‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order

On Friday 15 November 2024, the Institute for International Law and the Humanities hosted a lunchtime seminar, '‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919-1998), presented by Daniel R Quiroga-Villamarin and chaired by Dr Laura Petersen.
Even before the Unitedstatesean President Truman urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance has proven to be a fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. Indeed, in the collective imagination of practitioners and scholars alike, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a veritable “architecture” that overlooks “areas” of governance sustained by normative “pillars.” But international law’s castles, of course, were not built solely in the air. For the metaphorical use of architectonical language only hides international law’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which the “international” is produced, contested, and disputed. Conversely, my book project, takes the “architecture of international cooperation” as a relevant question for international legal history. Instead of taking purpose-built environments for granted, I trace the birth of what I call the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s “move to institutions” in the short twentieth century (1919-1998). With this, I refer to the emergence of buildings that claimed to serve as “international parliaments” throughout this period -especially those linked to universal or regional International Organizations. I follow this arc from “interwar” Geneva to the end of the Cold War, studying the ways in which this tendency to “parlamentarize” interpolity relations has mutated throughout the century. I do so by drawing from multilingual archival materials related to buildings erected in Geneva, New York City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Vienna, and Rome. By historicizing space and spatializing history, I explore the intersections between international law, democracy, and architecture in our unending quest to construct a just, and hopefully “better,” international order.