Special Issue Editorial: Second World Approaches to International Law

This editorial introduces a new research agenda provisionally called ‘Second World Approaches to International Law’ (SWAIL). Drawing on Borges’s parable of an impossible map that coincides with empire, we treat conceptual ‘mapping’ as a condition of knowledge: to render a complex world communicable, international law compresses diversity into concepts and binaries that stabilise meaning while thinning what they cannot carry. Because such compression is selective, questions of epistemic governance become unavoidable: what is rendered visible, sayable, and researchable shapes what is flattened, occluded, or treated as peripheral. Read in light of the sharpening of geopolitical and disciplinary fault-lines in international law, SWAIL is framed neither as anti-cosmopolitan regionalism nor as a bid for universalism, but rather as an analytical, diagnostic, and dialogical project that unveils and problematizes liminality, dual exclusion, and the conditions of recognition within international legal argument. After identifying East(-Central) Europe as an ‘in-between’ space in international law, the articles collected in this symposium pursue that reorientation in a wider cross-regional register, with an eye to dialogue, building bridges and, potentially, a fusion of horizons in international law.