What is an international organisation? In an ancient parable recounted in several religious traditions, a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time – I personally prefer the telling of this parable by the Sufi poet Rumi in his Masnavi, in which the men are sighted but encounter the elephant in a dark room, but will mostly refer to the better-known version. Each man touches a different part of the elephant: one touches its leg, another its trunk, the third its tusk, the fourth its tail, and the last its ear. Each argues forcefully that an elephant is a different thing, depending on which part they have touched: the first says the elephant is like a tree; the next that it is like a snake; the third that it is a kind of spear; the fourth a rope; the last a fan. The men are unable to reach agreement; in some versions of the story, they come to blows. The story’s moral is usually taken to be that truth is not absolute, that each person’s understanding is relative to their standpoint, and that an attitude of intellectual humility is necessary in order to learn from the perspectives of others.

This stimulating volume invites us to see international organisations anew, from fresh angles and in new lights. In particular, the editors are keen to expand the horizons of mainstream scholars of international organisations law, who are accustomed to viewing their subject-matter through lenses that focus narrowly on the relationships between international organisations and their members. Many of the chapters gathered here explicitly or implicitly reject a ‘functionalist’ approach to international organisations (though precisely what that means seems to vary somewhat from author to author); even the doyen of international organisations law, Jan Klabbers, disavows functionalism in its barest form, proposing a ‘supra-functionalist’ alternative in its stead.Footnote ¹ The themes of the volume – expertise, structures, performances, and capital – deliberately push at the boundaries of mainstream thinking in international law; many of the contributions manifest a growing interest in questions of materiality among legal scholars;Footnote ² and several of the authors reflect on international organisations from outside the discipline. The volume goes a long way to remedy the imbalance that the editors perceive in mainstream studies of international organisations law, offering an abundance of new (in)sights from anthropology, political science, and history.

The editors of this volume draw a sharp distinction between doing international organisations law and thinking about international organisations. Mainstream international lawyers approach international organisations with pragmatic ends in mind: they see legal problems to be solved, and they deploy their legal toolkit accordingly. This ‘mono-disciplinary outlook’ and ethos has, in the editors’ view, led to an over-emphasis on ‘doing’ international organisations law at the expense of ‘thinking’ about international organisations.Footnote ³ The solution the editors propose is ‘for the discipline to start seeing IO differently’.Footnote ⁴ Yet the sequence could just as easily be reversed: what one sees will inevitably be shaped by what one thinks, how one imagines the world, what one expects to see. This concluding chapter begins with ‘ways of doing’ scholarship on international organisations and proceeds to reflect on the diverse ways of seeing and thinking suggested by the preceding chapters in this volume, before making some tentative suggestions about possible ways forward.

Ways of Doing

How should we do the study of international organisations?Footnote ⁵ The blind men in the parable come at the elephant from different angles but share a single method of investigation – touch. In contrast, the assortment of methodologies on display in this volume is striking. Each author makes a compelling case, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, for their way of studying international organisations. Broadly, however, the approaches adopted here may be seen as resolving into two distinct ways of doing the study of international organisations.

The first approach is essentially deconstructivist, aiming to expose the blindspots and biases of international organisations, and perhaps also of those who study them. In general terms this approach is well established in international law scholarship,Footnote ⁶ though more theorised versions remain rare, especially in international organisations law (before now). Chimni leads the way, recommending an expanded ‘external critique’ of the ‘biased design and unjust distributional outcomes’ of international organisations, together with an ‘internal critique’ that would show how they ‘subserve the interests of powerful states over time’.Footnote ⁷ These forms of critique require digging past surface appearances, clearing away distracting epiphenomena, and unearthing the essential truth. Cutler engages in a similar exercise, showing how ‘resilience talk’ obscures ‘underlying socio-political-economic causes of poverty, insecurity, and inequality’ while ‘depoliticis[ing] and naturalis[ing] deep structural inequalities in the governance activities of international organisations and law’.Footnote ⁸ Mansouri likewise takes up the critical project of uncovering ‘hidden power relations’, revealing how ostensibly ‘technical’ organisations embody certain hegemonic orders.Footnote ⁹ Klabbers’ analysis of ‘functionalism’s limits’, showing how it distorts and obscures important aspects of the operations of international organisations, serves as a kind of critique of ideology, in effect if not in name.Footnote ¹⁰

The second broad way of doing the study of international organisations suggested in other chapters is (re)constructivist. Rather than taking them apart with the aim of exposing the falsity or fetishism of international organisations, these scholars trace how they are constituted through heterogenous practices and materials. Littoz-Monnet thus aims to show how expert knowledge is made in global governance;Footnote ¹¹ Uribe traces the construction of ‘hidden hunger’ as a specific ‘object of governance’;Footnote ¹² Soave seeks to account for the ‘legal production of the international judiciary’;Footnote ¹³ Santer carefully recounts the transnational legal conflicts arising over maritime rescues in the Central Mediterranean;Footnote ¹⁴ Quiroga-Villamarín reveals how the physical headquarters of organisations shape and constrain their expression of the international;Footnote ¹⁵ Halme-Tuomisaari urges focussing on ‘the legal technicalities and practical materialities that define their operations’;Footnote ¹⁶ and Clements describes reform in the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an ‘infinite institutional becoming’.Footnote ¹⁷ As Van Den Meerssche argues in his account of shifting ‘cultural techniques’ of lawyering in the World Bank, tracing the assemblages that make up international organisations offers an alternative form of critique, one that remains sensitive and response to ‘the changing politics of law’.Footnote ¹⁸

The distinction between deconstructive and reconstructive ‘ways of doing’ outlined here is no doubt overdrawn. To be sure, many of the chapters in this volume can be read as straddling both modes. Clements’ attention to the ‘notions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness’ embedded in the ICC’s ‘organisation form’ resonates with Cutler’s deconstruction of ‘resilience talk’.Footnote ¹⁹ Cutler in turn reminds us that ideology works to interpellate subjects as much as it inverts or distorts our image of reality.Footnote ²⁰ Halme-Tuomisaari is concerned with uncovering the ‘inner logic’ of international organisations.Footnote ²¹ Chimni’s ‘internal critique’ would include examining their ‘everyday practices or organisational culture’,Footnote ²² while his interest in proposals for reform suggests a fundamentally reconstructive impulse at play.Footnote ²³ Other authors would almost certainly resist being pigeon-holed into one or other approach, and fairly so.

Ways of Seeing

What then does this volume reveal about international organisations? What is glimpsed here that was not seen before? The authors of these chapters are more modest than the blind men in the parable. None claims exclusive (in)sight into the nature of international organisations; several explicitly deny the possibility of turning on the lights, opening one’s eyes, and seeing the elephant whole. One or two express mild misgivings about the overweening claims to special discernment by scholars in certain disciplines (not their own, of course). Instead, most of the chapters self-consciously focus on specific episodes, mechanisms, or aspects of international organisations. In doing so, they present a kaleidoscope of images that transform how we view these entities.

Indeed, the international organisations seen through the chapters in this volume are startlingly heterogeneous in their composition and activities. As the editors note, mainstream international legal scholars tend to focus on international organisations as such – assumed to be discrete, self-contained, coherent entities – and their members, which are mostly states. In contrast, the chapters in this volume describe entities that are teeming with life – actors and actions, objects and projects, practices and performances. From the varied perspectives of the authors gathered here, international organisations are channels for the circulation of people, data, and documents through multiple ‘crossing points’, ‘boundary sites’, and ‘material infrastructures’;Footnote ²⁴ producers of policies, programmes, committees, and documents;Footnote ²⁵ ‘socio-political machineries’ that generate diverse ‘governance objects’ through the manipulation and deployment of knowledge;Footnote ²⁶ targets of reform, carried out by ‘a set of actors, arguments, and their tools’;Footnote ²⁷ physical sites, buildings, and other infrastructures,Footnote ²⁸ constituted by the ‘patterned practices’, ‘competent performances’, and relationships of a community of legal professionals;Footnote ²⁹ embodying professional cultures expressed in ‘objects, rules-of-thumb, textual references and templates of analysis or documentation’;Footnote ³⁰ instruments for transnational capitalist class interests;Footnote ³¹ and more. As these chapters suggest, an international organisation will look very different depending on whether one is examining its (executive) head, its (operational) feet, or the (administrative) belly of the beast.

With such diverse makeups, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the chapters also depict international organisations and their constituent entities as engaged in more or less continuous processes of struggle. To some, the principal antagonists are those actors already recognised by mainstream international lawyers – international organisations and their member states – though the struggles should be understood as taking place both between and within them.Footnote ³² To others, more specific struggles warrant particular attention. International organisations like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund thus incarnate contestations between classes, within classes, or between capitalist states. Bodies such as the International Maritime Organisation, the International Organisation for Migration, and the European Union engage in transnational legal conflicts among themselves, with state agencies, and with non-governmental agencies regarding the governance of international borders.Footnote ³³ The struggles to reform the ICC are played out through reiterative interpretive work on ‘legal materials’.Footnote ³⁴ More concretely still, even the effort to obtain and maintain secure physical accommodations turns out to be an ongoing, uphill battle.Footnote ³⁵ But what enables our authors to see such variety and turmoil in institutions that typically appear so flat and lifeless in legal texts?

Ways of Thinking

The blind men in the parable interpret their findings through mental models drawn from their prior experiences in the world. The one who touches the elephant’s leg and declares that the elephant is like a tree is only able to do so because he has some experience (and thus expectation) of what a tree feels like. Indeed, he has probably touched several trees, so he has a sense that there are different kinds of trees; even if this tree is not quite the same as the others he has experienced, it shares enough of the common properties of a tree – for example, its vertical orientation, girth, and rough surface – for it to be classed as such. Likewise, the man who touches the elephant’s ear must have some general sense of the possible range of forms and properties of a fan, to be able to assert confidently that an elephant is like a fan. Their different ‘ways of seeing’ the elephant are intimately tied to their ‘ways of thinking’ about the world: how they classify and categorise objects; how they analogise or distinguish between different instances or cases; what they are primed to ‘see’, and what their imaginations do not permit them to observe.

Our authors likewise employ a range of mental models – or, to extend the ocular metaphor, theoretical or interpretive lenses – that allow them to see different aspects of their objects of examination. With a wide-angle lens such as is provided by historical materialist or critical political economic terms of analysis, it is possible (in fact, one is almost compelled) to see how international organisations are implicated in broad, transhistorical patterns of domination, hegemony, and exploitation. The scholar who adopts a more microscopic lens, in contrast, will be likely to discover more of the unseen, everyday lives of international organisations.Footnote ³⁶ An anthropologist’s sensibility will be attuned to pluralism in law as in culture; an historian will observe contingency and change; a scholar steeped in practice theory will find, well, practices. The variety of lenses being deployed here is impressive, taking inspiration from Marx, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Latour, among others. Each of these lenses has its limitations: to see one part of the elephant clearly is to see the rest only fuzzily, or not at all.

The most dominant mental model of all, of course, is that of the international organisation itself. With all their great diversity, all the authors in this collection seem to agree, more or less, on their object of study; certainly, none fundamentally questions the usefulness of international organisations as a category of analysis. Once one has been taught to see an elephant, it seems, it is difficult to forget or push the image out of one’s mind, even if one is told ‘don’t think of an elephant!’ And yet, there may be good reason to question whether all of the entities under investigation in this volume belong to the same species. Is the many-limbed (and many-trunked, and many-tailed…) United Nations really the same kind of thing as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons? Do the Universal Postal Union and the World Health Organisation belong in the same conceptual bucket as each other, the ICC, or the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organisation? For all the attention to detail in practices, materiality, and processes found here, it may be surprising to find such consensus on an overarching concept that purports to unite them.

The division between macroscopic and microscopic views leads back to the distinction between deconstructivist and reconstructivist ways of doing the study of international organisations. The first element in each dyad imagines international organisations as real and complete entities, with capacity for sufficiently coherent will and action that they can be debunked or dismantled – or at least held responsible. The second imagines international organisations in the process of becoming or assemblage. This may at first blush seem less useful for accountability purposes, and therefore less appealing to a practising lawyer. But that judgement is probably premature; rather than undercut accountability, a more complex and fluid understanding of international organisations-in-the-making may eventually make possible a more precise schema of responsibility. These are early days as an exciting new wave of scholarship gathers: instead of closing down possibilities, why not catch the wave for a while and see where it takes us?

Ways Forward?

Ways of doing – ways of seeing – ways of thinking. Like the blind men in the parable, students of international organisations grasp at different parts of the objects of their study, observe distinct phenomena, and interpret their findings through diverse mental models. Indeed, all three are tightly interconnected and impossible to separate in practice. What, then, might the future hold for this flourishing field of scholarship and praxis? No one can say for sure, but here is a short wish list – as personal and idiosyncratic as any other – from a fellow dweller in the dark.

First, there is certainly room to push further in all of the directions pursued and advocated in these chapters, and to connect these with other streams of scholarship. Though a number of excellent ethnographic studies of international organisations have appeared,Footnote ³⁷ much more is needed to understand their everyday, inner workings. Here, inspiration could be drawn from recent inquiries into, among other things, documents,Footnote ³⁸ files,Footnote ³⁹ and meetingsFootnote ⁴⁰ in other settings, as well as from the classic works of Max Weber, who is surprisingly little cited in this volume.Footnote ⁴¹ The relations among international organisations, mentioned in passing in only a few chapters, is a subject of increasing study by international lawyers and international relations scholars,Footnote ⁴² and could likewise offer opportunities for more focussed ethnographic and historical study. Rational choice and game-theoretic approaches, also under-represented here, might strengthen Marxian critiques of international organisations’ role in entrenching the domination of powerful states.Footnote ⁴³ Complementary ways of thinking about international organisations could be found in the academic discipline of public administration,Footnote ⁴⁴ while organisation studies might offer further critical and practice-oriented perspectives.Footnote ⁴⁵

Second, more efforts to bridge the gaps between apparent dichotomies in the field, building on those made in this volume, would be welcome. Productive linkages could be sought between the microscopic views provided by practice-theoretic approaches and the more macroscopic, diachronic perspectives offered by exciting new histories of international organisations during the interwar period, during the Cold War, and in the era of decolonisation.Footnote ⁴⁶ There is ample scope for studies connecting the materiality of international organisations to the affective lives of the people who work in them.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, scholarship that bridges – and thus helps to explain – the gulf between the high ideals expressed by international organisations and their involvement in projects of imperialist domination or capitalist exploitation seems as necessary as ever.

Third, a reflexive turn that accounts for the effects of scholarship on the practice of international organisations may be well overdue. There is something strange about the passivity of the elephant in the parable that opened this chapter. What are the chances that the elephant would not react in some way to all that prodding and poking of its ears, trunk, and tail? Similarly, scholarly probings of international organisations are more than likely to produce some kind of response, for better or for worse. This relationship between cause and effect can be seen most obviously in self-conscious efforts by international lawyers to promote new rules on decision-making in particular international organisations or to reform the law on responsibility, or to devise new mechanisms to hold them to account. But more subtle effects – though no less far-reaching – may arise from re-visioning international organisations, to take one example, as an actor in ‘global administrative bodies’ operating in a ‘global administrative space’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Exploring these effects promises to offer a new way of connecting the ‘ways of seeing’ explored in this volume with the ‘ways of doing’ in international organisations.