Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin

Even before the U.S. President, Harry S. Truman, urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance has proven to be a fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. Indeed, in the collective imagination of practitioners and scholars alike, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice. But international law’s castles, of course, were not built solely in the air, for the metaphorical use of architectonic language only hides international law’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which the “international” is produced, contested, and disputed. Instead of taking purpose-built environments for granted, Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin traces a genealogy of the emergence of the international parliamentary complex as a spatial technology of global governance (1918–1998). During his fellowship, Quiroga-Villamarin will be carrying out archival work in relation to the making of the Vienna International Centre (VIC) of 1979 and its relation to the establishment of the United Nations Office at Vienna in 1980.

Dissertation Project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Doc.CH Grant 20077 (2021-2024).