This book is a response to my dissatisfaction with the way in which international law and the development project tend to be approached as separate fields of academic and institutional practice – as deterritorialized and exceptional ventures, frictionless discourses that cross our lives only occasionally. Yet although it may not be obvious, the argument I advance in this book is that we, and the spaces surrounding us, are continually being constituted and reconstituted by international law through its marriage – in historical, ideological, economic and institutional terms – to the development project. The might of this encounter, I suggest, permeates our desires, the ends we aspire to and the means we use to attain such ends. The twin siblings of international law and the development project shape our territories, dreams and forms of action relentlessly. In my view, our failure to pay attention to their expansive and joint operation occludes much about how we inhabit the world and about the consequences of these modes of habitation.

As a Latin American holding a Colombian passport (and having only recently acquired an Australian passport), I have been well aware of this fact. Travelling between Bogotá, Boston, Frankfurt, Melbourne and London, amongst many other cities, to conduct fieldwork, attend conferences and speak at workshops during the making of this book, I have been asked many times about my legal status. And every time my status has been questioned in each of these places, I have felt the tug of an international normative order under construction. Even though migration authorities, rental contracts and labour codes have been bedevilled with idiosyncrasies in each place, and even though the peoples of these places have very different stories to tell about themselves and their relation to the land, at the end of the day these particularities have not been great. Beyond these differences, I have always felt a strong alliance between law, ideas of progress, and the sensation that by abiding by the law, some kind of development is ensured; a new step in the long dureé of global modernity is attained.

This book presents the results of a decade of research into the close relationship between international law and the development project.