Don’t Look Down! International Law and its Worn Geopoetry

• Department of Law

The EUI International Law Working Group hosts a presentation and discussion with Professor Nikolas M. Rajkovic, who will present his current research on International Law as a product not just of legal sources, but also a geographic narrative. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

International Law is not only a product of legal sources, but also a geographic narrative. Yet, international lawyers scarcely ponder the surface they toil upon, and the need to examine modern geography’s legacy in conditioning the disciplines’ worldview. To be fair, this spatial void has not been unique to disciplinary International Law, since it has spread across the gamut of international studies generally. Profound discrepancies exist in terms of when and how specific disciplines addressed—or did not address—established spatial presumptions. An apt example is the contrast between disciplinary International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL). With the surprise end of the Cold War, IR confronted a striking blindness caused by its then state-centric worldview, which prodded the field to consciously look down into the epistemology of international space to reinvigorate its theorizing. As this chapter will explain, International Law manifests a contrasting trajectory: a discipline that—via accident and intent—avoided looking down to examine the epistemological foundations of its statist worldview. 

Territorial Trap in IR versus Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth in IL. Agnew made visible how grand spatial theory stood at the root of IR’s—and every discipline’s—worldview of geographic facts. However, Schmitt’s intervention—while prominent—failed to generate a similar scale of spatial reflection and contestation amongst international lawyers. The chapter interrogates: How come? And how an eluded debate on statist geography has now come to hinder International Law’s capacity to rethink changing boundaries of geo-institutional and geo-legal ordering."

Professor Rajkovic’s presentation will be followed by a discussion with the audience.