Workshop

Central European University

Vienna, Austria, 21-22 February 2025

Day 1: Friday, 21 February

8:30-9:00 Registration and Coffee

9:00-10:00 Keynote: Lauri Mälksoo (University of Tartu) – Eastern Europe as a Problem of 'Small States' and 'Great Powers' in International Law: A Historical Perspective

10:00–11:30 Panel 1: Across Centuries and Lands: Time and Space of SWAIL

Moderator: Matias Möschel (Central European University)

·      Tamás Hoffmann (Corvinus University Budapest) – A Region without Agency? The Absent Eastern European Voice in the History of International Law

·      Eric Loefflad (Kent University) – Medieval Boundaries of Pluralism: The Kingdom of Hungary, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Political Geography of Alternative International Legal Orders, 895-1795

·      Hendrik Simon (Peace and Conflict Research Institute, Frankfurt) – German Expansion–Polish Resistance. On a Special Relationship in Modern War Discourse

·      Jakub Ciesielczuk (University of Nottingham), Magdalena Zabrocka (University of Aberdeen) – Selectivity in the Choice of ‘Victims’ of Double Standards in International Law: The First and Third, but What of the Second?

11:30–11:45 Coffee Break

11:45-13:15 Panel 2: Toward Self-Reflection: Exploring Peripheral Identities in International Law

Moderator: Xymena Kurowska (Central European University)

·  Jakub Szumski (Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena/Institute of Advanced Studies Central European University Budapest) - Empire on Trial: Bohdan Winiarski and Cold War Formalism in the South West Africa Case (1960-1966)

·  Andrea Leiter (University of Amsterdam) – Nomadic subjects and Eastern Europe in International Law

·  Gor Samvel (UiT Arctic University Norway) – Post Soviet International Lawyer in Search for Identity: The Case Armenia

·  Marek Jan Wasiński (University of Łódź) – At a Slight Angle to the Universe: Theorizing from the In-Between

13:15-14:15 Lunch Break

14:15-15:45 Panel 3: Struggling with the Past: Collective memories, personal experiences, and Transtemporal Imaginaries

Moderator: Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias (Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Law Studies)

·  Sanja Djajić (University of Novi Sad), Sanja Dragić (Independent) – In Search of SWAIL: Voices from the International Law Classroom in Serbia

·  Tomasz Srogosz (University of National Education Commission Kraków) – Methodology of the History of Law of Nations: Some Critical Remarks on the Doctrine of International Law in Poland and other Eastern European Countries

·  Tomasz Lachowski (University of Łódź) – Totalitarianism, Memory and Genocide in the ‘Bloodlands’: An International Law Perspective

·  Iryna Marchuk (University of Copenhagen) – Return to History and Rediscovery of International Criminal Justice in Eastern Europe

15:45-16:15 Coffee Break

16:15-17:45 Panel 4: Theorizing SWAIL: Exploring its promise and limitations as a Concept

Moderator: tbc

·      Momchil Milanov (International Court of Justice) – Europeans with a Footnote: Fiction, International Law and the Internalised Irrelevance of Eastern Europe

·      Anastasiya Kotova (Lund University) – Against SWAIL: On the Need for Theory Grounded in Praxis

·      Enyeribe Oguh (University of Ghana) – SWAIL: A Path to Anachronistic Nationalism or Dangerous Revanchism?

·      Patryk Labuda (Central European University) – A New Research Agenda: On the Promise and Pitfalls of SWAILing

19:00 Workshop Dinner (optional)

Day 2, Saturday, 22 February

9:00-10:30 Panel 5: Push & Pull: Exploring Liminality and Integration

Moderator: Boldizsàr Nagy (Central European University)

·      Ciaran Burke and Polina Kulish (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Second World Institutionalism? Assessing the Eurasian Economic Union as a liminal example of regional integration

·      Sergii Masol (University of Copenhagen) – Deimperialisation of Russia and Prospects for Its Reaccession to the Council of Europe

·      Harshad Pathak (University of Geneva) – Second World Approaches to International Investment Law – Insights from the Third World

·      Tamás Molnár (EU Agency for Fundamental Rights) – Legal discourses on international and EU migration/refugee law in Central and Eastern Europe: emerging new narratives as a form of SWAIL?

10:30–11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12.15 Panel 6: Here, There, and In Between: Second World Narratives about International Law

Moderator: tbc

·    Nina Mileva (University of Groningen), Nevena Jevremović (University of Aberdeen) – From a Subject to an Object: The (former) Yugoslav Space in International Legal Thought

·      Dimitrios Kourtis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) – Breaking the “Chains of Ignorance and Barbarism” through State Genesis: The Greek State and the Civilising Mission of International Law

·      Sergey Sayapin (KIMEP University Kazakhstan) – Central Asia and SWAIL: A Long Quest for Self-Identification

·      Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín (University of Amsterdam) – Cuba Libre? Pan-Americanism, the 1962 Missiles Crisis, and the Geopolitical Boundaries of the “Second World”

12:15-13:15 Lunch break

13:15-14:45 Panel 7: On the Way Out: Eastern and Central Europe in the Russo-Marxist Shadow

Moderator: Anastasiia Vorobiova (Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Law Studies)

·     Przemysław Tacik (Jagiellonian University Kraków) – Self-Determination of Peoples as a Legal Form of State Marxism’s Contradictions

·   Nikolas Sabján and Igor Hron (Comenius University Bratislava) – Beyond the Western Lens – Rethinking Russia's Place in Marxist International Legal Theory

·      Svitlana Starosvit (American Society of International Law) – Global West, Global South, Global East, and the Stakes in the Russo-Ukrainian War

·      Kostia Gorobets (Groningen University) – Russian Alternative Legality and International Law: A SWAIL Perspective

Central European University

Vienna, Austria, 21-22 February 2025

Where is Eastern Europe on the mental maps of international lawyers?

Nearly three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, scholars from the region increasingly question how the discipline of international law understands, conceptualizes, and interprets today’s epochal events in Ukraine, situated in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, East and West, and North and South.

               Echoing Khromeychuk’s critique that before 2022 most people “didn’t imagine Ukraine at all”, and that many today conjure up “caricatures based not on knowledge… but on mythology”, this workshop seeks to take a second look at both mainstream and critical discourses about international law, specifically at the relationships between the Western and non-Western world in shaping views of international law’s past, present and future. In searching for Second World Approaches to International Law (SWAIL), this project takes as its point of departure that Eastern Europe – an ill-defined, ambiguous, and often derogatory term that includes all of East-Central Europe not part of the West – occupies a liminal space within the discipline of international law. ‘Too eastern to be western’ and ‘too European to be southern’ (Hailbronner and Fowkes), Eastern European states are neither the progenitors of mainstream, ‘imperial’ Western international law, nor a generally recognized object of Western and Russian imperialism, in the interstices of which modern, 19th century international law was born. Neither of the ‘core’, nor of the ‘periphery’, the region occupies a liminal, semi-peripheral (Hoffmann), and largely invisible mental space, that results in its ‘dual exclusion’ from both mainstream Western – a term often uncritically amalgamated with Eurocentric – international law as well as from non-Western or Third World Approaches to international law (TWAIL). In short, Eastern Europe, understood as part of the former Second World, falls between the cracks of both mainstream disciplinary approaches and mainstream critique of international law.

This workshop sets out to explore why and how the liminality, semi-peripherality and dual exclusion of Eastern Europe, and the wider Second World, matter for international law. This project encourages creative thinking and its conceptual boundaries are intentionally fluid. In particular, while the term Eastern Europe encompasses the Balkans and post-Soviet space (understood as countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence), it leaves open the question of who else might belong to the ‘in between’ category of states from the former Second World, labeled recently the ‘Global East(s)’ (Mueller). Indeed, some non-European or semi-peripheral candidates (e.g., Korea, Japan, China, Turkey, most Latin American states) may be better categorized as ‘in between’ or ‘Second World’ than as part of the ‘Global South’ or ‘Third World’. The project not only aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of international law’s past, present and future, and to unsettle some mainstream and critical narratives that have come to dominate the discipline of international law in the last two decades; it aims also to foster bridges with scholars from other regions and is geared to countering imperialism (Hendl, Burlyuk, O’Sullivan, Arystanbek; Labuda) by addressing epistemic injustice, westsplaining, and coloniality of knowledge production in international law vis-à-vis Eastern European peoples and its scholars.

In searching for SWAIL, key research questions for this workshop include:

1. Disciplinary status quo:

• Empire and colonialism: How have mainstream positivist and non-mainstream approaches, such as TWAIL, New Haven School, feminist and Marxist approaches, conceptualized Eastern Europe and its relationship to empire and colonialism? In particular, why has TWAIL, understood as mainstream critique of international law, largely neglected East-Central Europe, Southeastern Europe and the Balkans? Why is the history of empire in non-Western parts of Europe not relevant for critique of mainstream (Western) international law? Does the concept of ‘colonialism’, used increasingly to describe Russia’s relationship to Ukraine, apply to Western and Russian expansion in Eastern Europe? Why is the fall of the Soviet Union not considered part of decolonization? How should we think critically about Eastern European states’ own entanglements with imperialism and colonialism?

• Liminality, in betweenness, inter-imperiality: What is the relationship between Russia and Eastern Europe? Is there a critique of Russo-centric understandings of Eastern Europe in mainstream Western and non-Western international law? How does TWAIL scholarship and mainstream critique, including Marxist approaches, understand Russia as a global actor in international law?

• Eurocentricity: How does Eastern Europe relate to the concept of Eurocentrism? Is Euro-centrism actually West(ern Europe)-centrism in international law? What are the stakes and consequences of distinguishing between Western empires and the eastern part of Europe that was itself the object of expansion by both Western and non-Western empires?

2. Defining the Second World/Global East’s contributions to international law:

• How should we understand Second World / Eastern European / Global East approaches to international law? What are its distinctive features in a (positive) substantive sense, as opposed to an emerging (negative) critique of its absence from both mainstream international law and from mainstream critique?

• How have the historical experiences of Central, Eastern, and Balkan European states, for instance under minority treaty obligations qua pre-conditions of statehood, shaped their current approaches to the international legal order? In what ways do these legacies impact today’s socio-political challenges like the rise of nationalism, democratic backsliding, minority questions, migration policies, and EU integration? Is conditional statehood bound by the demand to accept superimposed legal obligations of neo-imperial origin still a valid analytical framework for the region?

3. Geospatial, epistemological and mnemonic dimensions:

• What is the relevance of geospatial concepts and epistemological categories like the ‘West’, ‘Global South’, ‘Third World’, ‘East’, ‘East-Central Europe’, ‘Global North’ for international law specifically? Are these categories primarily descriptive, constitutive, or both, in relation to geospatial and political conditions?

• What role do these concepts and contested memories of the past play in framing global events with international legal significance such as Russia’s invasions of Ukraine (or interventions in e.g., Georgia, the Sahel or Sudan)? What other major developments in the region could benefit from a clearer disaggregation of categories like Eastern Europe, Global East(s), and Second World?

• Can the same questions be raised for other ‘liminal’ regions in the global order like central Asia? What of Greece vis-à-vis Turkey and the former Ottoman Empire? In international law, are there other examples of liminality that defy the mainstream West (First World, Global North) vs Third World (Global South) divide, and how might this matter for international law?

4. Knowledge production:

• Representation and inclusion: where do we find people from behind the former Iron Curtain in today’s hierarchies of academic production? Why do mainstream international law journals in Europe only have token representation from Eastern European scholars and institutions? Why are Eastern Europeans under-represented in publishing generally (Demeter)? Thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, do mental maps of academic superiority persist in ‘oriental’ Europe (Wolff)?

• Methods: What methods should international lawyers and scholars from other disciplines use to study the Second World and Global East(s)’s role in international law? What role should insights from mainstream West-centric approaches, including critical approaches and TWAIL, play in decolonizing mainstream approaches and mainstream critique to recover Eastern Europe’s place in international law?

5. Relevance:

What is the theoretical and practical, contemporary and future, relevance of SWAIL as a new object of study or approach to international law? Why should Eastern Europeans, who often reject this term as derogatory and aim to assimilate with the ‘West’ as much as possible, care? By the same token, what are the stakes of this discussion for the West and/or Global South(s)?

Please submit an abstract, max. 500 words, and a brief bio to Patryk Labuda (labudap@ceu.edu) and Marek Jan Wasiński (mwasinski@wpia.uni.lodz.pl) by 31 October 2024. Selected participants will be notified by mid-November and will be invited to submit outlines of 1000-2000 words by 31 January 2025. The workshop will allow in-person and virtual attendance. There is a limited budget for travel and accommodation assistance. If you would like to be considered for this funding, please specify that in your email.