A radical turn in International Law and Development? Corporations, capitalist states and imperial governance

ABSTRACT This article describes how the liberal orthodoxy informing the field known as ‘Law and Development’ (L&D), as a field of knowledge, obscures contemporary imperial and neo-colonial governance practices. Through the metaphor of the disciplinary ‘picket fence’, and engagement with three nodes of tension from colonial governance reproduced today, it reveals L&D’s limited and partial production of knowledge on governance exercised by two key actors – transnational corporations and capitalist states. This article argues for a new, more explicitly critical, trajectory of research that foregrounds the corporation-nation governance nexus within a more radical International Law & Development (ILD) field of research.