Guy Fiti Sinclair - To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States

Conversations : Globalization and Law

Our guest for this episode is Guy Fiti Sinclair, one of the world's foremost experts in the areas of international organizations law, the history of international law, and law and social theory, as well as the author of To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (OUP 2017).
In the book, Guy provides a detailed history of crucial periods of development for three major international organisations - the International Labor Organization from the 1920s until the end of World War II, the emergence of United Nations peacekeeping in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the World Bank's 'turn to governance' in the 1990s - to demonstrate how the lawyers working for them drew upon ideas from domestic constitutional law and corporate management to expand those organisations' powers over time without formally amending their founding treaties. Moreover, Guy argues that this expansion was undertaken and rationalized as necessary to a process of making modern states on a broadly Western model; and that international law has played a central role in that process.
In addition to an appointment as Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, Guy is or has been a Senior Fellow on the Melbourne Law Masters at Melbourne Law School, an External Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law, Associate Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and the Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Law.
Leading the interview was André Nuñes Chaïb, Assistant Professor of Globalization and Law at Maastricht University, with the help of Aravind Ganesh, Postdoctoral Researcher in International and Comparative Law. The podcast was edited by Renaud Callaert, a student on the LLB programme at Maastricht University Faculty of Law.