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 revisualizes international law for a fractured global order, equipping readers with the concepts to see where authority truly moves today.

‘This sharp and lucidly argued book offers us powerful insights into the ways in which established perspectives have occluded our understanding of how power works in the international system. It is an indispensable guide to illuminating crucial developments in a time of crisis and bewilderment.’

Antony Anghie - University of Utah

‘Off the Map is a bold intervention that compels international lawyers to confront a dimension of their discipline that has long been taken for granted: its cartographic imagination. Nikolas M. Rajkovic shows with remarkable clarity how international law’s core concepts – territory, jurisdiction, sovereignty – are products of a historically contingent visual and spatial order that continues to evolve. As Rajkovic says, to remain on the map, International Law must move beyond defending an inherited conceptual turf. This is a book that will greatly appeal to all students and scholars of International Law, but also of International Relations, Political Geography and History.’

Ayşe Zarakol - University of Cambridge

‘To map is to govern, to order, to comprehend — until the world outpaces your map. In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Professor Rajkovic reimagines the cartography of international law for a world of digital infrastructures, algorithmic management, informal economies, and black sites. In a series of elegant meditations, Rajkovic brilliantly challenges traditional notions of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory for a world truly gone, in his words, ‘off the map.’’

David Kennedy - Harvard Law School

‘Law and lawyers, rule and rules, maps and mapping, space and place, landscape and territory, information and infrastructure, optics and units, meaning and metaphor, worldview and world view: In this stunningly original book, familiar themes are reconfigured, concepts realigned, theory transformed. Juriscape displaces jurisdiction — definitively. All things modern melt away.’

Nicholas Onuf - Florida International University