Beyond indeterminacy: On reputation and interpretation in international law
This dissertation explores the role of reputation in the practice of interpretation in international law. First, it argues that reputation has been fundamentally misconceptualised in legal scholarship, and proposes a more sociologically-inspired understanding of the concept. It then argues that in the frequent absence of centralized interpretation and enforcement in international law, reputation has an important role in processes of stabilization and change in the practice of interpretation: participants in that practice care about what others think of them, and therefore meaningfully orient their interpretive expressions towards each other. Interpretations of international law stabilize and change as a result. It is by way of such processes that indeterminacy makes way for relative determinacy, and international law is ‘made’ and ‘remade’. The project explores interpretation under the spell of reputation in two case studies: the interpretation of the principle of self-determination as codified in the UN Charter, and the interpretation of the ‘political prohibition clause’ in the World Bank’s Articles of Agreement.