Dr. Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín (SNSF/University of Vienna) Architects of the Better Worod: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order, 1898-1998 Abstract Even before the US President Harry Truman famously 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 had already proven to be fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. In the collective imagination of both practitioners and scholars, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a structure with its own “architecture” that overlooks areas of governance sustained by normative pillars. And yet, international law’s castles were not built solely in the air. The metaphorical use of architectonical language in the existing literature only hides the discipline’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which internation...
