Geography has an enigmatic place within the discipline of International Law. It is ubiquitous, but yet obscure. Few legal scholars appreciate the depth of this association between International Law and disciplinary Geography. Notably, International Law’s spatial premises did not arise from the discipline’s own interrogations, but rather from its import and veneration of a cartographic model crowned by modern science. This has left international lawyers—among many experts—stuck to an eternalised World Map of states that hinders scrutiny into novel geometric and non-geometric boundaries of authority. Such spatial and normative dynamics raise pertinent questions: Why do international lawyers rarely reflect on their geographic theory or theorising? How is a discipline innately defined by (i.e. International) and involved with geography—and space—seemingly distant from evolving Geographic thought?
The discussion and feedback session will focus on Draft Chapter 3 - Potere Incognito: Seeing, Power and the Cartographic World Order, which "provides a modest window onto International Law’s entanglement, to illustrate how productive and structural power actually constitute the very root of the discipline".
Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Professor and Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and is the former Head of the Department of Public Law and Governance (PLG). He is also currently a Visiting Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute (Italy). Nikolas is a senior faculty, and an Academic Council member of the Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP). His current research is at the intersection of International Law, International Relations, and Critical Geography.