ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights several traits of institutional design that characterise the current discontent among states with liberal institutionalist governance. It discusses these traits with states’ critiques of transnationalism. The chapter analyses how states respond to such frustration by developing policies and practices designed to reclaim sovereign manoeuvrability by circumventing or creatively navigating these same international legal structures. This development draws on the very same transnational structures and modus operandi as foreseen by transnational law scholars. The chapter argues that in contrast to the predictions of transnational legal scholarship, this form of transnationalism is increasingly used as a managerial tool to limit the impact or development of more traditional and liberal forms of international law. The expansion and increased institutionalisation of international law itself seem to have created the structural premise for this type of politics of international law. In sum, international law has developed to a point where some states feel threatened by their own creation.
