International organizations— international legal persons created by treaties between states to pursue specific purposes and functions— have for almost 100 years been associated with the possibility of “international government,” and all of the utopian and dystopian associations that this term bears. Hailed as the solution to irrational nationalist particularism and the means to international coordination and cooperation to solve problems on a world- scale, a much- fretted about legal question has been whether and when the entities have exceeded the powers intended by their creators. In an era of globalization in which international organizations have come (in some fields of action) to play extensive global governance functions, the legal authority and legal accountability of such organizations has become all the more pressing. However, the international legal debate about the nature, mandate and regulation of international organizations— and the pathways to the expansion of their powers and activities— has tended to revolve around doctrinal questions of implied powers and subsequent practice. In this timely and ambitious book, Dr. Guy Fiti Sinclair develops a richly contextualized study that places the development of the functions and powers of three international organizations within the contemporary flux and movement of legal, political, economic, and social thought that formed the essential intellectual context for their evolving roles. Through his historical account of the development of the programming of the International Labour Organization (ILO), of the United Nations’ (UN) peacekeeping operations in Suez and the Congo, and of the World Bank’s “turn to governance,” Sinclair’s book adopts a genealogical and socio- legal method, reconstructing in convincing and elegantly presented detail the personalities, political projects, and legal problems that shaped the development of these organizations. Rather dry legal questions of treaty interpretation can now be read in the context of animated controversies refracting progressive reformist zeal, emergent welfarist and laborist political programs, an ethos of technical problem solving, and visions of the reconstitution of political, economic, and social order in the post- colonial world.