The Rule of Law in Global Governance

LIEPP and CSO are glad to invite you to attend the seminar : 

The Rule of Law in Global Governance 

Monday June 17th 2019

12h00 - 13h45

Room LIEPP

254 boulevard Saint Germain, 75007 Paris 

Please register here

Presentation : 

 Ian Hurd

 Professor of Political Sciences

 University of Northwestern

Contemporary accounts of international law in global governance rest on a liberal model law. It sees international law in cooperative terms, as a set of choices made by governments that produce both individual and mutual gains. This begins with the idea that there is a harmony of interests across society and it ends with the prescription that governments should follow international law. However, global governance looks very different if we start instead by paying attention to inequality and differences of opinion: if we assume that laws and institutions advance some interests at the expense of others, then international law comes to be seen as taking sides in political struggles over the distribution of gains and loses in society. The ‘losers’ in global governace are not visible to the liberal approach, with the effect that liberal internationalism approaches fantasy as an analysis of global politics. This article sets the liberal approach alongside a more political alternative and shows how different intuitions about the relation between law and politics produce different conceptual, political, and methodological programs for scholars of global governance.

Discussion :

 Horatia Muir Watt

 PhD in Private International Law

 University of Paris II-Assas