Chapter 1 reveals the largely unexamined role of geography in shaping the conceptual architecture of International Law. Although legal doctrine depends heavily on spatial categories, the discipline rarely interrogates the geographic imaginaries or cartographic histories that sustain them. This chapter excavates the deep entanglement between legal and geographic thought, tracing how Eurocentric cartography helped construct the modern state system and naturalize the “World Map” as International Law’s default visual ontology. The chapter shows how geographic thought has undergone a conceptual reckoning that International Law has yet to confront.

Despite major transformations in how authority and power are exercised today, international legal reasoning remains anchored in a static, territorial imaginary inherited from statist mapping. This disjuncture narrows the discipline’s capacity to grasp emergent forms of global ordering that operate across discontinuous, networked, and materially mediated spaces. The chapter therefore calls for renewed engagement with contemporary geographic theory, not as a doctrinal supplement but as a means of reworking the spatial premises embedded in legal thought. It frames the book as a project of grafted interdisciplinarity – cultivating new conceptual tools while reconfiguring inherited ones – and invites international lawyers to rethink how global legal space is visualized, institutionalized, and materially enacted.