Staging a critical intervention into the epistemic structures that are taken for granted within the discipline of international law, 'Second World Approaches to International Law' (SWAIL) maps and problematizes what disciplinary schemes flatten, occlude, or render peripheral. 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. We encourage scholars and practitioners willing to explore differently formulated 'in-betweenness' in international law to get in touch -- our project is open-ended and we are actively exploring various opportunities for meetings, conferences and publications.

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Webinar on Second World Approaches to International Law

Special Issue: International Community Law Review (2026)

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

Held in Vienna in February 2025, the inagural SWAIL I workshop set 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. Over 25 scholars from different parts of Eastern Europe and beyond came together to launch a critical interrogation of how the Second World(s) are (mis)-understood in in international law. See below for a brief description from the call for papers.

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.