The making of the global economy: International law and the Global South

Abstract

Abstract Across a fractured geopolitical landscape, the Global South faces renewed constraints on its capacity to pursue sovereign development. Rather than treating these pressures as symptoms of a ‘new Cold War’, this article returns to the original Cold War as a decisive moment in the consolidation of the legal and epistemic foundations of today’s global economy. It argues that the Cold War was a pivotal phase in a longer history of disembedding, through which economic governance was separated from social and political life and reorganized through juridical, financial, and metrological techniques. While the Soviet project often advanced more solidaristic visions of development, both socialist and Western frameworks ultimately relied on technocratic and growth-centred models that narrowed the space for postcolonial demands for redistribution and structural reform. Through a longue durée analysis of the colonial, Cold War and post-Cold War periods, the article traces how international law and development co-evolved as interlocking techniques that rearticulated imperial hierarchies into global economic norms and institutions. Revisiting this history reveals the juridical infrastructures that continue to reproduce global inequality and the legal imaginations and material sites through which the Global South continues to contest its fate.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Leiden Journal of International Law, 2026 · DOI ↗