A radical turn in International Law and Development? Corporations, capitalist states and imperial governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes how the liberal orthodoxy informing the field known as ‘Law and Development’ (L&D), as a field of knowledge, obscures contemporary imperial and neo-colonial governance practices. Through the metaphor of the disciplinary ‘picket fence’, and engagement with three nodes of tension from colonial governance reproduced today, it reveals L&D’s limited and partial production of knowledge on governance exercised by two key actors – transnational corporations and capitalist states. This article argues for a new, more explicitly critical, trajectory of research that foregrounds the corporation-nation governance nexus within a more radical International Law & Development (ILD) field of research.