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Webinar
Second World Approaches to International Law (SWAIL)
9 June 2026, 14:00-16:00
Please register here.
This webinar offers an exploratory conversation around the research agenda tentatively called SWAIL. Tracking what disciplinary schemes flatten, occlude, or render peripheral, SWAIL stages a critical intervention into the epistemic structures that are taken for granted within the discipline of international law. Exploring international law as a complex set of practices and ideas shaped by dominant discourses and their blind spots, ‘Second Worldness’ in SWAIL functions as an analytical, diagnostic, and dialogical device that problematizes liminality, dual exclusion, and the conditions of recognition within international legal argument. Following the symposium in the International Community Law Review, the webinar with the seven contributors and the guest editors will discuss the articles’ main themes with a view to SWAIL’s future development. The webinar will explore questions such as: In what ways might the essays in the symposium prompt reflection on alternative ways of organising discourse, while reorienting thinking about contemporary problems of international law and the normative constructs through which they are addressed? Do the authors reveal positions, experiences, or objects of inquiry that dominant conceptual schemes have flattened, occluded, or rendered peripheral? Does the symposium widen the terms by which international law may be understood? Conversely, does SWAIL remain partly constrained by the very grammars it seeks to problematize? The webinar is offered not as a definitive statement of SWAIL’s goals, but rather as an exploratory event in which the symposium articles may open horizons, foster dialogue, clarify limits, and render visible new sites of contestation.
Discussants
Discussants
Ciarán Burke is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, and a visiting professor at various universities around Europe. He is the former Director of Research of the Irish Law Reform Commission, and works as a freelance legal consultant.
Tamás Hoffmann is a senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies and a Bohdan Winiarski Research Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. His specialties include international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and legal problems arising from the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
Polina Kulish is a PhD candidate and a research associate at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Her fields of research encompass the law of international organisations, law of international security, and media law. In her current research project, she is exploring the nature of member states’ compliance in international organisations.
Patryk I. Labuda is an assistant professor of international law and international relations at Central European University. Dr. Labuda has two main areas of expertise: the impact of global governance actors, in particular international courts and UN peace operations, on domestic law and politics, especially in central Africa; global legal ordering through a post-colonial Global South-East(ern European) lens.
Tomasz Lachowski currently works at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Łódź. Tomasz does research in Conflict Processes, Human Rights, Transitional Justice and International Law. Their current interrelated projects are 'Transitional Justice in post-Maidan Ukraine' and 'Application of Transitional Justice in Ongoing Conflicts and Post-war Reconstruction. An International Law Perspective'.
Eric Loefflad is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in the history and theory of public international law, broadly understood. He received his PhD from Kent Law School in 2019 and also holds a BA in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University, a JD from the Gonzaga University School of Law, and an LLM from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín is a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow in International Law and European History at New York University. He earned his PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute and is the managing editor of the Journal of the History of International Law.
Gor Samvel is an MSCA postdoctoral researcher at the UiT-Arctic University of Norway, Faculty of Law. He holds a PhD in International Law and Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute, as well as master’s degrees in law from Ghent University and Yerevan State University.
Marek Jan Wasiński is an Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Łódź. His research spans critical and non-mainstream approaches to international law, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe as a liminal, post-imperial space (SWAIL – Second World Approaches to International Law), as well as international human rights, including practice and case law from Sub-Saharan Africa.
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