Seeing the International Law Commission

Since its creation by the United Nations in 1947, the International Law Commission has become firmly established as an authoritative expert organ within the international legal order. From the 1990s onwards, a number of legal and political developments have impacted the work of the Commission, raising questions about its role, its mandate and its authority. The aim of this thesis is to see the Commission and its members as they make sense of the work in which they are engaged. By centering the Commission’s repeated focus on itself – on what is doing and why it is doing that – the thesis asks: what does a posture of asking and not-answering ‘do’? What does this repeated move reveal about the International Law Commission, and in turn, about international law as a discipline? Seeing the International Law Commission combines extensive archival research with participant observation, uses a mix of historical, literary, and socio-legal methods and borrows from organizational studies and anthropology of international organizations. Offering the first and only systematic analysis of the International Law Commission’s understanding of itself, the thesis fits with an emerging call to reimagine the ways in which international institutions are studied within international legal scholarship.