ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the conversion of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a narrowly focused organization with an obscure mandate into the leading producer of knowledge about the international economy. The IMF that emerged from Bretton Woods was the institutional embodiment of a monetary disarmament treaty. In terms of legal doctrine, the IMF is a treaty organization whose staff speak for the treaty and its goals rather than for individual members. In bilateral surveillance, staff occupying a space of technical neutrality carries out serial routinized assessments of individual members. Multilateral surveillance moves the observing eye up one level, and examining how policies of different members interact in the world. Pinning down precisely what "surveillance" means for the IMF is not easy or necessarily productive, because it has become a catch-all term for almost all Fund activity aside from actual lending.
