰ generating ethnographies of organisations. The result is a rapidly growing body of research analysing different UN entitiesFootnote ²¹ and international law.Footnote ²² These include ethnographies of international courts,Footnote ²³ including the European Court of Human RightsFootnote ²⁴ and the International Criminal Court,Footnote ²⁵ and of truth-and-reconciliation commissions.Footnote ²⁶ Anthropological work focuses on the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodical ReviewsFootnote ²⁷ and treaty bodies, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women,Footnote ²⁸ and the Convention against TortureFootnote ²⁹ and the Human Rights Committees.Footnote ³⁰ Studies of the World BankFootnote ³¹ complement ethnographies of human rights activities, including failures in diverse local settingsFootnote ³² and their links to global networks, and research on expert techniques,Footnote ³³ transnational activist and expert networks.Footnote ³⁴ Together this scholarship documents the growing influence of independent expertsFootnote ³⁵ and their influence on transnational legislation,Footnote ³⁶ EU policymaking,Footnote ³⁷ and informal law-making.Footnote ³⁸

In fact, it may be easier for anthropologists to study and theorise IOs than it is for international lawyers, for whom the multiplicity of IOs presents a significant hurdle. How does one arrive at satisfactory legal definitions or theorisations when the concrete incarnations, criteria for membership, and scopes of operations differ so greatly?Footnote ³⁹ Yet, where international lawyers perceive troubling differences, anthropologists see significant sameness. First, there is IOs’ community of practice, the (permanent) staff of which share great similarities. With rare exceptions, they all belong to the same transnational elite possessing similar educational backgrounds and work experiences.Footnote ⁴⁰

Sameness likewise characterises their professional endeavours. When IO staff produce and process human rights reports, they generally do so using similar knowledge practices and legal technicalities, no matter where in the world they are located.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, sameness unites the international human rights and humanitarian sector: it matters little whether the documents are processed by the UN Human Rights Council, the Human Rights Committee, or a regional human rights monitoring body, or whether the individuals processing documents are UN secretariat members, state delegates, or NGO staff.

An inductive field of research characterised by ‘pre-theoretical commitments’,Footnote ⁴² anthropology has a proclivity for theorising from the ground up, in stark contrast to law, which is both deductive and normative. For example, when examining IO operations, a legal inquiry commonly commences with a distinct fiction regarding what constitutes an IO and its mandate, followed by assumptions about the impacts IOs should have.

Inductive theorisation, however, begins with IOs’ inner logic and operations, which anthropologists observe, participate in, and hear our interlocutors describe. It portrays IOs as ‘social worlds with distinct characters, influenced by their connections with civil society, states, transnational corporations, and publics’.Footnote ⁴³ It reveals how ‘international organisations involve collective and individual actors in their policy-making, absorb critique, attempt to neutralise political conflict, and create new political fields in competition and collusion with local actors and national governments’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It further highlights the ‘affective lives of bureaucracies’, and ‘how actors maintain a sense of purpose and agency in spite of the tedious and burdensome nature of the administrative procedures in which they take part’.Footnote ⁴⁵

After sufficient analysis, an ethnographically grounded, theoretical understanding emerges that transcends the borders of formality and legal fiction, encompassing the informal, the improvised, the unexpected, and the irrational. In my own work, inductive theorising generated a description of the UN human rights monitoring framework as a formidable ‘apparatus’. This conception borrows from Foucault, who describes the apparatus, aka, the dispositive, as a ‘heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said and the unsaid’.Footnote ⁴⁶

I complement this description with ice as a metaphor for describing the complexity of organisational inner contours.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ice is likewise an apt metaphor for illustrating the ‘fuzzy logic’ of the UN human rights apparatus. ‘Fuzzy logic’ is borrowed from Bourdieu, who used it to underline the exaggeratedly rigid nature of ‘system’ or ‘structure’ as analytical concepts, by emphasising the indeterminacy of the rules diverse agents mobilise in practice, as well as to highlight the creative gap between ‘habitus and institutional structure’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Examining UN operations using inductive fuzzy logic captures an interesting paradox that evades deductive inquiries. One of IOs’ cardinal values is that their operations should be transparent. Yet, the very documents such organisations produce may in fact create confusion and obfuscation. This outcome may partly be due to specialised jargon and procedural complexity. Indeed, rather than constituting a problem or shortcoming, fuzziness or partial opacity may be a desired element for seasoned insiders. A UN treaty bodies example clarifies this. The mandate of human rights treaty bodies is based on covenant provisions. For example, the basis of the Human Rights Committee’s operations is stated in Article 36 of the ICCPR.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, these provisions leave the scope of operations for the treaty bodies themselves to define.

Over the past decades, the committees and the UN have determined many elements of what the treaty bodies do and how. One example of this is the role NGOs play in Human Rights Committee sessions. Although formally only states and treaty bodies participate in Constructive Dialogues about state reports, NGOs have extensive opportunities to voice their views by submitting ancillary reports, contributing to the Lists of Issues on the basis of which Constructive Dialogue takes place. In addition they are able to share their views immediately before the Constructive Dialogue in the lunch-time briefing sessions open only to NGO delegates and committee members.

Moreover, the scope of treaty body operations has expanded, as illustrated by the UN Human Rights Committee processing state reports in the absence of state parties. The expansion does not please all states, giving rise to aspirations to curb treaty body operations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Expansion has been largely made possible by the UN human rights apparatus’s ‘fuzzy logic’, which allows seasoned insiders to manoeuvre in diverse, subtle ways. Yet, both the manoeuvring and its consequences would be lost in accounts emerging from deductive, formal, normative theorising about IOs.

Anthropologising Impact

Chimni notes how ‘[i]n the corpus of literature which constitutes international legal studies, there is little reflection on the role of international institutions in sustaining a particular vision of world order’.Footnote ⁵¹ Billaud and Cowan echo this when they point out how seldom bureaucracies, national or international, are viewed as the site of visions, let alone utopias. Instead, they note, ‘classic representations tend to describe bureaucratic formations as “rationality machines”, administrations as homogeneous black boxes and bureaucrats as individuals working “without hatred or passion” to implement a broader vision of which they remain largely ignorant’.Footnote ⁵²

International legal scholarship, particularly human rights scholarship, may be illuminative when it comes to grasping underlying visions, for instance, in Paul Lauren’s The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen.Footnote ⁵³ In his sweeping exploration of the origins of human rights thinking in various global regions, Lauren also depicts a world on a steady march away from superstition and moving toward rationality, human rights, and rule of law.Footnote ⁵⁴

In legal scholarship, the most common criticism of UN treaty bodies realising their underlying vision to improve human rights in the world is that their efforts are legally non-binding, and hence, ineffective. Indeed, the Human Rights Committee can only produce documents with authoritative significance, and some scholarship suggests minimal impact, when assessed via criteria such as including Committee Concluding Observations in legislative debates, court proceedings, or parliamentary debates.Footnote ⁵⁵

Yet, anthropological insights reveal alternative paths of influence. Riles examines how individual documents and sessions can form a seamless cycle to constitute human rights dialogue. The significance of such dialogue originates in its capacity to link seemingly disparate events – such as processing an individual state report by a UN treaty body – into meaningful continuities. Together, these continuities form trajectories that apparently embody progress, as illustrated by changing the language in UN documents from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ in the early 1990s.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another avenue explores the informal influence that treaty body proceedings have. This may happen when a state civil servant picks up a UN treaty body report condemning the state’s practices towards minorities. The civil servant may use the report to argue for increased resources, thus ideally improving the position of minorities, while also advancing human rights.Footnote ⁵⁷

There is a third avenue, which directs an analytical gaze on the ‘mundane forms through which (IOs) work’,Footnote ⁵⁸ the ‘boringly, even achingly, familiar routines’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Helpful here is Riles’ work on legal technicalities, ‘those aspects of legal practice that cannot be reduced to norms, trust or other sociological concepts’.Footnote ⁶⁰ One tangible example is the ‘routinised pathways of thought’ via which lawyers approach legal documents. This manner of approaching documents constitutes ‘a profoundly aesthetic practice’ ‘of fidelity to proper form’. The ‘legitimacy of law inheres in its aesthetic dimensions and practices’,Footnote ⁶¹ which becomes ‘a script for a particular kind of collaboration’.Footnote ⁶² In the following ethnographic vignette, I elaborate upon the significance these insights offer for understanding the role of ‘lawlike’ organs like UN treaty bodies, including the values that they uphold in their operations.

Dialogue with Ourselves

It was an irregular UN Human Rights Committee session in Geneva at the Palais Wilson, the headquarters of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. For the first time, the seats state representatives customarily occupied at the front of the spacious conference room were empty. In all other respects, the stage was set for the undoubted culmination point of this high-profile, international gathering, the Constructive Dialogue, which is UN treaty body work’s most treasured component. Committee members were seated in their places and ready for action; the interpreters were in their glass booths; members of the UN Secretariat were there, as were UN Conference services members and several NGO representatives, interns, and other observers. Press secretaries were ready to record the events, and the webcam a Geneva-based NGO operated was prepared to start transmitting ‘to the world’. Only the lead character in this scene – the state – remained conspicuous by its absence.

The session that followed testified that the situation was novel for everyone involved. Committee members asked numerous times why there was no delegation from Belize. UN secretariat member responses suggested the reason might be financial, or as one committee member candidly stated, the state was ‘broke’. Another committee member noted, had the session occurred at UN headquarters in New York – as one in every three Human Rights Committee sessions had prior to 2013 – Belize could simply have sent a staff member from its permanent mission. As committee sessions are now held exclusively in Geneva, where Belize has no permanent mission, this was not an option. Other committee members questioned this reasoning: ‘Just because a state says something does not mean you should believe it.’

As the session wore on, the committee members’ frustrations became palpable: several said it was a shame there was no delegation from Belize to respond to the numerous questions the committee had regarding implementation of the ICCPR. However, the committee members did not slack off: despite the absence of a respondent, they followed the usual session choreography by posing pointed questions regarding Belize’s inaction regarding the ICCPR. The longest monologue by an individual committee member lasted almost forty minutes.

Constructive dialogue is a curious phrase. Dialogue is a staple of the UN treaty body operations and draws from the rhetoric of ‘dialogue’ prevalent in international collaboration. Yet, neither constructive dialogue nor dialogue have clear-cut definitions or distinct statuses in international law. In pragmatic terms, UN committees’ Constructive Dialogues are highly orchestrated exchanges that usually last six working hours per state, consisting of formal opening statements read out by the heads of state delegations, followed by questions posed by committee members, mostly concerning compliance with the ICCPR, a round of answers by state representatives usually after brief preparation time, then follow-up questions by the committee, and, time permitting, a final round of answers by states.

Although accompanied by an air of spontaneity, in reality, all the elements of dialogues are carefully prepared in advance, requiring jointly months of labour. The questions committee members pose are based on extensive background research, as are the answers state representatives offer. More often than not, both questions and potential answers have been written down prior to sessions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Significant labour accompanies the most important ‘shadow actions’ of the public performance, namely, the ancillary reports national and international NGOs prepare, submit, and present to the committee in sessions closed to state representatives.

From Savage to Civilised via Human Rights Reports

What is the relevance of Constructive Dialogues? What really happens during them and according to what logic does it make sense to have one with oneself? Officially, Constructive Dialogues are moments for sharing factual information. Elsewhere, I challenge this, arguing that, in addition to, or perhaps instead of, exchanges of factual information, they entail significant hidden communications connected to tensions over who is a legitimate representative when it comes to providing information on behalf of a population.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this chapter, I want to propose another answer by focusing on the importance of the seemingly insignificant and even banal: the forms and practices of Constructive Dialogues; in other words, the fact of their occurrence.

I thus ask the following: What if part of UN treaty bodies’ relevance hinges on the very fact that UN expert bodies process documents called ‘state reports’ in elaborate, ritual sessions called ‘Constructive Dialogues’? What if, by extension, the legitimacy of IOs and the means for them to realise their visions lie in ‘aesthetic practices’ embedded in ‘fidelity to proper form’,Footnote ⁶⁶ which bestow upon these documents and practices – in the words of Jessie Allen – ‘legal magic’.Footnote ⁶⁷ To unpack these assertions, it is useful to take a momentary detour to explore the notion of the ‘standard of civilisation’, a notion for which, despite inspiring vast scholarship,Footnote ⁶⁸ we lack agreed-upon definitions. However, the link between civilisation and international law appears uncontested: as Obregon summarises, ‘international law carries the weight of being pronounced as the ultimate product of civilisation, making it into an utopian ideal of a transnational organised legal system that would bring progress and peace to the world’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Obregon connects this assertion to Kant’s Perpetual Peace, in which he states that the difference between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ rests on insistence on a constitution and a preference for ‘rational liberty’ as opposed to a ‘savage state of lawlessness’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Tzouvala echoes this characterisation, arguing that the civilised standard became ‘a way of systematising and legitimising a wide range of juridical practices’.Footnote ⁷¹ These practices were ‘justified with highly moralising references to civilisation’,Footnote ⁷² amounting to a ‘logic of improvement’.Footnote ⁷³ Parfitt echoes these thoughts, noting that ‘only those political communities that had been successfully interpellated as modern, bureaucratic and juridically separate from society and economy, were deemed to be civilised and, therefore, full subjects of international law’.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Koskenniemi and Anghie, among others, illustrate, the standard of civilisation formed grounds for exclusion, conquest, and colonisation of peoples and states by ‘those who thought themselves civilised or at least “more civilised”’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus, the standard of civilisation creates ‘a conundrum between exclusion and conditional inclusion’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Today, the standard of civilisation is increasingly seen as synonymous with ‘metrics, indexes and “best practices” that give contemporary iterations’.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is moreover embodied by the human rights system’s expansion,Footnote ⁷⁸ with the consequence that states which do not conform to this standard risk being ‘exiled from the inner core of international society’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The idea of meeting a standard of civilisation depends on fulfilling metrics determined by human rights reporting obligations, accompanied by quantified indicators.Footnote ⁸⁰ This resonates with Mbembe’s observations regarding postcolonial relations, according to which power works ‘in its minute details’, on ‘the principles of assemblage which give rise to its efficacy’ together with ‘types of institutions, knowledges, norms, and practices that issue from it … as well as the light that the use of visual imagery and discourse throws on the nature of domination and subordination’.Footnote ⁸¹

Adhering to human rights reporting obligations often suffices for acceptance into the international community, or at least it is the only remaining, uniformly expected – or promised – action that the contemporary human rights regime offers. As Donnelly notes, ‘(t)he international community still refuses to act before ethnic conflict erupts into widespread bloodshed, or even to develop early warning systems’.Footnote ⁸² This inaction is problematic: as many noted regarding the Bosnian War, among others, military action justified in the name of human rights often causes as many problems as it solves. There is an indisputable sense of disappointment when confronted with this reality: just as with Belize’s state report, the UN Human Rights Committee, like other UN treaty bodies, usually continues its diligent examination of documents accompanied by carefully choreographed Constructive Dialogues, even when, for example, military actions or terrorist attacks have taken place.

Sitting in the calm conference room of the Palais Wilson, the voices of children playing in the adjacent schoolyard entering through the windows, this situation may seem downright ludicrous. Proceeding with the calm processing of documents through ‘UN reality’ may feel like the last thing that should happen in the face of severe wrongdoings. Yet, this is what the committee does, and further, what it has been mandated to do by the covenant it monitors. With these observations, we return to Downton Abbey’s grand mansion. This time, we find ourselves at the upstairs dinner table – for which location Mr Carson, the butler, fervently polished the silverware. The crystal glassware and porcelain serving dishes are matched by the elaborate detail on the ladies’ dresses. The men are impeccably dressed in white ties. After some polite chitchat, an exchange ensues. Participating are Mr Branson, the chauffeur who became Lord Grantham’s son-in-law, and Lord Grantham’s mother, Lady Grantham, a true specimen of old British noblesse.

With this statement, our circle is complete. We find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, drawn back to the remote and exotic, both the islands of the Pacific and the small coastal states of Central America. Yet, in this instance, it is not the anthropologist’s whites that separate the civilised from the savages. Nor is it the silverware that, via feverish polishing according to vigilant standards, communicates to the brute Germans that they have not conquered civilised Britain. Instead, the separation between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ is created and maintained by aesthetic practices concerning documents and meetings that demonstrate ‘fidelity to proper form’ – just as the vigorously examined documents and carefully choreographed rituals in the main conference room of the Palais Wilson do.

In all simplicity, this means that part of the ‘civilising mission’ is embedded in the very fact that IOs exist. By extension, a core part of their importance is embedded in the very materiality of their work. In the field of human rights, ‘fidelity to proper form’ refers to the continuous proliferation of different ‘units’, ‘policies’, ‘programmes’, ‘committees’, and ‘rules’. Thus, in 2018, when Belize sent a state delegation to participate in the proceedings, the Human Rights Committee framed the matter in praise of progress, which it included in its finally adopted Concluding Observations.Footnote ⁸⁴ Indeed, the significance of such forms and practices is not determined by their impact or effectiveness, but rather by their mere existence.

This example elucidates that, in the human rights field, the very production of infinite numbers of ‘lawlike’ documents, as well as the elaborate practices according to which these documents are processed, form the civilised standards for a better world. When examined from this perspective, more important than whether or not such documents have binding legal force, or even what they contain, is that they convey their messages by means of appropriate organisational aesthetics, including covenant-like paragraphs and sub-paragraphs that rely extensively on individual pieces of legislation, court rulings, policies and action plans, and ritualised meetings. It is the legal technicalities that give these forms and practices their ‘legal magic’ and by extension their legitimacy. Their existence comes to embody a vision of a better world characterised by technicalities and proper aesthetic practices, and by extension, the values of rationality, transparency, and the rule of law.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I highlighted the alternative approaches that anthropology may offer to the study of IOs in international law. These include insights into the effects that IOs may exert on today’s world order and the mechanisms via which this occurs. Focusing on legal technicalities and materiality offers new analytical avenues for reflecting on the relevance and consequences of IOs’ operations. Such a focus also offers insights into the historical continuities characterising both IOs and international law. To date, such continuities have been largely overlooked in scholarship on IOs.

This approach opens fresh avenues for considering the future of IOs and their visions, allowing us to ask whether IOs still have utility. The world depicted in Downton Abbey started to vanish soon after the historical moment described at the beginning of this chapter – although not because of the war with the Germans and definitely not due to lacking standards where polishing silverware was concerned. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 we have seen again how quickly and unexpectedly the world can change. We have experienced how fast the life that seemed normal to us to can be turned upside down.

We have likewise experienced how quickly new standards for a better world can be introduced, whether they are the face masks we began to wear or the COVID-19 vaccination certificates we became accustomed to showing to enter airplanes, hotels, and restaurants – all things that just a few years prior would have felt impossible to imagine. We do not yet know how permanent these new standards will be or when the subsequent waves of pandemics or other world crises will occur that will upend what we know as proper procedures. These changes, however, make apparent how much the world has changed since the inception of IOs decades ago, when global concerns were very different from those we face today. What will happen to IOs in the future, and whether they will be able to adapt to everchanging world situations, we do not yet know. What remains certain is that to understand this future – the impacts and effects of IOs operations, as well as the diverse roles legal technicalities, materialities, and aesthetics play – sustained interdisciplinary debate remains essential.

Thus, anthropology offers to the study of IOs insights into the effects that IOs may exert in today’s world order, as well as the mechanisms via which they do so. It also provides alternative means for considering the legitimacy of IOs and the historical continuities that accompany the ‘civilising mission’ that they embody.