The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with
The Crisis of Kartenpolitik: Critical Geography and International Law
Description: Please join Professor Dr Nikolas M. Rajkovic for an insightful discussion on Critical Geography and International Law. Geography has an enigmatic place within the discipline of International Law. It is ubiquitous, but yet obscure. Many types of disciplinary lawyers engage implicitly with geography in everyday practice, yet this has been at some distance from Geography in the capital “G” and thus disciplinary sense. International Law remains defined by core concepts with inherent geographic and cartographic lineage, such as territory, territoriality, extraterritoriality, and jurisdiction. 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. An ingestion so complete, in fact, that few notice how the generative notions of cartography and geometry became quietly subsumed by, and forgotten within, the institutionalized grammar of territory and jurisdiction.
This has left international lawyers—among many experts—stuck to an eternalized “World Map” of states that hinders scrutiny into novel geometric and non-geometric boundaries of authority. There is a misplaced concreteness assigned to statist cartography that overlooks how the res—or material terrenes—of boundaries actually reside in evolving assemblages of maps, lists, algorithms, guards, fences, gates, ISO standards, weapons, passports and other technologies, which have given material life to such axioms as states and markets. Such spatial and normative dynamics raise pertinent questions: Why do international lawyers rarely reflect on their geographic theory or theorizing? How is a discipline innately defined by (i.e. International) and involved with geography seemingly distant from evolving Geographic thought?
Bio: Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Professor and Chair of International Law at Tilburg University (The Netherlands), 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. He is completing a forthcoming book for Cambridge University Press (2026) Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law.
Registration: SCILJ appreciates your registration at scilj@juridicum.su.se before 22 November.
Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/63741058965
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