The Infrastructure of International Law-Making: How Buildings Shape the Publicness of the Global Law-Making System

Abstract

International law is a peculiar form of global ordering, one marked by the “imperative of trying to turn a capacity for crude coercion into legitimate authority.”1 The international law-making system is therefore discursively structured around an aspiration to “publicness,”2 around a commitment to secure “some responsiveness to the claims and interests developed within the relevant publics.”3 As it is evident to any observer, this commitment is oftentimes not honored and the process is frequently detached from the ideas, interests, and priorities of those whose lives are ultimately governed by international law.4 The typical analysis of this detachment tends to focus on the role played by the enabling norms—specifically, the norms governing representation, participation, and deliberation in the international law-making system.5 In this Essay, I argue, however, that the actual publicness of the system is also shaped—sometimes in combination with the law, sometimes in competition with it—by the infrastructure of international law-making.6 For all the grand statements about transparency and public engagement, for all the sincere attempts at inclusion and all the ostentatious legal principles, my claim is that the built environment—the chambers, the fences, the checkpoints, the hallways—generally ensures, both materially and symbolically, that the sites of decision making, where law is ultimately created, are distanced from multiple sites of contestation, where the various publics and counterpublics make their voices heard.7