Local Space, Global Life
The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development

This book examines the everyday functioning and impact of international law and the development project, particularly across cities in emergent nations.

Luis Eslava (Author)

9781107465091, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 October 2016

374 pages, 36 b/w illus. 7 maps
22.5 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.54 kg

'A fascinating book. Law shapes the worlds we inhabit, both locally and globally, and Eslava shows us how by mapping the formal and informal arrangements that generate urban space. The surprise is the significance of international law in the most local of places. A terrific case study of law in development.' David Kennedy, Harvard University, Massachusetts, and author of Of War and Law

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.

1. Introduction
2. Building the global from the local
3. Development and the nation-state
4. Development changes places
5. The making of a new Bogotá
6. The local self of the international
7. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Law [L], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Hispanic & Latino studies [JFSL4]