To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford University Press, 2017) was awarded the 2018 ESIL Book Prize. In this book, Guy Fiti Sinclair explores how international organisations (IOs) have expanded their powers over time without formally amending their founding treaties. IOs intervene in military, financial, economic, political, social and cultural affairs and increasingly take on roles not explicitly assigned to them by law. Sinclair contends that this ‘mission creep’ has allowed IOs to intervene internationally in a way that has allowed them to recast institutions within and interactions among states, societies and peoples on a broadly Western, liberal model.

Adopting a historical and interdisciplinary, socio-legal approach, Sinclair supports this claim through detailed investigations of historical episodes involving three very different organisations: the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations and the World Bank. The book draws on a wide range of institutional and archival materials, bringing to light little-known aspects of each organization’s activities, identifying continuities in the ideas and practices of international governance across the twentieth century and speaking to a range of pressing theoretical questions in present-day international law and international relations.

• Moderator: Vincent Chetail, Professor of International Law, The Graduate Institute

About the Speaker:

Guy Fiti Sinclair is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington Law School. His principal area of research and teaching is public international law, with a focus on international organisations law, the history and theory of international law and law and global governance. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Journal of International Law, an Associate Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and a member of the Editorial Board of Oxford International Organizations (OXIO).