Situating 'publicness': International Organizations and the Making of Global Classes

Theories of power in international institutional law continue to shape international jurists’ understanding of the ‘institutional’ dimension of the discipline and the world order more broadly. International organizations have historically been conceptualized on a spectrum between the two mainstream theories: functionalism-states as masters of international organizations- and cosmopolitan constitutionalism- international organizations as masters of the system. ‘Publicness’ runs like a red thread in both accounts of IOs, overshadowing the ways in which world institutions reconfigure production relations and make global classes around the materiality they manage. In this thesis, I focus on the parallel histories of the International Telecommunication Union, the International Maritime Organization and the International Tropical Timber Organization between 1960s and 1990s and how they institutionalized capitalist norms and practices around the materiality they manage.