In 1972, Laura Nader published her generationally influential article, “Up the Anthropologist.” The motivation for Nader’s intervention was borne partly out of her experience with students who felt daunted by the prospect of studying powerful social elites—what has now become popularly known as “studying up.” As a pioneering legal anthropologist, for Nader this often involved the study of law, especially elite lawyers. Nader outlined many of the opportunities and demands that would face anthropologists and others who sought to use ethnographic methods to study those who could articulate and promote their own representations in public, and actively limit researcher access to their workplaces.
Fifty years after Nader’s intervention, Dimitri van den Meerssche’s The World Bank’s Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice tackles this task of “studying up” at perhaps one of the most singularly powerful international institutions—the World Bank. Van Den Meerssche takes up this particular challenge when all of the barriers Nader identified early on have only intensified. Not only is the Bank fully enmeshed in the defense of its own public image, but it is fully aware of the possibility that researchers could take any access as an opportunity to construct their own critical narratives
Van Den Meerssche has thus produced a fascinating analysis of how to study such an institution under these constraints, as well as a meditation on what critique of international institutions should look like. What he produces is not a traditional ethnography but, as Nader presaged, a creative empirical study that takes advantage of the Bank’s own complexity to dive deeply into the daily world in which the Bank’s lawyers operate.
The World Bank’s Lawyers structure follows its core analytical stratagem: each of the Bank’s three primary General Counsels (GC) from 1983-2016 receives two focused chapters. Van Den Meerssche gained access to the Bank during a three-month position during the time of the third GC examined, Anne-Marie Leroy. This experience sensitized him to the workings of the Bank’s lawyers, and oriented how he explored the tenure of all three GCs through interviews and the ability to request from the Bank itself access to its own prodigious internal documentary production. While many of his requests were denied without comment, he was able to gain access to often quite detailed records from this thirty-year period.
What Van Den Meerssche’s study reveals then is not some set of summary conclusions about “law” or “the rule of law” at the Bank but the way in which each General Counsel attempted to transform the role of law and lawyers at the Bank based on their quite distinct visions of lawyering. Heavily influenced by Actor-Network Theory—inspired by Bruno Latour and often associated with Science and Technology Studies—Van Den Meerssche shows how each GC worked to influence one node within this complex ecosystem, with great attention to the levers they used to reorient the work of the Bank’s lawyers and their place within the Bank’s programming more generally.
Thus, for each GC—in turn, Ibrahim Shihata (1983-1998), Roberto Dañino (2003-2006), and Anne-Marie Leroy (2009-2016)—Van Den Meerssche centers their personal ambitions in an almost organic reconstruction of the Bank in a space between nation-states and among other international institutions. He is thus able to show that there was never any stable concept of the “rule of law” at work at the Bank; instead each GC drew on their particular background to promote quite thick and divergent concepts of the rule of law in order to re-shape the place of law at the Bank—all while engaging and transforming the practices of their predecessors. Each of the two chapters devoted to these three tenures is filled with a dense tapestry of how each GC used daily and routine practices to implement these visions.
Herein, Ibrahim Shihata is cast as championing a “(liberal) trusteeship ideal of international law(yering)” (P. 7) which emphasized the gatekeeping role of lawyers as limiting avenues of World Bank programming. Shihata constantly worked to control how other sectors of the Bank thought about law through his own writings and lobbying but, most powerfully from Van Den Meerssche’s vantage, in managing the daily work and interactions of the Bank’s lawyers themselves. We are treated to intricate reconstructions of events such as the “distinctive ceremonial pattern[s]” of discussions by Bank lawyers among themselves and at meetings with other authorities at the Bank (P. 53). Crucially, while Shihata deployed a strategic formalism about law that foregrounded the authority of lawyers, it also opened up new avenues for Bank programming by naturalistically linking legal reform to private-sector-led economic growth (P. 65).
Shihata’s view of the proper role of the GC and the Bank’s lawyers then becomes a point of contrast for subsequent GCs. Many lawyers wedded to Shihata’s vision projected a narrative of loss whereby “law” became irrelevant within the Bank. But as Van Den Meerssche makes clear, this loss is, in reality, simply a transformation affected by subsequent GCs’ deploying many of the same tactics to reshape the daily routines and work of the Bank’s lawyers to pursue their own visions.
Shihata’s replacement, Roberto Dañino, is then introduced as presenting a stark shift in what a Bank lawyer should be. Dañino’s background as a self-styled cosmopolitan corporate lawyer moved him to embrace the moralizing power of “human rights” often invoked to criticize the Bank. He thus cast his tenure as rescuing the GC and the Bank’s lawyers from a crisis of relevance. The new Bank lawyer would not be an impediment to the aspiration of other facets of the Bank, but an enabler or “how to” lawyer. This fusion of liberal legalism wed to corporate pragmatism would not circumscribe or limit the Bank’s programming by taking on human rights concerns, but would ultimately vastly expand it (most notably to criminal law).
This spread “law” throughout the Bank, but also—critically for Van Den Meerssche’s approach—a whole range of new processes to diagnosis and evaluate the work of the Bank’s lawyers and the programming of the Bank writ large. Dañino used surveys of clients and various auditing practices to manage the Bank’s lawyers in the same way as such audits were increasingly imposed on borrower states. He introduced a language of “risk-analysis” to undermine Shihata’s emphasis on the Bank’s Articles of Agreement as the source of the GC’s authority, and saw lawyers as leaders in global policy reform. Most interesting, Dañino attempted to “enrol” various leading academics to transform their critical positions on the Bank and incorporate them as external allies as part of this new cosmopolitan vision.
When Leroy took over in 2009, she implemented her own new set managerial practices to transform the daily life of the Bank’s lawyers. She jettisoned Dañino’s justificatory invocation of human rights, but intensified his framing of “risk” as central to the Bank’s operation. Her background in French public sector administrative lawyering, in contrast to both of her predecessors, centered risk management as a practice of legal anti-formalism which sought to insulate the Bank from its various critics even as it again expanded the “apolitical” from economics to nearly every aspect of modern governance. Leroy thus completed a shift from Shihata’s more traditional fiduciary view to transform concerns with politics to concerns with managing risks, and from legal rules to “principles-based” legal practice. This shift summarily led the “rule of law” at the Bank to become a “culture of informed risk-taking modeled on the image of a flexible, dynamic, decentralized and outcome- oriented administrative practice” (P. 197). Such certainly ended Shihata’s vision of lawyering, but again spread Leroy’s vision extensively throughout the institution.
It is difficult to do justice to the detail in which Van Den Meerssche reconstructs each of these shifts through an array of documentary practices and shifting relationships. As he describes it, the Bank’s rule of law is a lively “moveable feast” (P. 10). In tracing the life of various managerial and project assessment documents, he stays true to his methodological tactic of not trying to demystify or deconstruct the work of the Bank’s lawyers, but to lay out the very material realities in which they existed with dispassionate rigor. He sought to reveal each actor in his ambit as a “full-blown mediator” (P. 285) of their own reality—a mediation that has practical effects even if by some standards incoherent, or self-serving, or both.
This methodological choice is framed by the two legal anthropologists who inhabit the interstices of the book’s footnotes, Galit Safaty and Annelise Riles. Van Den Meerssche embraces Riles, citing her 2011 Collateral Knowledge as inspiration as it sought to unpack the technical and documentary practices of financial regulators. In contrast, he provides a strident critique of Safarty’s own more traditional 2005-2006 ethnographic study of World Bank Values in Translation. Safaty was notably open about her strong normative priors in support of human rights, and critical of Dañino’s tenure as a failure to truly integrate human rights concerns into the Bank’s “rule of law.” Van Den Meerssche sees this commitment as missing much of the real material operation of the Bank by sidelining the daily world of lawyering his work reveals without prejudice. Given the access that he did receive to the Bank and its internal documentation, his methodological choice clearly led to victory in studying what many considered a now impenetrable empirical subject.
At this point, evaluations of The World Bank’s Lawyers could diverge. Van Den Meerssche’s enthusiastic embrace of Latour invites all the controversies that Latour’s approach to critique has inspired—as obscuring the material realities of power and influence beyond the “life worlds” of the subjects it tries to reconstruct. Here Van Den Meerssche perhaps suffers from the original sin of his inspiration, as Latour’s own oft-cited ethnography of the French Conseil d’Etat was notorious for its many claims regarding anthropology without engaging with any of its practitioners or controversies. Today, those like Nader who struggled with these issues have produced generations of ethnographies of powerful institutions—legal and otherwise—of which Safaty’s is but one, and otherwise missing in the text. For social movement actors unfamiliar or averse to Latour’s ANT/STS framing, much work would be needed to translate the fruits of this perspective as has been done in these other traditions of modern legal anthropology.
Still, Van Den Meerssche’s dedication and methodological seriousness provides numerous entry-points for interested readers. As with other recent works which attempt to recapture the material life of international law beyond its traditional sources, he convincingly demonstrates that an institution like the World Bank, even one focused facet like the General Counsel, can never be understood through legal analysis alone. Furthermore, the implicit critique his work enables is nothing less than vicious to common claims that international institutions are “constitutionalizing” and the prospect that non-radical reform of the Bank could be transformative for the form of lawyering it embodies. It would be now near impossible to take at face value any claim that the “rule of law” is some consistent rubric for understanding how the Bank’s lawyers operate. It is indeed a cold, dispassionate dissection that lays bare the Bank’s almost a-human view of lawyering as an enabling adjunct of the technocratic regulatory rationalism at the hear of global popular discontent.
The World Bank’s Lawyers stands out among the work of a new generation of international law scholars looking to expand and contest the very nature of international law scholarship. However one might feel about the nature of his critique, he has succeeded in provoking any serious reader to consider how knowledge about the field is produced, and what the aims of critical scholarship in international law should be.
