A World in Upheaval, International Law Out of Frame

[Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and Senior Faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy of Harvard Law School. He is the author of Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law (forthcoming CUP, 2026) and co-editor of The Power of Legality (CUP, 2016).]

International law today confronts a landscape that increasingly resists its inherited bearings. Heat domes and geoengineering schemes, Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine, Gaza’s devastation, shadow tankers and drone frontiers, climate-driven territorial claims in the Arctic, cyber-attacks on critical systems, and the geopolitical rupturing of global value chains—international law now sits amid a landscape that feels relentlessly disordered. Public discourse is saturated with talk of crisis, collapse, and dysfunction. Within the discipline, too, many increasingly wonder whether international law ought to be doing something differently—and, if so, what and how.

Part of the answer, I argue, lies not in the moment itself but in the lens through which the discipline perceives it. International lawyers, like all observers, see the world through inherited practices of vision—concepts, maps, models, metaphors, routines. As Nicholas Onuf reminds us, the worlds we inhabit “look the way they do because of the ways we go about the business of seeing.” Much of today’s disorientation, including the disillusionment students regularly bring into our classrooms, stems from the diminishing explanatory power of the bordered, polygonal world-picture that international law has treated as an extra-historical given. We are trying to read twenty-first-century upheaval through a representational frame increasingly misaligned with how authority, power, and conflict actually move.

The question, then, is not simply whether the present is radically different or much the same. It is whether international law’s ways of seeing are calibrated to the spatial conditions of the world it purports to govern.

The Moment Feels Radical Because the Cartographic Map Is Out of Scale

International lawyers reach quickly for crisis vocabulary—collapse, rupture, breakdown—when developments fail to fit inherited legal categories. This reflex reflects not only anxiety about global events, but the lingering belief that the discipline’s visual tools are neutral, even though they were forged through political, imperial, and Eurocentric histories.

The cartographic map is emblematic. For generations, the World Map of states offered a stabilising fiction: a mosaic of contiguous territories that made global life appear legible—here were states, there were borders; authority began in one polygon and ended in another. Self-determination itself came to be pictured through this geometry. Its endurance rested on projecting an order that felt objective and equitable—showing the legal world “as it is.”

Yet, as critical cartographers such as J.B. Harley, Stuart Elden, and Jordan Branch show, that neutrality was engineered. The map emerged from colonial, scientific, commercial, and administrative projects that defined how legal space should be imagined. Its coherence depended on archiving these histories out of sight so that the world could appear natural and self-evident.

This dynamic profoundly shaped international law. Core doctrines—sovereignty, jurisdiction, territorial integrity—rest on the representational logic of the map. As Martti Koskenniemi notes, legal argument often masks this contingency under a veneer of technical neutrality, making particular spatial arrangements appear inevitable. The cartographic map thus functions less as a mirror of geo-legal reality than as a legal text—reproduced through repetition, institutional use, and the quiet erasure of alternatives.

Today, this representational achievement strains against contemporary conditions. Authority now circulates through undersea cables, satellite constellations, cloud infrastructures, container routes, energy grids, data platforms, and financial circuits—systems that defy the planar geometry of territorial enclosure. Semiconductor supply chains stretch from Dresden to Tainan to Texas; green-hydrogen corridors will link North-African sunlight to Northern-European industry; and data governance depends less on server location than on control over standards and cables. In such environments, futures belong less to those who guard borders than to those who govern planetary flows.

These dynamics are not “global” in the cartographic sense. They operate through corridors, clusters, and chains—pixelated coordinates of connection that magnify the strategic value of some sites while marginalising others. They reorganise advantage and vulnerability in ways no flat political map can display.

What appears as radical rupture often reflects the limits of the discipline’s cartographic inheritance. International lawyers—whether litigating, advising governments, or teaching—are attempting to interpret a multi-scalar world with a single-scale image. When the instrument of seeing is out of scale, the world appears in crisis—not because events are unprecedented, but because the frame cannot accommodate their spatial form.

Retromania: Why International Law Keeps Replaying Its Old Spatial Grammar

If the map strains under contemporary conditions, why does the discipline remain so attached to it? One explanation lies in Simon Reynolds’ notion of retromania: the tendency to recycle established forms when a field becomes uncertain about how to innovate.

Retromania in international law is not nostalgia but habit—the reactivation of inherited categories such as territory, borders, sovereignty, and jurisdiction even when the dynamics at issue do not map cleanly onto them. As Reynolds notes, when past forms dominate conceptual space, they compress our capacity to apprehend and innovate the new.

International law’s retromania is reinforced by its deep entwinement with the cartographic map, which has long defined what counts as legally meaningful space. As Henri Lefebvre argued, space is produced through practices rather than discovered. Yet much doctrinal reasoning still relies on a spatial imaginary shaped by an earlier geopolitical moment—one premised on enclosure, contiguity and volume. By contrast, as Saskia Sassen shows, contemporary geographies are relational, multi-scalar, and continually reassembled through flows, standards, and infrastructures.

This disjuncture is visible across domains: territorial explanations for logistical phenomena; sovereignty invoked to manage supply-chain vulnerabilities; jurisdiction extended analogically to algorithmic systems; border “crises” declared even when decisive drivers lie in maritime chokepoints or offshore gatekeeping. These moves are not without value, but they reveal an impulse to translate emergent geographies back into cartographic terms.

As Anne Orford observes, disciplinary authority is often maintained by recentering familiar narratives rather than revising foundational assumptions. Meanwhile, contemporary authority circulates through infrastructures that territorial categories capture only partially. Work by Deborah Cowen, Benjamin Bratton, and Louise Amoore shows how logistical networks, digital stacks, and algorithmic governance shape power and vulnerability in ways that escape bounded territorial volumes.

Retromania narrows the discipline’s interpretive horizon. It encourages treating emerging configurations as disruptions rather than signs of deeper spatial reordering. Avoiding this does not require abandoning inherited concepts, but widening the discipline’s visual tools so that contemporary configurations become legible rather than anomalous.

The End of the Somnium

Beneath crisis rhetoric and retromania lies a deeper anxiety: the unravelling of what the Hellenic world called the somnium—the dream of rising above the Earth, like the sun, to behold it as a single, harmonious whole. This aspiration shaped centuries of cartographic and imperial imagination. International lawyers absorbed this Apollonian lens; every World Map of states rests on the belief that the planet can be rendered as a unified and sunlit surface.

Today, that synoptic image is losing its stabilising force. As David Kennedy notes, confidence in an integrated world-picture has weakened: “whole regions of the world are coming unglued… or people simply stopped believing.” This is not only geopolitical unease but a fading faith in the visual singularity that once anchored international legal thought.

International law internalised the somnium conceptually. Ideas such as “sovereign equality” and “territorial integrity” presuppose that the Earth can be viewed—and governed—as a singular object. But contemporary geographies reveal intersecting infrastructures—climatic, digital, logistical, financial—operating at different scales, producing distinct vulnerabilities, governed by different authorities. They do not align neatly. They overlap, collide, evolve asynchronously. No single image can render them coherent.

Questions once anchored in territorial location—where authority lies, where responsibility attaches, how obligations travel—now require engaging with chokepoints, platform stacks, atmospheric flows, and ecological cascades. The bordered mosaic obscures more than it reveals. This is not a crisis of normativity but of geographic vision. The deeper anxiety comes not from disappearing order but from the instability of the image that once conveyed order.

Relocating the Book: Beyond the Click-and-Post World

International law’s representational crisis is reinforced by a parallel shift in its mediums of thought. For decades, monographs enabled conceptual innovation—spaces where arguments accumulated and lineages formed. Today, short-form writing—blogs, tweets, commentaries—dominates the discipline’s rhythms. These formats are agile and accessible, and crucial for timely engagement. But they can inadvertently reinforce the flattened spatial imagination tied to cartographic thinking. They excel at engaging events but struggle to illuminate the conditions that make those events possible.

Yet many of international law’s most consequential problems—networked warfare, supply-chain interdependence, atmospheric destabilisation, platform governance—require conceptual labour capable of analysing space, scale, and infrastructure. But the monograph now sits uneasily within metrified academic governance, where value is quantified, speed rewarded, and reflection appears inefficient.

Marginalising the book narrows the discipline’s conceptual repertoire. The forms of thought it sustains—genealogy, synthesis, historical contextualisation—are indispensable for grasping ecological, logistical, and digital transformations. As Marshall McLuhan cautioned, the medium shapes the thought it conveys. Short-form platforms are indispensable for response, but they cannot perform the remapping that contemporary spatial conditions demand.

Reaffirming the place of the book is not nostalgia but necessity: sustaining an intellectual ecology in which short-form interventions keep conversation alive and longer-form work reshapes the conceptual horizon.

Recalibrating International Law’s Ways of Seeing

The central challenge facing international law today is not simply whether the world is in crisis. It is whether the discipline is equipped to see the world it now confronts. When international law relies on a cartographic lens increasingly misaligned with contemporary geographies of authority, the fading stability of borders can be mistaken for the fading possibility of law itself. What feels existential often turns out to be epistemic.

Responding to this moment therefore requires not only doing differently, but seeing differently. The task is not to abandon the discipline’s cartographic inheritance, but to recognise its limits. A planet organised through corridors, cables, platforms, atmospheres, and infrastructures demands conceptual tools attuned to movement, scale, and interdependence—not solely to enclosure.

If international law can recalibrate its framing—if it can interrogate the very image through which it understands the planet—what now appears as crisis may come to look like transformation. If it cannot, it will continue to misread shifts in scale as ruptures in order and to confuse the planet’s remapping with the discipline’s unravelling.