Call for Papers: Second World Approaches to International Law II - Singapore, November 2026
DEADLINE 1 AUGUST 2026
Mapping International Law’s Second Worlds: Middle Powers, Semi-Peripheries and Shifting Hierarchies in the Global Legal Order
Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University 16 – 17 November 2026
Synopsis The global legal order faces growing contestation. Multilateralism and transnational cooperation increasingly yield to competitive bilateralism and transactional coexistence. Grave violations of international norms become routine and fear of great power backlash dilutes responsibility. Yet, while hegemonic and (neo-)imperial ideologies, concepts, and arguments are retrieved, refined, and reasserted, uncertainty reigns about how these shifts are best understood and conceptualized, with divergent perspectives emerging from the Global East(s), South(s) and West(s). International law’s role in perpetuating hierarchy, domination and exclusion – and the (post-) colonial foundations of global order – are increasingly acknowledged even in mainstream disciplinary accounts. However, less attention has been paid to the experiences, practices, processes, vocabularies and perspectives of in-betweenness that defy binary classifications of North-South, core-periphery, liberalilliberal, etc. Recent debates have centered the notion of ‘middle powers’, a term encompassing actors as diverse as Canada or Australia at one end of the spectrum, or Turkey and BRICS+ at the other end. Applied unevenly to Latin America or Eastern Europe, the ‘semi-periphery’ traditionally described inbetween and incomplete (usually economic) subordination or transition. Drawing on Second World Approaches to International Law (SWAIL), a self-reflexive project exploring how international law produces and manages ‘in-betweenness’ across different registers, this call for papers invites contributions that explore these themes, whether articulated as conceptual semi-peripherality and incomplete integration, or as actor-based claims to middle-power or emerging-power agency, including practices of asserting legally grounded sovereignty under imperial pressure. The central question is how international law’s dominant classificatory schemes shape doctrines, institutions, and epistemic authority while flattening, marginalizing and occluding in-betweenness that does not fit within the hegemonic paradigm(s).
Full call available here.