(2024) 5 TWAIL Review 30-50
ISSN 2563-6693
Published under a Creative Commons licence. 

International law is largely assumed to be the product of sovereign states who freely create, join, and adhere to international treaties and other international legal instruments. Recent TWAIL scholarship, however, suggests that it is international law that creates, modifies, and legitimates states. In this paper, I advance this provocation through a case study of the neoliberalization of the Indian state and, specifically, that of Indian agrobiodiversity. I argue that the neoliberal transformation of the Indian state was a result of dialogic and multiscalar processes in which the neoliberal Indian state was constructed as a legitimate actor by international institutions and through the disciplinary power of international law. It further shows how evolving modes of capital accumulation are mutually constitutive of changes in international law, which ultimately rely on novel but nonunique technologies of government. Interrogating the ensemble of technologies, discourses, and institutions within this recent history illuminates the overlapping complexities structured by the productive power of international law.