Abstract This article applies transparency to itself. It asks ‘What is transparency?’, ‘What do we think it means?’, and ‘What are the effects of transparency and transparency discourse beyond what they do and do not reveal?’. Whereas transparency and its instruments are assumed to reveal the ‘as is’ world of international adjudication (what really goes on within judicial institutions, and how and why decisions are taken) this article observes how transparency and its instruments construct that reality. After highlighting the fictions and contingencies of transparency, it explains how transparency creates a subjunctive ‘as if’ world of adjudication, where actors behave ‘as if’ what transparency reveals is true. Through informing behaviour, transparency constructs the ‘as is’ world of adjudication. Whereas in the context of international adjudication the focus is typically on how transparency legitimises power, this article observes how transparency simultaneously empowers and legitimizes the exercise of the power that it creates.
Hemi Mistry (Wed,) studied this question.