Andrew Lang - Power, Law and the Global Economy

In this episode, we welcome Professor Andrew Lang (University of Edinburgh), a leading critical voice in international economic law and global political economy. Andrew’s work poses a deceptively simple but analytically demanding question: how do law and expertise make global markets possible, and what forms of power and inequality are sedimented within everyday technical decisions? Drawing on his influential scholarship on “global ungovernance” (co-authored with Deval Desai), the conversation examines how contemporary global governance operates through a conjunction of institution-building and managed instability. This is a mode of rule that incorporates critique, problematises its own foundations and keeps central objectives such as the “rule of law” or “sustainability” structurally open to revision. The discussion begins with Andrew’s formative engagement with the global justice movements of the early 2000s, and the enduring normative orientation they provided for his scholarship. We then turn to a core intervention in his work: the most consequential forms of expertise are often those that present themselves as technical and apolitical. These modes shape problem definitions, delineate what can be known or measured and determine whose knowledge carries authority within global governance. Joined by student questions, the conversation moves from the “impossibility of closure” to the implications of accountability, agency and ethical responsibility. We explore crisis as a governing strategy, alongside contemporary invocations of “polycrisis” and resilience. Particular attention is paid to technical domains, from carbon accounting standards to supply-chain sustainability metrics, which emerge not as peripheral details but as constitutive elements of the global political economy. The episode closes with a reflection on an unsettled moment in global order, one in which inherited assumptions have eroded, ethical questions can no longer be deferred and a new generation of scholars and practitioners must reconsider what it means to exercise international expertise. Andrew Lang is Professor of International Law and Global Governance at the University of Edinburgh. His research spans international economic law, global political economy and the politics of expertise, with particular emphasis on how legal and technical practices constitute markets and organise global economic life. Andrew Lang’s profile can be found here: https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/people/professor-andrew-lang We discussed: ‘Global disordering: Practices of reflexivity in global economic governance,’ European Journal of International Law. 2024. 35, 1, p. 1-47. ‘Introduction: Global Un-Governance,’ (with D. Desai), Transnational Legal Theory. 2020. 11, 3, p. 219-407.