False Universalism of Global Governance Theories: Global Constitutionalism, Global Administrative Law, International Criminal Institutions and the Global South

Why are theories of global governance unsatisfactory? Why are theories of global governance unable to integrate the lived realities of the people of the global South? International law and its institutions are growing at an unprecedented speed and this expansion has captured the curiosity of international lawyers and international law scholars. As international law and its institutions continue to grow, there are concurrent concerns regarding their democratic foundations. A large body of scholarship encapsulates these anxieties through the prism of global governance. In particular, two specific theories of global governance, global constitutionalism, and global administrative law, seek to introduce ideas of constitutionalism and administration as theories of governance. Global governance institutions seek to regulate the people of the global South, but both global constitutionalism and global administrative law are uninformed about the people living in these regions.

Two central arguments are pursued in this dissertation. First, as theories of global governance, both global constitutionalism and global administrative law ignore and obscure the colonial and imperial history of international law and its institutions. By ignoring international laws lineage, scholars are not able to accurately theorise contemporary global governance through constitutionalism and administration. Without the inclusion of the global South, global constitutionalism and global administrative law, as theories, are caricatures of western universalism embedded in international law. In this respect, these two theories represent a false universalism, which must be challenged. The second argument is that there must be an engagement with the global South if global governance is to be theorised accurately and holistically. As part of the second argument, this dissertation turns to the question of how we might theorise global governance from the perspective of the global South.

In pursuing these two arguments, this dissertation is grounded in Third World Approaches to International Law. In order to present the foregoing arguments, this analysis will rely on three case studies from international criminal law and its respective institutions: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court.