This chapter examines the context and consequences of the Registry ReVision project from the perspective of its management ideas and practices. While championed by Herman von Hebel, newly elected registrar of the court in 2013, ReVision was a long-term project of institutional transformation fostered and executed by external consultants, internal experts, judges, and staff members. While taking place in a wider context of court contention and dissent from certain quarters, ReVision told a uniquely managerial story about the court’s deficiencies and future organisational needs in ways that prioritised certain contexts, problems, and voices over others. And although its effect was to depoliticise the court, it simultaneously offered this effort as the extent and limit of the court’s own political ambitions. By surveying the actors, practices, and documentation of ReVision, this chapter offers an account of the reorganisation as a project of professional comfort.

After briefly comparing the findings of the above cases, Chapter 7 considers their broader reach through a preliminary exploration of the mobilisation of ethics experts in the case of synthetic biology of the United States. It then connects the argument of the book to the literature on the politics of ethics in IR, making it clear that the expertisation of ethics has in fact allowed for a more efficient political mobilisation of ethics. It finally points to the relevance of the book’s findings to existing debates on the making of knowledge, agendas and policies in global governance.

This concluding chapter draws The Law of the List together and is structured in three parts. First, the key arguments of the book are reiterated by providing a brief summary of each chapter. Second, six original contributions the book brings to the study of global security law and governance are highlighted. These include: (i) studying global law empirically as an assemblage of relations and practices, (ii) studying ‘the global’ through local structure-making sites rather than from international institutions (like the Security Council), (iii) mapping the politics of expertise in global law-making, (iv) studying technologies of governance as devices that assemble legal and political relations and that have performative effects, (v) analysing how preemptive security produces novel rearrangements of law and governance that require empirical study, and (vi) rethinking global emergency governance as something assembled from mundane practices, rather than an effect of sovereign power. The chapter closes by arguing that the Law of the List, first introduced as a temporary preventive measure by the Security Council, is now a permanent feature of the global security law landscape. This book is an experiment in strategic knowledge production and an invitation for further socio-legal studies of global security law to come.

In the early years of the Cold War, important debates took place on the nature and scope of both slavery and forced labour. The adoption of the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery in 1956 and the vote on the Convention on the Abolition of Forced Labour in 1957 were preceded by long and heated discussions within key international bodies such as the United Nations Social and Economic Council (‘ECOSOC’) and the International Labour Organization (‘ILO’). Yet, conventional legal histories tend to minimise these debates on the ground that they relate to the ‘political context’ of the Cold War. What is more, they tend to present the adoption of the two conventions as building blocks of the abolitionary project pursued by modern international law. My aim in this chapter is to destabilise such linear narratives. Focusing on the issue of forced labour, I will make five points.