Catherine Brolmann, The Institutional Veil in Public International Law: International Organisations and the Law of Treaties

Catherine Brölmann's book is a welcome addition to literature addressing the role of intergovernmental organisations (henceforth ‘institutions’, or ‘IGOs’ for comparative purposes) as autonomous actors within international law. Given the importance of autonomous organisations in the delivery of effective collective security and peacekeeping, this book can be seen as a valuable addition to the literature analysing and perhaps developing the conceptual framework surrounding conflict and security law. On the whole, emphasis so far has been on how institutions (though not always just IGOs) change or distort the rather flat Westphalian landscape,1 whereas Brölmann's book takes an altogether different approach. It places its analysis at the centre of that landscape, focusing on the archetypal horizontal structure of the law of treaties, and is perhaps more effective for this very reason. This is a carefully crafted and considered account of the difficulty of accommodating non-state actors within a legal system which,...