The fundamental recognition in this book is that the issue of what international legal principles are applicable to the operations of the IFIs is an important topic that would benefit from more rigorous study. Twelve deeply committed contributors - whose work spans the academic, policy, and activist spectrum - suggest that a better understanding of these legal issues could help both the organizations and their Member States structure their transactions in ways that are more compatible with their developmental objectives and their international responsibilities.

In this new volume in the Elements series, Daniel D. Bradlow traces the history and development of international law and international financial institutions from 1918 to today, providing a detailed overview of the legal frameworks within which such institutions were established and operate, and which structure their relationships with their member states and their citizens. The book opens with the inter-war years, the Bretton Woods Conference, and background on the treaties establishing the IMF and the World Bank. It then discusses the Articles of Agreement of the IMF and the IBRD, providing information on their governance arrangements, mandates, and operating principles. The international legal status of these two international financial institutions, their international legal rights, responsibilities and obligations, and their privileges and immunities are also examined. In later chapters, the book explores how the structure, functions, and operations of the World Bank and IMF have evolved since their establishment and examines the regional development banks and the regional financial arrangements that were created after them. The book concludes by exploring the challenges that international financial institutions are currently facing, and the contributions that international law can make to help them successfully meet these challenges.

Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.

The Politics of International Law offers an introduction to the role of law in contemporary international affairs. Through a case study-driven analysis of topics such as human rights, the use of force, international environmental law, international trade law, international criminal justice and the right to self-determination, the book explains the interaction between law and politics in the world today, demonstrating that one cannot be understood withoutthe other.The book is divided into two parts. Part I introduces contemporary international law with a focus on constitutive legal principles such as sovereignty, territorial integrity and the legal equality of states. Through these introductory chapters, students are encouraged to take a holistic view of the processes and actors that drive international affairs, and explore the fascinating paradox that while international law is largely created through political processes, it also constitutes theenvironment in which international politics is practiced.Part II builds on the foundations laid in Part I to analyze contemporary controversies in international law and politics. Chapters focus on a number of substantive issue areas, including international environmental law, international economic law, human rights law, self-determination and secession, the law governing the use of force, and international criminal justice.This book is written to impart on readers a deepened understanding of both the possibilities and limits of international law as a tool for structuring relations in the world.Digital Formats and ResourcesAlso available as an e-book with functionality, navigation features, and links that offer extra learning support

The Elgar Companion to The World Bank provides a comprehensive review of the past 80 years for this powerful development institution. Using different theoretical approaches from an expert group of scholars as well as practitioners, it presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the World Bank and the wider field of International Relations.

The World Bank and Sustainable Development: Legal Essays collects works from the past ten years by David Freestone, former Deputy General Counsel and Senior Adviser at the World Bank. The essays offer a unique perspective founded on the author’s years of experience at the World Bank and cover a wide-range of topics. Updated by current Bank Staff members, together these seven legal essays represent a seminal body of work from a uniquely qualified voice in international environmental law.