Making it Work: Law's Agency in Global Governance

Résumé En

This paper presents a research agenda for the study of law in the global context. Inspired by the work of Annelise Riles, it invites legal scholars in the field of global governance and law beyond the state to 'take on the legal technicalities' of globalisation. Law and lawyers have a core role in the conception, the construction and the functioning of global regulatory settings. However, the study of the legal technicalities of global governance has been overlooked, both by the theoretically-minded literature on law beyond the state-which tends to look at more 'fundamental' features of law and politics in the global context-and by those studying the actual workings of global governance-who take legal technique for granted as one among other instruments of regulation. We argue that legal technique is too interesting to be reduced to a consequence of wider globalising trends or to a simple instrument of technocratic governance and of power dynamics that escape democratic scrutiny. The study of law as technique can offer insights into how law constitutes social, political or economic phenomena. This kind of self-consciousness and self-reflection is crucial in legal scholarship especially today, as it is a necessary step for opening the way to transformative politics in the field of global governance and beyond. After explaining the drivers and assumptions of our approach and its connection to other research agendas, we expose the possible directions of the inquiry that we propose.