Chapter 3 examines how international lawyers see the world and argues that this visual orientation is a product of longstanding forms of power embedded in the cartographic medium. It begins by challenging the liberal assumption that law stands apart from power. Instead, it shows that structural and productive forms of power have shaped the architecture of International Law from its inception. Central to this inheritance is the dominance of the cartographic map: presenting the Earth through geometric grids, territorial containers, and the seemingly naturalized image of the “World Map.”

By reversing the discipline’s hierarchy of text over image, the chapter reveals how cartographization has governed international legal perception, and traces how mapping practices became foundational to the very conditions of global legibility. Cartographic power fashioned territory, borders, and jurisdiction into universal categories and naturalized a Eurocentric, state-centric world order.

The chapter then introduces cartogenesis: the historical process through which geometric mapping remade earlier spatial literacies and consolidated the cartographic globe as the default ontology of International Law. Yet this visual regime now strains under emerging spatial realities that elude planar representation.

Ultimately, the chapter argues that rethinking international legal space requires breaking with this cartographic template.