Double Issue Symposium 28 (2-3) International Community Law Review (2026)
Editorial: Second World Approaches to International Law
Marek J. Wasiński and Patryk I. Labuda
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: SWAIL; liminality; conceptual compression; epistemic governance; self-reflexivity in international law; East-(Central) Europ
Eric Loefflad’s contribution responds to calls for a more complete history of international law by extending its spatiotemporal horizon.[1] The frame is widened beyond not only the late nineteenth-century international legal project, but also the classic story that installs 1648 as a Westphalian point of ‘European’ disciplinary origin. Known for his pioneering re-readings of E(C)E,[2] Loefflad re-maps the field’s deep past through a historiographical projection that resists more familiar renderings of imperial dominance, focused on overseas Western rivalries while shrinking, or rendering peripheral, the power relations carried across the Euro-Asiatic steppe. Drawing on the critical geographic insight that space is not merely a container of social life but also a force in its production, he revisits Halford Mackinder’s macro-geopolitical optic to render visible the mediating space between the imperial legacies of Rome and Constantinople, legacies later claimed and reworked, in different idioms, by Western European powers and Russia in its successive embodiments. The article reconsiders how formations from the deep past continue to matter for international law, which in turn allows a more critical engagement with contemporary Russian legal self-positioning and its contingent justificatory vocabularies for instrumentalising both inclusion in, and exclusion from, the family of nations, in struggles over the status of polities located in that mediating space.
This mediating space overlaps partly with what is commonly described as E(C)E and is sometimes recruited into essentialising claims about a Cold War-defined ‘Second World’. When ‘Second Worldness’ is deployed as an analytic resource, however, it can make that mediating space legible in a different register, unsettling settled disciplinary schemes of reference. Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín’s contribution illustrates this move by turning to Cuba at the height of the 1962 Missile Crisis and showing how international institutions, and the argumentative possibilities they enable, can be mobilised to hold together dimensions of geopolitical positioning – in casu geographical space and ideological alignment – that the discipline’s inherited frames usually force apart. His intervention prompts the following observations and questions for further inquiry. First, it shows how legal argument becomes a medium for navigating political tension. Second, as a methodological corollary, it cautions against overly dogmatic accounts that treat conceptual linkages between law and politics as category errors, rather than as objects of inquiry. Last but not least, it opens space for further self-reflection on how imperial grammars of justification can be internalised and reproduced in liminal spaces, particularly when their uptake is mediated by narratives of security and by the moral comfort of geographic distance.
Self-reflexivity within international law can produce an existential unease, rooted in the recognition of responsibility and the ethical choices accompanying participation in what is sometimes cast as the law of all laws and the law of all humanity.[1] In a more intellectually restrained register, it can yield a Sisyphean posture, born of involvement in an argumentative routine that is repetitive and internally contradictory.[2] More generatively, it can also recall individual agency and stimulate inquiry that brings into view scholars whose situated experience and intellectual formation took shape in liminal spaces, often outside the horizons of actors preoccupied with charting international law’s civilisational project or its decolonisation. Tomasz Lachowski’s contribution pursues that reorientation by problematising the concept of genocide and by excavating strands of its genealogy that are entangled with E(C)E’s experience qua ‘Bloodlands’, following Timothy Snyder.[3] Against the backdrop of twentieth-century imperial reconfigurations and Cold War strategic settlements, Lachowski stages the divergent trajectories of legal and political thought represented by two well-known figures: Raphael Lemkin and Andrey Vyshinsky. He argues that the conceptual edge of Lemkin’s genocide concept, oriented toward protecting multiple endangered polities in the region against imperial threat, was later circumscribed through the concerted pressures of dominant geopolitical actors, both the Soviet Union and Western powers. By linking political history to doctrinal reconstruction of later embodiments of the crime of genocide, Lachowski shows how restrictive understandings of genocide shaped legal qualification and, in doing so, translated imperial positions into legal form. Turning to the present, his article also illuminates how the transfer of Ukrainian children can operate as an imperial technique of subordination by eroding group continuity, and how this practice’s treatment in law turns on what international legal argument is able to carry into view.
Accountability for international crimes returns in Tamás Hoffmann’s contribution, which probes the discipline’s epistemic habits in examining how overlooked Eastern European agency helps us rethink two formative episodes in international criminal law from the aftermath of the Second World War: the UN War Crimes Commission and Hungary’s Peoples Tribunal. Engaging, if only implicitly, with a residual blind spot in some critiques of Eurocentrism, Hoffmann shows how traditional narratives of the field’s formation can themselves marginalise agency and intellectual labour associated with the region. Rather than a compensatory gesture, the article offers a diagnosis of how exclusion is reproduced through disciplinary canons of relevance, citation economies, and inherited narratives of origin. Hoffmann also raises the uncomfortable question of how far such marginalisation is sustained not only by centres of authority, but also by forms of inertia within liminal positions, including Eastern Europeans’ routinised uptake of the very vocabularies that render them peripheral.
Navigating the mediating spaces of the Eurasian landmass, Ciarán Burke and Polina Kulish turn to the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). By drawing attention to a relatively under-examined strand of institutional development,[1] they bring into view the EAEU as both a product and agent within a complex, often entangled interplay of economic, security, and political forces. Focusing on two external actors vying for influence in Eurasia, notably Russia and the European Union, the authors show how power asymmetries shape this in-between space, which stretches across, in geographical terms, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The Eurasian space’s material scaffolding is conditioned by standardised rail infrastructure, trade corridors, weather-shaped patterns of production, and linguistic continuities. As such, this scaffolding exerts a structuring pressure on the incentives for cooperation that major actors pursue, and on the legal forms through which those incentives are stabilised. At the same time, Burke and Kulish present Eurasia as still shaped by the accumulated history of normative and political interaction, in which the EAEU’s institutional design both reflects and reproduces configurations of power in the wider region.
Finally, remaining within the EAEU space but focused on the Caucasus, Gor Samvel shifts the focus to the professional community of international legal scholars. Self-reflexivity – an ethical posture central to SWAIL – often emerges through forms of moral, cultural, cognitive, or professional disquiet. That disquiet can be triggered, first, by realizing how positionality within spatio-temporal reality conditions what international law can be made to mean, and second, by confronting how the profession’s investment in an internalised, thin positivism may harden into a ‘pedagogy of irresponsibility’[1] that disconnects conduct from wider registers of social and ethical accountability. Samvel’s contribution turns to the enduring, century-long disengagement of Armenian scholars from participation in processes of international law. He traces this posture to Soviet professional legal consciousness, understood as a process through which participation in international legal argument was structured by, and helped reproduce, a specific form of legality shaped by the Russian-cum-Soviet Empire’s agenda in the Caucasus. As Samvel argues, enduring colonization of Armenian international lawyers’ legal consciousness can be seen as a mode of internalised, routinised participation in the production of legality under conditions structured by imperial relations. An unsettling residual question that Samvel leaves us with is the possibility that all international legal scholarship, in its leading themes and approaches as much as in its absent subject matter and methodological choices, bears an autobiographical character, shaped by the historical and structural conditions of its formation.