Special Issues

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.

As co-convener of a special issue on the Special Criminal Court (SCC), I situate the symposium articles in the context of the evolving situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) ten years after the law creating the hybrid tribunal was passed. The SCC is a unique institution whose creation, operation and jurisprudence raise critical and thought-provoking questions, yet paradoxically has garnered relatively little academic attention. This gap in scholarly inquiry prompted the symposium, which assesses the SCC’s achievements and ongoing challenges at a crucial juncture, with far-reaching implications for both transitional justice in CAR and the broader landscape of international criminal law. In the spirit of constructive debate, we invited key SCC stakeholders, alongside respected academics and specialists in transitional justice, to offer us their thoughts on the Court. 

From Bangui, on 27 September 2024, Patience Guerengbo, for many years a magistrate in CAR and currently President of the SCC Investigative Chamber, joined the symposium co-convenors, Patryk Labuda and Jérôme de Hemptinne, for an interview to share his views on the challenges of conducting investigations in CAR’s volatile context. The interview was conducted in French and has been translated into English by the co-convenors.