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Naming Global Administrative Law
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2005
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ColonialismLatin American StudyDecolonialityLawAdministrative LawLatin AmericaGlobal StudiesGlobal Administrative LawSecret DetentionLatin American SocietyLatin American HistoryInstitutional ChangeBiopoliticsLatin American StudiesInterdisciplinary StudiesInternational LawPublic International LawComparative LawHumanitiesInternational Organization
There is something about the act of naming that seems to work a kind of magic. When in the 1960s and 70s people began to insist that the practice of abduction, secret detention, torture, and eventual murder which had developed in parts of Latin America be called “disappearance,” and that “disappearance” be understood in this context as having a transitive inflection, they did not only cause a new entry to be added to our dictionaries. They turned a series of private, at any rate not widely known, histories into a big public issue. They established the systemic significance of events which until that point could be imagined as disconnected or aberrant. They mobilized a constituency for investigation, action, and institutional change. Many of the same things might be said about the person who looked at a whole range of developments to do with the enhanced interconnectedness of people and processes at distant localities and, for better or worse, called this “globalization.” Or the person who alerted us to the importance of variability among living organisms and ecological complexes, and to the erosion of that variability, and termed the category “biodiversity.” From this angle, the first and perhaps most striking achievement of those responsible for New York University’s Global Administrative Law Research Project is that they have named a phenomenon. In doing so, they have invited us to think about how seemingly disparate issues, structures and processes may be connected—how they might currently be connected, but also how more integrated global systems might be established in the future. With “global administrative law” comes an agenda for conceptual reflection, empirical study, and institutional redesign that gives shape and focus to an immense range of large and small questions about the legal control of decisionmaking in the contemporary world. Linked to this, some of the many other valuable things about the project and its associated activities have to do, for me, with the way