SWAIL

Concept Note

SWAIL - Second World Approaches to International Law

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

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.

This workshop sets 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. This project encourages creative thinking and its conceptual boundaries are intentionally fluid. In particular, while the term Eastern Europe encompasses the Balkans and post-Soviet space (understood as countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence), it leaves open the question of who else might belong to the ‘in between’ category of states from the former Second World, labeled recently the ‘Global East(s)’ (Mueller). Indeed, some non-European or semi-peripheral candidates (e.g., Korea, Japan, China, Turkey, most Latin American states) may be better categorized as ‘in between’ or ‘Second World’ than as part of the ‘Global South’ or ‘Third World’. The project not only aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of international law’s past, present and future, and to unsettle some mainstream and critical narratives that have come to dominate the discipline of international law in the last two decades; it aims also to foster bridges with scholars from other regions and is geared to countering imperialism (Hendl, Burlyuk, O’Sullivan, Arystanbek; Labuda) by addressing epistemic injustice, westsplaining, and coloniality of knowledge production in international law vis-à-vis Eastern European peoples and its scholars.

In searching for SWAIL, key research questions for this workshop include:

1. Disciplinary status quo:

• Empire and colonialism: How have mainstream positivist and non-mainstream approaches, such as TWAIL, New Haven School, feminist and Marxist approaches, conceptualized Eastern Europe and its relationship to empire and colonialism? In particular, why has TWAIL, understood as mainstream critique of international law, largely neglected East-Central Europe, Southeastern Europe and the Balkans? Why is the history of empire in non-Western parts of Europe not relevant for critique of mainstream (Western) international law? Does the concept of ‘colonialism’, used increasingly to describe Russia’s relationship to Ukraine, apply to Western and Russian expansion in Eastern Europe? Why is the fall of the Soviet Union not considered part of decolonization? How should we think critically about Eastern European states’ own entanglements with imperialism and colonialism?

• Liminality, in betweenness, inter-imperiality: What is the relationship between Russia and Eastern Europe? Is there a critique of Russo-centric understandings of Eastern Europe in mainstream Western and non-Western international law? How does TWAIL scholarship and mainstream critique, including Marxist approaches, understand Russia as a global actor in international law?

• Eurocentricity: How does Eastern Europe relate to the concept of Eurocentrism? Is Euro-centrism actually West(ern Europe)-centrism in international law? What are the stakes and consequences of distinguishing between Western empires and the eastern part of Europe that was itself the object of expansion by both Western and non-Western empires?

2. Defining the Second World/Global East’s contributions to international law:

• How should we understand Second World / Eastern European / Global East approaches to international law? What are its distinctive features in a (positive) substantive sense, as opposed to an emerging (negative) critique of its absence from both mainstream international law and from mainstream critique?

• How have the historical experiences of Central, Eastern, and Balkan European states, for instance under minority treaty obligations qua pre-conditions of statehood, shaped their current approaches to the international legal order? In what ways do these legacies impact today’s socio-political challenges like the rise of nationalism, democratic backsliding, minority questions, migration policies, and EU integration? Is conditional statehood bound by the demand to accept superimposed legal obligations of neo-imperial origin still a valid analytical framework for the region?

3. Geospatial, epistemological and mnemonic dimensions:

• What is the relevance of geospatial concepts and epistemological categories like the ‘West’, ‘Global South’, ‘Third World’, ‘East’, ‘East-Central Europe’, ‘Global North’ for international law specifically? Are these categories primarily descriptive, constitutive, or both, in relation to geospatial and political conditions?

• What role do these concepts and contested memories of the past play in framing global events with international legal significance such as Russia’s invasions of Ukraine (or interventions in e.g., Georgia, the Sahel or Sudan)? What other major developments in the region could benefit from a clearer disaggregation of categories like Eastern Europe, Global East(s), and Second World?

• Can the same questions be raised for other ‘liminal’ regions in the global order like central Asia? What of Greece vis-à-vis Turkey and the former Ottoman Empire? In international law, are there other examples of liminality that defy the mainstream West (First World, Global North) vs Third World (Global South) divide, and how might this matter for international law?

4. Knowledge production:

• Representation and inclusion: where do we find people from behind the former Iron Curtain in today’s hierarchies of academic production? Why do mainstream international law journals in Europe only have token representation from Eastern European scholars and institutions? Why are Eastern Europeans under-represented in publishing generally (Demeter)? Thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, do mental maps of academic superiority persist in ‘oriental’ Europe (Wolff)?

• Methods: What methods should international lawyers and scholars from other disciplines use to study the Second World and Global East(s)’s role in international law? What role should insights from mainstream West-centric approaches, including critical approaches and TWAIL, play in decolonizing mainstream approaches and mainstream critique to recover Eastern Europe’s place in international law?

5. Relevance:

What is the theoretical and practical, contemporary and future, relevance of SWAIL as a new object of study or approach to international law? Why should Eastern Europeans, who often reject this term as derogatory and aim to assimilate with the ‘West’ as much as possible, care? By the same token, what are the stakes of this discussion for the West and/or Global South(s)?

Project events

Publications (forthcoming)