“Suitable Palaces”: Navigating Layers of World Ordering at the Centre William Rappard (1923–2013)

Abstract

Abstract International law “moved to institutions” in the early twentieth century. While recent literature has explored the intellectual trajectories of these international organisations, most accounts divorce their analysis from the seemingly banal histories of the “buildings, staffs, and letterheads.” Conversely, I put the spatiality of the Centre William Rappard at the forefront of the history of interwar internationalism—and its echoes throughout the century. Erected in 1926 to serve the International Labour Organisation, this building was repurposed to host the World Trade Organisation in 1975. In this article, I reconstruct how struggles over claims of the (in)dignity of international order can be explored through disputes related to the political economy, material culture, and architecture of this infrastructure of global governance.