Rival Worlds and the Place of the Corporation in International Law

Struggles ‘over’ international law in the period between 1955 and 1974 should be understood not as a battle to control a pre-existing international law, but as marking a series of encounters between rival practices of world-making, each travelling with rival accounts of international law. The question of how to conceptualize the corporation, and its proper relation to law and state, was a key element of those rival accounts. In this chapter, we trace the (successful) effort to establish the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations, and the (unsuccessful) attempt to draft a binding convention. In this telling institutional moment, the struggle over the proper understanding of the relationship between international law, the state, and the corporation, which travels was also a struggle over the authorship of worlds, and the authority to govern them. Paying attention to such practices shows us that the battle lines were drawn in ways that upset the comfortable rehearsal of a North-South divide. Anti-colonial struggles, the incipient ‘Cold War’, the invention of ‘Development’, and the implementation of a (Marshall) plan to (re)construct Europe produced unexpected commonalities that included coalitions across North and South and instructive alliances between ‘public’ and ‘private’ actors. Slowing down our study of this moment reveals that much of what was at stake then remains so today, and that other worlds are still possible.