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Lys Kulamadayil
The World Development Report 2017 enthusiastically endorses law as means of governance and as a mediating force to power. Focusing on the role law plays in societies, it emphasizes its potential of enabling contestation. By contrasting this vision of law with the engagement of populist economic nationalists with domestic legal institutions, this chapter shows that the vision that underlies the WDR17 is, at best, an idealized vision of an internationalized rule of law. Economic populism, as is argued here, has a much more ambivalent relationship with law, which, due to the claim of representing the demos, leads to a stronger sense of entitlement in shaping, breaking and undermining legal institutions in the domestic sphere. Since international law is less susceptible to populist appropriation than domestic law, populists are more likely to reject it completely rather than bending it to their will.
