What does this award mean to you?

I was truly delighted about the award because I think it was a recognition of my dissertation’s interdisciplinary ambitions. While I am an international lawyer by training, I have always sought to engage very closely with scholars of both legal history and European and Global History. And from the outset of the project, I knew that it could resonate with wider transdisciplinary concerns as it also engaged with key themes in the fields of International Relations, the Anthropology of International Institutions, and even Architectural and Design History. But all of that, of course, is easier said than done!

In practice, truly interdisciplinary work is hard — and often not well rewarded. To be honest, I often feared that my dissertation would end up being “too historical” or “architectural” for mainstream legal scholars, while at the same time proving to be “too legal” for the social sciences. In fact, my own field of international legal history has been somewhat torn by recent debates in relation to disciplinary gatekeeping, turf wars, and a somewhat misguided attempt by some legal scholars to defend our own “juridical method” against the encroachment by historians — see, generally, my review essay in Global Intellectual History last year in relation to these controversies.

As such, I felt extremely happy when the European International Studies Association (EISA), which has an extremely diverse and broad membership but is strongly anchored in the field of International Relations, recognised the interdisciplinary potential of the project. I think this is what the award committee noted when it highlighted that the dissertation provided “a genuine model of what an astute articulation of law, international history, and political theory can bring to the study of international relations, across time and places”. I think this speaks to the growing awareness of the need for interdisciplinary approaches to make sense of our increasingly convoluted world.

And I think it also bears witness to how well our Geneva Graduate Institute is placed for this sort of research projects! In many universities, speaking across disciplines is almost an impossible venture. Whereas, during my doctorate, I was firmly anchored in both the International Law and International History and Politics Departments — while at the same time my affiliation with the Global Governance Centre allowed to be in close contact with researchers from all fields and traditions. Including, of course, International Relations.

Can you remind us of the main message of your thesis?

“‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order 1919–1998” is the first book-length analysis of the architecture of international cooperation as a central component of international legal history. It studies the intersections between the built environment, democratic ideals, and the institutionalisation of international law in the twentieth century. During this period, multiple international institutions designed and sponsored the construction of a series of purpose-built edifices to give the international community a room of its own. I follow this process from the first Hague Peace Conference (1899), through the Versailles settlement (1919), all the way to the end of the Cold War (1998). I analyse these new edifices in relation to the promise of democratising interpolity relations throughout the century: from Geneva to New York City, from Bogotá to Addis Ababa, and from Vienna to Rome.

The architecture of these new sites, I argue, is a material witness of the tensions of this unfulfilled quest for global democracy. In “Architects of the Better World”, I show that despite the lofty goals that animated the design and construction of these edifices, they were riddled with contradictions. To erect them, local power constellations made decisions with global repercussions in relation to their location, hiring practices, or funding. To design them, nationalist sentiments shaped the aesthetical considerations of what the international should look like. To run them, structures of vertical hierarchy were built to temper their democratic promise of horizontal equality. My monograph is neither a blind celebration nor a blanket condemnation of this quixotic and contradictory project. Rather, I capture the richness of this historical struggle to democratise international law through the built environment — offering insights for our own contemporary efforts to promote a democratic and equitable international order.

My book manuscript is now under review with a leading university press, and I hope it will be accessible for a broader readership very soon! I am also very grateful to the series editors of the “Voices in International Relations” series for their advice and to a long list of mentors for their support and encouragement — perhaps first among them, the members of my doctoral committee: Professors Andrea Bianchi, Carolyn Biltoft, Samuel Moyn, and Fuad Zarbiyev.

With the 88th General Assembly session now taking place in New York, and multilateralism weaker than ever, can we be confident about the future of international governance in Geneva?

I happen to be currently based in New York City now, in fact! Given that I have just taken up a position as one of the two inaugural Hauser/Remarque Global Fellows in International Law and European History at New York University, this is a question that has followed my path after my departure from Geneva — which, by the way, also included a stop in another city intimately connected to the UN: Vienna, Austria. In truth, it is hard to be optimistic today about the future of multilateralism, either in Geneva, New York City, Bogotá, or anywhere else. And yet, for exactly the same set of reasons, never has multilateralism seemed as urgent and as important as it is now!

This is not to say that some of the criticisms levelled against the institutions of international governance are not important. But rather, that many of them are not really “new”. A key insight from my research is that the demand for a more democratic world order — which is not more than roughly a century old — has always been fraught by internal tensions and external oppositions. And yet, decade after decade, a plethora of actors (be they individuals, civil servants, architects, lawyers, diplomats, or civil society activists) invested considerable efforts in constructing an international order bound to the rule of law. We live, for better or worse, in the world they created. And it falls up to us to pick up their mantle — however flawed. And most importantly, I show in my book manuscript that this process has always been open-ended and iterative in nature: it seems that “democratising” is a verb that can only be used as a gerund. That is equally true in moments of relative optimism (like in 1919–1920, 1945, or 1989–1991) and in those of brutal pessimism (like in 1939 or 1973). The same is true, I believe, for 2025!

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Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award 2025 of the European International Studies Association (EISA) during the last Pan-European Conference on International Relations held in Bologna on 25–29 August. This award recognises the PhD thesis he brilliantly defended in June 2024 entitled “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order 1919–1998”. Photo credits EISA/C-IN.

The EISA’s Best Doctoral Dissertation Award recognises outstanding work by young scholars in the field of International Relations. It is awarded to dissertations that make a highly original and significant contribution to International Relations based on rigorous research.

Banner image by Kamira/Shutterstock.
Interview by Marc Galvin, Research Office.