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

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.

Luis Eslava is a lecturer in international law at Kent Law School, a senior fellow at Melbourne Law School, and an international professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia. He teaches and writes in the areas of international law, international legal theory and history, anthropology of international law, public law, law and development, and urban law and politics.