Off the Map

A Critical Geography of International Law
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-44438-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 260 Seiten

Reihe: LSE International Studies

Off the Map challenges how international lawyers picture the world. While traditional scholarship continues to treat the 'World Map' of states as natural, this book exposes the discipline's cartographic inheritance and its growing fatigue. Drawing on critical geography, international relations, and media theory, Nikolas M. Rajkovic reveals how global authority now operates less through contiguous territories than through infrastructures, corridors, and nodes. Introducing the concept of 'juriscapes', he illuminates the legal significance of ports, data cable landings, aviation hubs, sanctions screens, and cloud regions-sites where rules bite and power circulates. He also develops the idea of pointillistic geographies, showing how law is enacted through coordinates, flows, and switches that escape the flat image of bordered states. Provocative yet accessible, Off the Map re-visualises international law for a fractured global order, equipping readers with the concepts to see where authority truly moves today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rajkovic, Nikolas M.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface: off the map; 1. The enigma: international law's forgotten geography; 2. Don't look [down]!: international law and its worn geopoetry; 3. Potere incognito: seeing, power and the cartographic world order; 4. From jurisdiction to juriscapes: toward a transformative theory of territorialization; 5. Vidi et vici: the rise and decline of cartographic rule; 6. The crisis of Kartenpolitik; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Rajkovic, Nikolas M.
Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and a senior faculty member of Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy. He was awarded a Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute (2021–22) and continued as a Visiting Fellow at its Law Department from 2022–2025.