1. Disciplinary failing in a reconfiguring world

International law today inhabits a paradox that is increasingly difficult to ignore. In public discourse,Footnote ¹ confidence in international law’s capacity to meaningfully constrain conflict, regulate economic coercion, or respond to planetary risk appears thin, brittle, and episodic.Footnote ² Armed conflicts unfold amid persistent allegations of legal violation with limited remedial effect.Footnote ³ Trade measures – tariffs, export controls, and sanctions – reshape global markets and everyday livelihoods while remaining largely insulated from multilateral legal scrutiny.Footnote ⁴ Climate governance oscillates between ambitious legal commitments and structurally inadequate enforcement.Footnote ⁵ For many observers beyond the discipline, international law therefore appears either politically ineffective or normatively exhausted.Footnote ⁶ What has shifted is not the prevalence of legal controversy, but the expectation that legal argument will shape outcomes rather than merely legitimate them after the fact.

And yet this erosion of external confidence does not translate into disciplinary retreat or contraction. Inside the field, scholarly and professional activity remains robust: doctrinal analyses proliferate, international adjudication continues to expand across multiple domains,Footnote ⁷ and areas such as armed conflict, migration, climate change, security, and emerging technologies have generated sophisticated and often highly adaptive literatures. This vitality is part of the puzzle rather than an exception to it. International legal expertise continues to structure important zones of governance, but its influence is increasingly mediated through technical, security, and managerial rationalities that translate legal reasoning into operational categories, procedures, and risk profiles – allowing legality to proliferate without reliably producing the public ordering effects the discipline associates with ‘International Law’.Footnote ⁸

The juxtaposition of external skepticism and sustained internal productivity marks not merely a tension but a diagnostic problem for international law as a discipline. International law appears buoyant as a discipline yet increasingly fragile as a governing language of public authority and ordering. This condition cannot be explained adequately by political backlash, populism, great-power rivalry, or geopolitics alone.Footnote ⁹ It instead invites closer scrutiny of disciplinary perception: what international law is trained to see as legally salient on a global scale, what it renders as governable through law, and what it relegates to ‘context’ before legal analysis begins. Put differently: the crisis is not only geopolitical; it is also epistemic.

These perceptual habits are sustained through the ordinary mechanisms of disciplinary reproduction as much as through institutional inertia. By ‘discipline’, I do not mean a unified intellectual community or a closed canon, but the recurrent practices through which international law reproduces its objects, methods, hierarchies of relevance, and standards of professional competence. International law trains new generations through inherited curricula of doctrine, procedure, and interpretive technique; journals, conferences, and blogs reproduce a shared sense of disciplinary competence; and legal vocabularies circulate as markers of legitimacy across governance arenas.Footnote ¹⁰ Together, these practices do more than transmit expertise:Footnote ¹¹ they stabilize inherited epistemic objects and spatial assumptions, allowing novelty to be absorbed as variation without reopening the discipline’s underlying modes of perception.Footnote ¹² They preserve a familiar ‘planar grammar’ even as governance becomes less polygonal.

Seen in this light, the problem is not institutional decline but epistemic orientation. International law as a discipline of knowledge and practice is failing – not because it has lost relevance or authority, but because its entrenched analytical frames no longer adequately register how authority is reorganized, how global space is being ordered, and how legality is designed beyond its canonical objects and categories. The claim is therefore not one of failure in the terminal sense, but of failing as an ongoing condition in which disciplinary vitality persists even as inherited modes of perception lose traction on changing forms of legality and authority. More precisely, the discipline confronts a growing spatial misalignment between its narrow set of canonical legal objects – formalized sources such as treaties, customary international law, and adjudication – and the diverse normative practices through which contemporary authority increasingly operates. Much of this activity unfolds in domains such as sanctions regimes,Footnote ¹³ financial compliance systems,Footnote ¹⁴ and security-listing practices,Footnote ¹⁵ which public international law engages only partially through its doctrinal and institutional horizons.Footnote ¹⁶ Normativity has not withdrawn; it has shifted. Across these domains, legal ordering is often inscribed through technical standards, compliance platforms, and infrastructural gateways that structure who may act, under what conditions, and with what consequences.Footnote ¹⁷ These arrangements sometimes bypass the sites through which public international law traditionally renders authority formally reviewable and open to challenge, rather than operating through the institutional forms it conventionally theorizes or prioritizes.Footnote ¹⁸

The problem for the discipline, therefore, is not that authority has become less legal, but that its inherited disciplinary grammars remain calibrated to a different architecture of rule. These grammars presume legality announced through jurisdictional claims, formal sources, and adjudicatory acts, rather than through governance practices that structure permissible action in advance of formal legal assessment.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, familiar doctrinal categories are preserved even as authority is exercised through administrative arrangements,Footnote ²⁰ layered contracting,Footnote ²¹ and algorithmic-mediated compliance,Footnote ²² which do not readily consolidate the forms of public legal ordering through which international law conventionally renders authority publicly contestable. This managed misalignment – between how legality takes effect across contemporary governance practices and international law’s inherited expectations of public ordering – is what I conceptualize as legality without order. The concept does not denote informal or extra-legal governance; rather, it captures a condition in which legalities proliferate and govern extensively while failing to consolidate the structural effects of public ordering that international law conventionally promises – such as coherent distributions of responsibility, stable jurisdictional authority, and institutionally available avenues of contestation. The term thus names not a normative deficit, but a structural gap between operative legality and the ordering effects international law expects legality to produce.

International legal scholarship is therefore confronted less with the ‘decline’ of law than with a constrained mode of disciplinary perception, anchored in inherited cartographic and jurisdictional frames, that struggles to register how legality is mutating, rescaling, and governing across dispersed networks of authority. This constraint reflects a joint effect of disciplinary orientation and governance design: legality is operationalized through compliance architectures, contractual chains, and risk-screening systems that shape conduct and allocate responsibility without crystallizing into the jurisdictional claims and adjudicatory acts through which international law conventionally perceives authority. This article addresses that constraint by tracing how disciplinary habits of seeing and ordering shape what international lawyers recognize as legally salient, and by arguing for a methodological reorientation toward the infrastructures and visual artefacts through which legality now becomes operational. The argument proceeds in five steps.

Section 2 shows how legality without order takes shape in contemporary geopolitical practice. Section 3 turns inward to the discipline, examining how doctrinal coherence is reproduced even as analytical purchase erodes. Section 4 analyses how legality is repurposed as a governing medium within contemporary geopolitics. Section 5 shows how governance environments are engineered to render public international law formally present yet operationally more peripheral. Section 6 identifies cartographic reason as the epistemic condition sustaining this misalignment, and Section 7 concludes by specifying a methodological reorientation for tracking legality where it now takes effect.

2. Legality without order

Two dynamics help illustrate how legality without order operates in practice. The first concerns the transformation of geopolitics itself.Footnote ²³ Contemporary geopolitics no longer operates primarily through a frontal opposition between power and law.Footnote ²⁴ In contemporary armed conflict, legal vocabularies of self-defence, proportionality, and precaution circulate across diplomatic statements, military manuals, and public commentary.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, patterns of military escalation,Footnote ²⁶ drone warfare,Footnote ²⁷ and infrastructural targetingFootnote ²⁸ are reshaping the material conditions in which law can meaningfully operate. The significance of this shift rests not in the erosion of legal argument, but in its altered function: legal reasoning more often accompanies and normalizes coercive action without anchoring it in durable, publicly contestable authority.Footnote ²⁹ Legality, in this sense, does not withdraw from geopolitical practice; it becomes operative as a technique of governance while the stabilizing effects traditionally associated with doctrinal law – coherent responsibility, jurisdictional restraint, and institutionalized avenues of contestation – remain increasingly unsettled.

This repurposing of legality coincides with a broader reconfiguration of how global space and historical time are imagined. The contemporary ‘return of geopolitics’Footnote ³⁰ unsettles assumptions of territorial fixity and periodic legal review, as strategic power is exercised through continuous practices of mass surveillance, screening, and risk management embedded in governance systems rather than through discrete acts of authorization or adjudication.Footnote ³¹ Geopolitical reasoning correspondingly shifts away from gridded territory and episodic decision-making toward the management of vulnerabilities within supply chains, energy systems,Footnote ³² and financial networks.Footnote ³³ The result is not simply a new geopolitical narrative, but altered spatial conditions under which political and legal authority becomes perceptible and actionable.Footnote ³⁴ Inherited doctrinal frameworks register this transformation only imperfectly, continuing to privilege cartographic jurisdiction and formal legal acts even as governing power increasingly operates through technical and contractual arrangements that allocate risk, structure access, and shape conduct within trans-territorial infrastructures.Footnote ³⁵ Geopolitics becomes less about borders as lines, and more about control over nodes, flows, corridors, and gateways.

The second dynamic concerns the designing of legalities that diminish the practical relevance of public international law without abandoning legality itself. Large-scale sanctions regimes – such as US and EU financial sanctions implemented through banking, payments, and export-control infrastructures – illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity.Footnote ³⁶ Although they remain formally grounded in domestic legislation and, in some cases, selective multilateral authorization,Footnote ³⁷ their governing force derives less from public legal determination than from the technical architectures through which compliance is put into routine effect.Footnote ³⁸ In practice, sanctions function through automated screening, risk-scoring, and compliance systems that structure market access and exclusion upstream of interpretive contestation or adjudicatory review.Footnote ³⁹ Outcomes are thereby stabilized in advance of questions of attribution, proportionality, or legality being raised in courts or intergovernmental fora, often placing decisive exercises of authority beyond the routine reach of treaty oversight and institutional contestation.Footnote ⁴⁰

Viewed through this lens, practices such as automated sanctions screening or transaction monitoring no longer appear as merely technical adjuncts to legal decision-making. Instead, they emerge as primary sites at which normative authority is operationalized, revealing how much contemporary governance is structured upstream of the doctrinal moments where international law conventionally expects legality to register as a justiciable question. This operational shift is reflected in the growing centrality of automated compliance technologies. As Hackney and Huggins observe in their analysis of sanctions compliance:

Once embedded within organizational compliance programs, these systems do not abolish legal judgment or eliminate the possibility of subsequent review. They do, however, relocate much of the practical work of legal assessment into operational thresholds, automated alerts, and managerial workflows.Footnote ⁴² As Hackney and Huggins note, sanctions screening technologies allow regulated actors to ‘autonomously screen data against updates to sanctions lists in real time’, thereby reducing the number of decisions ‘requiring human review’.Footnote ⁴³ This matters because it marks a shift in where legal assessment becomes practically consequential. A sanctions measure may still be articulated and defended in formal terms of legal authorization, but its practical effects are often shaped before contestation arises, through routine decisions about screening, escalation, and risk classification.Footnote ⁴⁴ Responsibility, review, and contestation are therefore not imagined here as having once been fully centralized. The point is rather that contemporary compliance infrastructures disperse these functions across private, technical, and administrative arrangements in ways that make contestation less routine, more delayed, and more difficult to trigger as ordinary legal practice.

Yet, this pattern is not unique to sanctions. Comparable dynamics emerge in domains such as global trade, logistics, and supply-chain security, where authority operates through the regulation of global circulations rather than merely through territorially bounded jurisdictions.Footnote ⁴⁵ Logistics provides a particularly concrete illustration. Deborah Cowen’s analysis shows that the territorial (state) border no longer functions as the primary spatial reference point for governance. Instead, security is increasingly organized around the protection of trans-territorial networks rather than territorial enclosure. Cowen captures this shift succinctly:

Read diagnostically, Cowen’s account reveals a shift in the spatial organization of authority: governance moves away from jurisdictional polygons toward the management of global flows, access points, and risk exposures.Footnote ⁴⁷ State borders do not disappear, but they cease to function as the primary sites through which authority is exercised.Footnote ⁴⁸ What remains analytically unresolved is how this spatial reorganization becomes legally operative – through which techniques, instruments, and routines authority is stabilized without relying explicitly on territorially bounded jurisdiction as its organizing frame. For international law, the significance rests in the mismatch this exposes: these forms of authority become difficult to register within the discipline’s inherited doctrinal objects, even before questions of legal intent, design, or strategy arise.

The consequence of this transformation is not merely descriptive but juridical. In these environments, authority is anchored less in formally allocated jurisdiction than in the capacity to shape conduct through operational control over trans-territorial systems and their access conditions.Footnote ⁴⁹ These sites are not normatively thin but legally dense, structured by interlocking regulatory rules and contractual compliance arrangements. What distinguishes them is not informality, but the encoding of authority in technical and infrastructural forms that exceed the territorial and polygonal frames through which public international law typically locates responsibility and opens authority to challenge.Footnote ⁵⁰ The result is an epistemic gap between where and how authority is exercised in practice and what public international law readily recognizes as legally salient.

What requires explanation, therefore, is not why these forms of authority exist, but why they remain so weakly registered as objects of legal analysis within public international law itself. This is not a problem of geopolitical practice alone, but of the disciplinary mechanisms through which international law stabilizes its objects, processes novelty, and reproduces its modes of perception. It is to these disciplinary mechanics that the analysis now turns.

3. Systems maintenance: How the discipline preserves doctrinal coherence

The claim that public international law is failing as a discipline requires careful specification. This is not an argument about collapse or disappearance: treaties continue to be negotiated, courts and arbitral bodies continue to operate, and doctrinal analysis remains prolific.Footnote ⁵¹ What is at issue instead is a form of disciplinary failing that does not register as decline, but as a deepening analytic misfit between the categories through which public international law makes authority legible and legally intelligible, and the increasingly heterogeneous spatial and institutional arrangements through which authority now takes effect on a global scale. The difficulty arises less from external resistance to legal constraint than from the discipline’s settled modes of perception,Footnote ⁵² which struggle to treat upstream governance arrangements – e.g., compliance systems and verification protocolsFootnote ⁵³ – as sites of international legal work, even when they shape outcomes before the institutional moments at which public international law traditionally expects legality to be framed as a dispute.Footnote ⁵⁴ In short, the discipline remains busy; its objects remain stable; but the world it governs does not.

A large empirical literature has already documented a gradual deceleration of formal international lawmaking alongside a shift toward informal regulatory coordination, technical standard-setting, and non-binding instruments over the past two decades.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rather than rehearsing this now-familiar account of institutional change, the concern here is how the discipline metabolizes change once it occurs. At stake is not only where authority is exercised, but how international law trains attention – how it is taught to notice, prioritize, and render certain practices legally consequential. The issue is therefore less one of institutional transformation than of disciplinary vision: how international law structures legal training (including, but not limited to, doctrinal instruction),Footnote ⁵⁶ stabilizes its objects of inquiry through entrenched categories, and reproduces hierarchies of legal salience that quietly govern what can even appear legally relevant for the purposes of scholarly and professional reasoning.Footnote ⁵⁷

The gap identified in Section 2 therefore has a disciplinary explanation. What appears, at the level of self-description, as adaptability and doctrinal vitality in fact operates as a politics of systems maintenance. International law has become adept at translating emergent forms of governance into adjacent analytical idioms – such as Global Administrative Law or Informal International Lawmaking – through which novelty is rendered intelligible without reopening the state-centric spatial assumptions on which disciplinary reasoning is anchored.Footnote ⁵⁸

This absorptive dynamic is visible in the mainstream uptake of these frameworks, through which dispersed regulatory practices are rendered legible using familiar vocabularies of ‘administrative’ or ‘informal’ authority. Rather than displacing inherited spatial grammars, these frameworks often re-articulate novel governance forms in ways that preserve the spatial imagination of public international law even as the underlying modalities of rule continue to shift. Disciplinary continuity is thus sustained as legal authority migrates away from the institutional settings for which entrenched categories were originally calibrated.Footnote ⁵⁹ Familiar legal objects and argumentative habits are preserved through routine reproduction rather than explicit defence, while inherited spatial premises are naturalized as background conditions of legal reasoning rather than treated as historically produced and politically contingent arrangements.

A parallel dynamic appears in what John Ruggie diagnosed as a failure of disciplinary re-description under conditions of spatial transformation: inherited conceptual vocabularies continue to organize perception and problem-recognition even as the organization of authority no longer aligns with the categories through which it is rendered intelligible.Footnote ⁶⁰ What appears as disciplinary adaptability thus operates as systems maintenance, governing what counts as a legal problem, how novelty is processed, and which transformations are relegated to the margins of analysis.Footnote ⁶¹ What follows is not stagnation but managed misalignment: internal productivity persists even as disciplinary maps lose analytical purchase on how authority is exercised in actual practices and strategies.Footnote ⁶² Doctrinal coherence, in this configuration, becomes a substitute for traction on the practices it purports to order.

Disciplines do not merely describe the world; they actively construct the objects they claim to study by stabilizing certain phenomena as coherent, governable, and analytically manageable.Footnote ⁶³ For international law, this insight directs attention to how legal objects are formed, maintained, and rendered durable over time. Object formation is sustained through routine practices – classification, doctrinal systematization, and methodological convention – that fix what counts as a legitimate problem, a proper method, and a competent intervention within the field.Footnote ⁶⁴ Once stabilized, these objects structure how novelty is received and processed. New practices are interpreted through familiar doctrinal categories not because they are analytically equivalent, but because those categories define the boundaries of legal intelligibility itself. Anomalies are absorbed through analogy or bracketed as exceptions, while uncertainty is managed through incremental refinement rather than reopening the underlying assumptions about jurisdiction, authority, and scale that organize disciplinary vision.

Heiskanen and Zarakol capture this risk when they caution that analytical concepts often travel poorly across historical transformations because they remain anchored in the empirical configurations that originally gave them coherence.Footnote ⁶⁵ In international legal scholarship, this conceptual inertia is not merely theoretical; it is institutionally reproduced through everyday disciplinary machinery.Footnote ⁶⁶ Doctrinal curricula quietly fix what counts as legally meaningful controversy and legitimate technique for new entrants to the field.Footnote ⁶⁷ Editorial curation and peer-review cultures reinforce what counts as recognizable argumentative style and scholarly credibility. Citation practices, increasingly mediated through indices and impact scores, thicken canonical lineages and reputational authority. These mechanisms do more than transmit knowledge: they stabilize disciplinary incentives and expectations, producing a bounded field of ‘good questions’ and ‘competent answers’ that systematically narrows what appears legally salient or methodologically tractable over time.Footnote ⁶⁸

Consequently, the discipline becomes highly capable of reproducing its own competence, authority, and internal coherence even as the environments to which its conceptual apparatus was calibrated are materially transformed. Empirical studies of contemporary international lawmaking underscore this pattern, noting that scholarly attention remains disproportionately concentrated on treaty-based processes and formal institutional outputs even as consequential coordination increasingly consolidates elsewhere – in informal bodies, technical committees, and hybrid governance arrangements.Footnote ⁶⁹ What follows is not conservatism but path dependence: analytical attention and scholarly reward continue to cluster around doctrinally central legal forms precisely because they remain legible within inherited disciplinary frames, even as authority is increasingly exercised through sites that those frames are ill-equipped to apprehend as legally significant.

A useful comparative lens for understanding this dynamic comes from the genre of disciplinary self-critique in International Relations. The relevance of this literature concerns structure rather than analogy: Buzan and Little famously argued that a field can be institutionally vibrant while intellectually insulated and conceptually underperforming, not because it lacks internal dynamism, but because it becomes weakly integrated with adjacent disciplines and real-time practices. Their opening diagnosis captures the paradox with remarkable empirical texture:

A closely related inversion was identified earlier by Kratochwil and Ruggie in their assessment of the study of international organizations:

What makes this inversion analytically important is not simply the divergence between scholarly vibrancy and real-world decline, but the persistence of conceptual habits whose assumptions struggle to track the environments they are meant to explain. Disciplinary international law confronts a structurally comparable dilemma, albeit within a distinct institutional ecology. It remains embedded in courts, treaty bodies, international organizations, and state-centric institutions, which continue to instantiate an ideal-typical vision of public legal order grounded in cartographic space, formalized institutions, and contiguous jurisdictions.Footnote ⁷² At the same time, much contemporary governance is organized elsewhere – through technical systems, administrative procedures, and hybrid regulatory arrangements that international law only partially structures and seldom governs directly.Footnote ⁷³ Misalignment thus appears less as institutional decline than as continued reliance on entrenched doctrinal grammars to accommodate developments that increasingly exceed their explanatory reach.

This continuity dynamic is also visible in the internal mechanics of legal reasoning itself. Martti Koskenniemi has shown that international legal argument is structurally organized around a recurring tension between apologetic accommodation of power and utopian claims of normative autonomy, a tension that sustains legal reasoning by enabling continual doctrinal movement without undermining formal coherence.Footnote ⁷⁴ Duncan Kennedy’s account of the ‘three globalizations’ similarly emphasizes that successive legal consciousnesses function as structured vocabularies of concepts and arguments through which jurists generate and reorganize positive law, rather than simply replacing inherited modes of legal reasoning.Footnote ⁷⁵ These accounts converge on a shared insight: translation operates less as conceptual renewal than as a mechanism for stabilizing doctrinal continuity under conditions of change.

The diagnosis becomes sharper once a distinction is drawn between law and legality. The distinction does not introduce a new domain, but clarifies how misalignment is reproduced in spatial practices.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here, law refers to the formalized doctrines, sources, and institutional procedures of public international law.Footnote ⁷⁷ Legality, by contrast, refers to the ensemble of practices, techniques, and organizational arrangements through which normative authority is enacted and made practical across governance environments.Footnote ⁷⁸ Under contemporary conditions, authority is increasingly exercised through legal practices embedded in compliance systems, technical standards, contractual arrangements, and private ordering.Footnote ⁷⁹ These modalities shape governing capacity and allocate responsibility while operating at some remove from the adjudicatory and jurisdictional sites through which public international law traditionally authorizes and stabilizes legal authority.

Once legality is approached in this operational sense, the location of authority shifts analytically: its effects become visible less in formal rules or adjudication than in the technical legal devices and expert practices through which problems are defined and acted upon at a distance.Footnote ⁸⁰ Parallel empirical research on informal international lawmaking reinforces this account, documenting how regulatory authority consolidates through expert coordination, soft instruments, and iterative practices, rather than through formal consent-based lawmaking – particularly in trade facilitation, financial regulation, and technical standard-setting.Footnote ⁸¹ Across this literature, the recurrent finding is not that law disappears, but that operative authority consolidates in arenas only partially aligned with the doctrinal sites through which public international law usually routes review and contestation.Footnote ⁸²

What emerges is a form of conceptual lag more precisely understood as spatial misalignment. International legal scholarship continues to organize perception through territorial and jurisdictional frames,Footnote ⁸³ even as governance increasingly unfolds through trans-territorial configurations assembled across distributed regulatory arrangements, technical systems, contractual chains, and cross-cutting networks.Footnote ⁸⁴ Inherited spatial categories thus continue to structure legal reasoning after the material configuration of authority has shifted, producing distortions that register as conceptual coherence rather than analytical strain.Footnote ⁸⁵ The difficulty, therefore, lies less in a scarcity of rules than in a patterned limitation of disciplinary recognition: certain governance environments do not readily appear as juridically salient within international law’s settled modes of perception.

This failure of recognition has consequences beyond disciplinary self-understanding. It shapes how legality is mobilized and made effective in practice. Where inherited categories do not register certain modalities of authority as legally central, governance actors can operationalize legality through alternative sites and infrastructures with limited doctrinal scrutiny. The analysis therefore turns next to how legality is deliberately assembled and deployed within contemporary geopolitical practice – before returning, in Section 6, to the deeper visual and epistemic conditions that structure what international law is able to see.

4. Geopolitics through law: Repurposing legality as a medium of rule

Sections 2 and 3 established the paradox: legality proliferates in practice even as public ordering effects become harder to secure, and the discipline’s own routines help normalize that divergence. Section 4 turns to the active side of the story: legality is not simply strained by geopolitics; it is increasingly assembled as a medium of geopolitical rule. Geopolitics, as used here, does not name a domain of brute power external to law, nor the mere recurrence of great-power rivalry after a liberal interlude. On this account, geopolitics refers to practices through which political authority is spatialized, vulnerabilities are identified, and global relations are organized as governable fields across liberal, authoritarian, and hybrid legal–political settings rather than within a simple West/non-West divide.Footnote ⁸⁶ Its ‘other’ is therefore not law as such, but the liberal–legal imaginary of an international order capable of containing geopolitical struggle through rules, institutions, and periodic adjudication. The puzzle is not whether law constrains power, but how legal forms, procedures, and infrastructures help sequence coercion, allocate risk, and stabilize outcomes across trans-territorial systems.

Classical geopolitical and international thought has often treated geopolitics and law as opposed logics – strategic necessity versus institutional restraint. Contemporary accounts of a ‘return of geopolitics’ largely inherit this opposition, recasting geopolitical conflict as the revival of historical antagonism after liberal expectations of convergence and stability.Footnote ⁸⁷ Burles captures this narrative when he observes:

More important for present purposes is Burles’s insistence that this ‘return’ should not be read primarily as historical recurrence, but as evidence that geopolitics is a practice that actively produces spatial and temporal orders as objects of governance:

The implication for disciplinary international law, therefore, is not simply that geopolitics pressures legal ordering from the outside, but that legality participates in producing the spatial and temporal coordinates through which geopolitical authority is exercised. Legal procedures, justificatory vocabularies, and regulatory infrastructures now shape how coercion is sequenced, normalized, and institutionally distributed, making legality a constitutive element of geopolitical rule rather than a vocabulary appended to it.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Anwar and Klonowska observe in their analysis of contemporary security-listing:

Seen from this angle, the contemporary revival of geopolitics appears less as a return to brute power than as a reorganization of how authority is exercised through legal–infrastructural governance. Geopolitical projects notably rely on legal procedures and regulatory architectures to structure action in advance – channeling discretion, stabilizing expectations, and organizing intervention across dispersed sites.Footnote ⁹² Financial clearing systems,Footnote ⁹³ logistics corridors,Footnote ⁹⁴ digital platforms,Footnote ⁹⁵ and technical standards become sites of leverage not because territorial command disappears, but because legality is deliberately used to condition access, interoperability, and exposure to risk across these systems. As Farrell and Newman observe in their analysis of weaponized interdependence:

In these settings, power operates less through overt legal prohibition than through routinized configurations of permissible action that are less likely to register as moments of legal decision or contestation.Footnote ⁹⁷ Authority is thus exercised upstream, shaping outcomes before disputes crystallize into doctrinally recognizable events.

This reconfiguration alters where and how authority is exercised. Where traditional international legal analysis situates sanctions, coercion, and enforcement within inter-state relations governed by attribution and authorization, contemporary governance increasingly operates through distributed control over critical systems of circulation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Authority takes effect through arrangements in which private and hybrid actors regulate access, mobility, and participation as a matter of routine operation rather than formal command. Banks shape access to payment rails;Footnote ⁹⁹ platforms regulate digital participation;Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and compliance vendors calibrate security thresholds.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In these environments, legality functions less as an external constraint on power than as an enabling medium of governance. Legal vocabularies and procedural forms stabilize expectations, allocate risk, and organize institutional action across dispersed sites of decision-making.Footnote ¹⁰² Normativity is enacted less through formal legal judgment than through standardized procedures, documentation practices, and compliance routines that define the conditions of participation on an ongoing basis.Footnote ¹⁰³ As Riles shows in financial regulation, governance increasingly operates through technical legal devices and routinized knowledge practices, such that compliance is embedded in organizational tools and management systems rather than arising solely from the situated judgment of identifiable officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Rodiles and Sullivan likewise demonstrate how authority expands through the deliberate construction of technical expert spaces that channel regulatory norms across institutional boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Normative force thus consolidates within proceduralized practices rather than remaining centered on formal interpretation or adjudication.

The effect on disciplinary international law is therefore displacement rather than disappearance. Legal expertise remains indispensable to the design and maintenance of compliance systems and procedural architectures through which authority is operationalized, often by private and hybrid actors. What shifts is not the presence of legality, but the location at which it becomes decisive: authority increasingly attaches to operational control over verification systems, standards, and access conditions that structure participation across trans-territorial systems of rule.

The contemporary revival of geopolitics, therefore, cannot be understood simply as the erosion of law. What is at stake instead is a re-engineering of where legality is made actionable and contestable across sites of governance. Public international law remains symbolically central within diplomatic justification and disciplinary discourse, even as the practical organization of authority consolidates elsewhere – within technical, administrative, and infrastructural systems that do not consistently enter international law’s ordinary field of doctrinal attention. This divergence between legal visibility and governing efficacy raises a distinct analytical question: how does authority remain legally constituted while being routed away from international law’s conventional arenas of authorization, review, and contestation?

5. Governance by design: Routing authority through architecture

Section 5 answers this question by showing how governance design keeps authority legal while rerouting it across dispersed institutional settings and global scales. The issue is not law’s displacement by informality, but a patterned reorientation of legality across global space that shifts the practical centres of decision, review, and accountability. These arrangements remain legally constituted even as they move the decisive work – screening, verification, access control, escalation – away from treaties, courts, intergovernmental organizations, and formally allocated jurisdiction.

The analytic focus is therefore not relocation alone, but recalibration through design. Authority is shaped in advance through arrangements that determine which norms become actionable, which forums acquire practical weight, and who controls access. By structuring action through, e.g., thresholds and procedural handoffs, these environments can often foreclose – or at least delay – the kinds of disputes, hearings, and institutional engagements through which public international law expects authority to be scrutinized publicly.

Saskia Sassen’s analysis of territorial debordering provides a particularly instructive entry point into this transformation. She distinguishes between ‘territoriality’ as a juridical construct of sovereign authority, and ‘territory’ as a contingent governing capability produced through embedded legal, technical, and organizational logics – rather than as a fixed national container.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This distinction shifts attention from territory as a pre-given spatial surface to territory as an outcome of legal and infrastructural practices. The key point is not debordering as a descriptive phenomenon, but the legal work performed by design choices that embed authority within specific institutional and technical arrangements rather than in jurisdictional claims alone. Territory thus emerges not as a stable substrate upon which law operates, but as an outcome of legal, infrastructural, and institutional assemblages, continuously produced and recalibrated through regulatory practices.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Most strikingly, Sassen shows that states deliberately select among legal instruments in ways that reconfigure how governance is routed in relation to international law itself. Rather than treating international law as a default constraint, states choose between public, private, national, and international legal forms to organize authority and manage cross-border effects.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As Sassen, drawing on Buxbaum, notes, ‘The United States uses largely private law, and avoids international law when it can, whereas Germany uses largely public and international law.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These contrasting strategies demonstrate that authority can be organized through distinct juridical pathways, altering the practical role international law plays in governing outcomes without displacing legality as such. Here, design operates as a spatial routing mechanism, directing authority into different legal infrastructures with distinct sites of decision-making, visibility, and accountability. Once embedded in templates, compliance systems, and procedural architectures, legality shapes behaviour by fixing screening and verification practices upstream, before questions of interpretation or adjudication arise.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The same design logic is visible in security governance organized around circulation and transaction monitoring. In these settings, authority is exercised less through territorially bounded commands than through the regulation of flows within commercial and financial infrastructures. Decisions shaping intervention arise within compliance systems embedded in private and hybrid institutions, rather than primarily through courts, treaty bodies, or intergovernmental authorization. These arrangements combine private ordering with regulatory and infrastructural coordination in ways that complicate the familiar distinctions between public international law, domestic public law, and market regulation.Footnote ¹¹¹ What is at stake is not the retreat of legality, but a reconfiguration of where and how normative force is made operational. As Marieke de Goede shows in her analysis of contemporary counterterrorism governance:

De Goede’s analysis shows that legality is exercised upstream, within operational processes that precede formal legal determination. Here, legal authority is configured through the sequencing of data analysis, thresholds, and verification practices that structure intervention before any formal legal determination is made. Transaction monitoring and data analysis do not merely inform downstream legal decisions; they constitute security governance itself,Footnote ¹¹³ through what de Goede describes as a security chain in which normativity is enacted via ongoing practices of classification, escalation, and exclusion embedded in commercial infrastructures.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Authority thus operates through anticipatory thresholds and verification routines that shape intervention prior to the attribution of responsibility or the invocation of jurisdiction in public legal fora.Footnote ¹¹⁵

These arrangements are difficult to apprehend within inherited legal frames not because law is absent, but because legality is exercised in forms that do not align with international law’s spatial expectations of public ordering. Rather than consolidating authority through identifiable mandates, jurisdictional claims, or adjudicatory acts, governing force emerges through distributed handoffs among private actors, automated systems, and regulatory procedures.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Responsibility is diffused and decision points attenuated, even as effects are reliably produced. Because inherited modes of legal observation remain oriented toward cartographically mapped jurisdictions and discrete acts of authorization, these practices are often recognized only belatedly – if at all – as instances of international legal ordering, despite their decisive role in structuring access, exposure, and intervention across trans-territorial space.

Again, a comparable shift is evident in domains of global circulation and logistics. Cowen shows how power increasingly operates through chokepoints, routing systems, and infrastructural coordination that govern global trade movements without relying on cartographic jurisdictions as their primary organizing frame.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In these environments, authority attaches less to territorial competence than to control over circulation itself – operational gateways and interoperability requirements enforced through verification protocols rather than formal allocations of jurisdiction. Legal techniques remain central, but their effects materialize through dispersed systems of coordination that fragment responsibility and attenuate the institutional pathways through which authority becomes traceable, challengeable, or assignable.

Read in combination, these developments point to a broader spatial misalignment rather than a sector-specific anomaly. The organization of authority increasingly diverges from the territorial and cartographic grids through which international law renders authority spatially legible. International legal reasoning remains anchored in imaginaries of jurisdictional enclosure, even as governance operates through networked and infrastructural spatial arrangements.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The consequence is not merely misrecognition but a structural advantage for governance designs that exploit this divergence and operate beyond established pathways of doctrinal attention.

Bruno Latour deepens the stakes of this divergence by clarifying why inherited cartographic assumptions are not merely inadequate, but structurally misleading as foundations for locating contemporary authority. His intervention reframes the issue as one of spatial misrecognition rather than institutional malfunction. Dominant territorial imaginaries continue to organize political and legal reasoning even after the material conditions they presuppose have shifted. What appears, from within international law, as a problem of jurisdiction, scale, or visibility thus registers, on Latour’s account, as a symptom of a deeper mismatch between the Newtonian ‘Globe’ that underwrites geopolitical reasoning and the heterogeneous ‘Earth’ that structures political interdependence.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Reflecting on climate governance – and crystallizing this critique in his discussion of the COP21 negotiations – Latour argues that the classical image of sovereign states arrayed within a cartographic and universal territorial grid reveals its ‘complete unrealism’ when confronted with planetary entanglements that traverse ecological systems, technological infrastructures, and global supply chains. The issue is not that sovereignty has disappeared, but that it continues to be imagined within a spatial frame that no longer corresponds to the material organization of authority and power. As he puts it:

On this account, sovereignty’s contemporary instability reflects not simply geopolitical strain, but the exhaustion of a cartographic ontology. Once the assumption of a neutral, polygonal surface collapses, authority can no longer be grounded securely in territorial enclosure alone. It must instead be understood as emerging through configurations of network dependencies, infrastructural linkages, and shared exposures that cut across jurisdictional containers.Footnote ¹²¹

For disciplinary analysis, this shift is decisive. If authority is no longer organized primarily through bounded territorial competence, then legality will not appear solely at the sites where public international law has learned to look for it. Rather, it will materialize within the infrastructural and organizational networks that manage circulation, vulnerability, and systemic interdependence. The architectural engineering of legality thus appears not as technocratic deviation, but as a predictable response to transformed spatial conditions of rule.

Legal power, under these conditions, operates increasingly through institutional and technical infrastructures that configure conduct upstream, while territorial jurisdiction and formal allocations of competence account for a shrinking share of practical authority.Footnote ¹²² What seems like a change in spatial description therefore entails a redistribution of juridical force: reshaping where legality is located, how authority is stabilized, and which legal forms acquire operative force within contemporary governance architectures.

Nicholas Onuf’s rule-theoretical framework clarifies why this migration has constitutive consequences, rather than merely institutional ones. For Onuf, rules do not simply constrain conduct; they actively constitute social and political order by shaping who can act, how authority is distributed, and which forms of governance become possible. As he puts it:

Once legality is embedded in technical standards, classifications, interface designs, and organizational routines, these constitutive effects are no longer concentrated in courts, treaties, or formally designated sources of international law. They instead take hold within operational systems that organize access, responsibility, and compliance, even when they do not appear as ‘law’ within public international law’s doctrinal categories.Footnote ¹²⁴ In this sense, governance design becomes a primary site at which legality acquires constitutive force, even as doctrinal analysis remains oriented elsewhere.Footnote ¹²⁵

The epistemic implications resonate, again, with Heiskanen and Zarakol’s analysis of concept formation, which cautions that analytical concepts are necessarily provisional and may cease to travel well as the contexts they seek to capture evolve, risking forms of conceptual distortion rather than isolated analytical error.Footnote ¹²⁶ The significance here is not conceptual lag as such – already diagnosed in Section 3 – but the ways in which such lag is actively reinforced through governance design itself. In these cases, misalignment is not merely inherited; it is reinforced by arrangements that embed authority within technical and organizational forms that exceed territorial and jurisdictional frames while remaining legally operative. As designed legality consolidates in these environments, authority increasingly operates beyond the sites through which public international law is institutionally organized to perceive and contest it.

The resulting condition is not disciplinary stagnation but gradual drift. International law remains productive and institutionally robust, even as its analytic orientation continues to privilege institutions and forms that account for a shrinking share of contemporary authority. What matters here is not only the internal reproduction of inherited orientations, but their interaction with governance designs that route responsibility, accountability, and contestation into technical and administrative domains less subject to traditional juridical intervention or public review. Authority consolidates through compliance architectures, procedural defaults, and infrastructural routines that operate ahead of, or alongside, the institutional moments at which public international law expects authority to enter view as contestable and allocable. The result is a widening misalignment between how the discipline systematizes legal perception and where authority is exercised most consequentially in global practices. If this displacement were merely institutional, it might be addressed through reform of competence or procedure. Its persistence instead signals a deeper epistemic constraint: the visual and spatial habits through which international law determines what can appear as a legal object at all. The analysis therefore turns next to those habits of disciplinary vision.

6. Cartographic reason: How visual grammars limit legal perception

If Sections 4 and 5 traced how legality is repurposed and made effective through institutional and infrastructural design, the deeper source of disciplinary failing lies not only in strategy or architecture, but in the epistemic conditions that determine what can appear as a legal object. The discipline remains anchored in visual habits inherited from modern cartographic reason – polygonal territories, contiguous jurisdictions, and planar hierarchies that privilege the state as the primary spatial unit of political and legal ordering.Footnote ¹²⁷ These habits do not merely inform how international lawyers describe the world; they structure the field of legal intelligibility, shaping what appears legally salient and what recedes into background ‘context’ before doctrinal reasoning begins.Footnote ¹²⁸ Cartographic reason thus operates not as a neutral representational aid, but as an epistemic infrastructure that conditions what can count as legally consequential on a global scale. Where Section 3 traced how legal objects are reproduced within disciplinary practice, the analysis now turns to how cartographic visuality filters the world before doctrine gets to work,Footnote ¹²⁹ pre-sorting what can plausibly be treated as a juridical problem.

Such pre-sorting belongs to a wider family of critiques of spatial fixation, but it identifies a specifically legal-epistemic problem. Earlier critiques of the ‘territorial trap’, state-as-container thinking, and methodological nationalism showed how political and social analysis can naturalize the state as the container of political life, mistaking a historically produced spatial form for an analytical given.Footnote ¹³⁰ Migration and refugee law scholarship has likewise challenged territorially bounded accounts of border control through work on externalization, borderscapes, topographical approaches, and global migration law.Footnote ¹³¹ So too, strands of international legal scholarship on fragmentation, especially accounts organized around functional differentiation rather than territorial division, have moved beyond narrowly cartographic understandings of legal order.Footnote ¹³² They show that spatially attuned legal analysis is not absent. The point is rather that such insights remain unevenly integrated into the discipline’s general account of international legal ordering. Cartographic reason names this broader grammar of legal visibility: the background assumptions about territory, jurisdiction, scale, and institutional form through which some arrangements become central legal objects while others remain technical context, infrastructure, or subfield-specific concern. In this sense, the concept is complementary to infrastructure theory, legal pluralism, legal entanglement, and new legal materialism, but asks a prior question about how international law distributes legal salience in the first place.

Critical cartography helps specify how this grammar operates. It has long challenged the assumption that maps merely depict a pre-existing spatial reality. J. B. Harley’s foundational intervention reframed mapping as a practice of power–knowledge rather than neutral representation. As he insists:

Harley’s intervention is epistemic rather than merely ideological. Cartographic practices do not simply mirror spatial reality; they actively stabilize particular spatial arrangements as authoritative knowledge. When maps are treated as neutral representations, historically contingent spatial orders are naturalized as juridical givens, obscuring their emergence from administrative projects, geopolitical strategy, and relations of power.Footnote ¹³⁴ As Strandsbjerg’s analysis of ‘cartopolitics’ further shows, cartography does not merely represent borders and authority but mediates their production, actively shaping which spatial claims become legally actionable and institutionally governable.Footnote ¹³⁵ Spatial ordering, on this account, is co-produced through visual conventions and administrative techniques, stabilizing some objects of governance while rendering others peripheral within legal reasoning itself.

What is rendered peripheral, however, is not merely left outside the map. Harley’s account of cartographic silences shows that omission and blankness actively help constitute what can be known, ignored, possessed, or governed. International law’s cartographic grammar works in a similar way.Footnote ¹³⁶ It foregrounds states, borders, jurisdictions, and institutional surfaces, while rendering infrastructures, corridors, platforms, databases, compliance systems, and logistical seams less readily available as objects of general legal theory. The discipline may therefore be caught in something like an ‘ideal of international law’, analogous to what Edney calls the ‘ideal of cartography’:Footnote ¹³⁷ a confidence that inherited representational forms can be gradually refined without reopening the spatial assumptions that organize representation itself.

Critical cartography and ‘cartopolitics’ thus share a core insight: visual practices do not merely accompany legal authority; they condition its intelligibility. For international law, this insight matters because the discipline’s inherited epistemic apparatus remains structured by a cartographic imagination. Political space is rendered as a mosaic of territorially bounded units and jurisdictional polygons that come to appear as neutral foundations for sovereignty and competence.Footnote ¹³⁸ These visual habits train international lawyers to see authority as planar, contiguous, and geometrically enclosed, shaping how jurisdiction is pleaded, how responsibility is attributed, and how institutional competence is imagined.Footnote ¹³⁹ Legal practices that do not conform to this planar grammar – such as contractual cascades, technical standards, or risk-management systems – are therefore more likely to be treated as technical context rather than as juridical ordering in their own right.

A related line of spatial scholarship cautions that the naturalization of territorial categories dulls analytical sensitivity by converting historically contingent spatial arrangements into taken-for-granted foundations of order.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Again, as Saskia Sassen observes, ‘the focus on the state’s authority over its borders has led to a naturalizing of territory as what is encased in national borders … leading to an analytic pacifying of the category territory’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Jens Bartelson similarly shows how global space is historically produced through cartographic imaginaries rather than merely represented, tracing how spatial categories are stabilized through epistemic and visual practices rather than discovered as neutral containers of political life.Footnote ¹⁴² The implication is not simply that space is socially constructed, but that authority itself depends on what becomes perceptible, represented, and governable within dominant visual grammars over time.Footnote ¹⁴³

Yet contemporary governance increasingly unfolds in environments that strain cartographic abstraction: algorithmic, financial, contractual, and ecological systems that lack the visual cues – planimetric lines, surfaces, and enclosures – through which authority has traditionally been rendered legible within international legal reasoning. Saskia Sassen’s work on territorial ‘debordering’ makes this shift especially clear, showing how regulatory capacity is repositioned within technical systems and forms of private ordering, disrupting inherited modes of spatial recognition even as regulatory reach intensifies.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As legality migrates into these less visually legible environments, the distance widens between inherited visual grammars and the sites where authority actually operates, producing a structural asymmetry between what the discipline is trained to perceive and where legal rule is practically exercised with effect.

This asymmetry persists in part because many of these sites are systematically coded – disciplinarily and pedagogically – as ‘private’, ‘technical’, or ‘economic’, rather than as modalities of public authority. At stake is not institutional exclusion, but a prior epistemic filtering. Contractual ordering is exemplary. As Lythgoe demonstrates, contracts function as key normative infrastructures through which trans-territorial authority is exercised and governance stabilized, yet they rarely register as legal objects within public international law’s field of vision, because this mode of normativity falls outside the cartographic frames through which authority is conventionally recognized.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Lythgoe makes the epistemic consequence of this ‘private-space’ coding explicit:

The problem, then, is not simply that contracts matter politically, but that this coding operates as a perceptual filter internal to legal reasoning itself. Authority that does not present itself in cartographically legible form is more readily absorbed as technical background rather than recognized as juridical ordering in its own right, even when it structures trans-territorial space in consequential and distributive ways.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

A further implication of this dynamic is why designed legal environments have the capacity to elude doctrinal perception. Their force does not typically depend on overt claims of jurisdiction or on disputes rendered legible through territorial forums, but on the capacity to organize conduct indirectly through standards, contractual cascades, auditing regimes, and technical protocols that operate across, e.g., supply chains and cloud platforms. Where international legal reasoning remains oriented toward authority that announces itself through formalized borders and territorialized mandates, contemporary governance increasingly operates by configuring thresholds, calibrating standards, and enforcing interoperability through compliance architectures. Authority is thereby exercised continuously and in advance, without waiting for territorially bounded jurisdiction or periodic acts of legal review to materialize.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The discipline’s difficulty in integrating these forms of authority points beyond institutional blind spots to a deeper problem of visual stability. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge sharpen this critique by reconceptualizing mapping not as a stable representational object, but as an ontogenetic practice – one that must be continually produced in order to appear authoritative:

On this account, spatial stability is not given but continuously assembled through repeated practices embedded in standards, tools, conventions, and institutional routines, rather than secured through representational accuracy alone.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The persistence of cartographic visuality in public international law therefore reflects not empirical adequacy but epistemic inertia: it sustains visually stable modes of legal perception even as authority consolidates in environments that resist cartographic abstraction. Authority that does not conform to these visual expectations is consequently absorbed as technical background rather than apprehended as legal ordering in its own right.

This visual orientation also helps explain the coexistence of disciplinary confidence and external doubt. Internally, the discipline remains doctrinally coherent and productive because its objects remain stable within inherited representational frames. Externally, however, international law appears increasingly misaligned with how power, authority, and governance are unfolding. What registers internally as coherence can therefore appear externally as insulation: disciplinary analysis privileges and reproduces familiar objects, even as authority consolidates elsewhere. Cartographic visuality functions here as the epistemic mechanism sustaining this divergence, stabilizing what counts as legally salient while marginalizing emergent forms of legality that do not fit inherited spatial grammars. Misalignment is thus not incidental but structurally reproduced through the discipline’s visual habits.

7. Reorienting method: Infrastructures and visual artefacts as legal archives

The argument has been that international law’s problem is not institutional exhaustion but a growing mismatch between its habits of perception and the sites where legality is now made effective. The preceding sections showed how that mismatch is produced: legality is repurposed within geopolitics, engineered into governance environments that reorganize accountability, and refracted through visual grammars that discipline what counts as legally salient. The concluding question is methodological rather than consolatory: how might international law recalibrate its objects, evidence, and analytic posture to track legality as it is assembled across infrastructures and artefacts – without collapsing the discipline’s normative ambition into mere description?

To answer that question, it is useful to restate – now as methodological pressures rather than descriptive claims – the three dynamics that have structured the analysis. First, contemporary geopolitics repurposes legality as an enabling infrastructure of governance: standards, procedures, and regulatory architectures operate as internal grammars of strategic rule rather than as external constraints. Second, legality is designed and engineered into technical, administrative, and contractual regimes that render public international law operationally peripheral without formal repudiation. Authority consolidates in infrastructures whose legality remains intact even as their visibility and contestability recede. Third, inherited spatial imaginaries continue to delimit what international law recognizes as legally salient, shaping the discipline’s evidentiary and methodological horizons.

Considered together, these dynamics point to a discipline that continues to function, but within frames whose correspondence with contemporary authority is steadily narrowing. The central question is therefore not whether international law survives, but how it organizes knowledge under conditions of spatial and institutional transformation. The implications are methodological rather than doctrinal: recalibrating how legal objects are identified, how evidence is assembled, and how authority is traced across dispersed sites.

This misalignment carries epistemic as well as political consequences. When scholarly attention remains anchored in inherited objects (notably, formal sources), legal visibility becomes uneven: some forms of authority appear salient and contestable, while others recede into technical opacity. What emerges is not merely analytical blind spots but patterned underexposure of sites where normative authority is exercised without sustained juridical and public scrutiny. Disciplinary misalignment thus shapes not only scholarly debate but the practical distribution of legal visibility and contestability.

Accordingly, what is required is not institutional reform or doctrinal extension, but methodological reorientation. Such reorientation requires shifts in what international lawyers treat as legally relevant empirical material and in how authority is traced. Rather than beginning from formal sources and visible institutions, scholarship must follow legality into the artefacts and practices through which it becomes operational: e.g., standards manuals, contractual templates, compliance protocols, algorithmic thresholds, audit metrics, platform rulebooks, classification schemes, and screening workflows that structure conduct prior to formal dispute or adjudication.

Methodologically, infrastructures must be treated as legal archives rather than technical background. Authority is embedded in classificatory design choices that rarely announce themselves as normative yet structure distributive outcomes and constraint in practice. In many contemporary settings, legality no longer consolidates into discrete doctrinal objects but is distributed across technical systems and routine compliance practices. Treating these formations as legally peripheral therefore risks systematic under-recognition of where and how authority is actually exercised. Attending to these sites is not an optional broadening of scope but a necessary recalibration of legal method to the operational conditions under which contemporary rule now functions.

Visual practice must likewise enter the evidentiary field. Diagrams, dashboards, spatial models, network maps, and workflow schematics are not illustrations of governance but instruments through which authority is rendered actionable and durable. Treating visual artefacts as epistemic data allows legal analysis to interrogate how spatial imagination structures perceptibility – what is made to count as ‘law’, and what is kept off-stage. Interdisciplinarity functions here not as enrichment but as epistemic disturbance, unsettling naturalized conceptual and visual habits that otherwise remain analytically invisible.

Several implications follow. First, the objects – or ‘sources’ – of international law must be reconsidered. Treaties, courts, and formal obligations can no longer serve as exclusive proxies for legality on a global scale. International legal analysis must increasingly track how normativity materializes across infrastructures, standards, contractual architectures, technical systems, and distributed governance regimes, without abandoning public international law’s normative commitments. Second, the discipline’s spatial imagination requires explicit interrogation. If authority increasingly operates through trans-territorial dependencies, logistical systems, and networked infrastructures, inherited cartographic grammars must themselves become objects of critique rather than tacit analytical baselines. Third, interdisciplinarity must operate as sustained epistemic pressure rather than decorative pluralism. Its value lies not in the accumulation of adjacent vocabularies, but in its capacity to recalibrate disciplinary perception where inherited methods miss where legality takes effect.

Such reorientation is unlikely to be institutionally comfortable. It may unsettle established research agendas, complicate peer evaluation, and disturb hierarchies of expertise that structure the discipline’s professional economy. It may also weaken the comforting narrative of legal centrality that has long underwritten international law’s normative self-confidence. Yet the alternative – continued refinement of inherited objects amid accelerating technological, ecological, and geopolitical transformation – risks consolidating disciplinary comfort at the expense of analytical traction. What is at stake is less the survival of international law than the conditions under which the discipline can continue to perceive authority in real-time.

If international law is to ‘fail’ otherwise – productively rather than comfortably – it must learn to inhabit this instability without retreating into defensive formalism or managerial optimism. The task is not to recover an imagined moment of legal centrality, nor to insulate doctrine from infrastructural, ecological, or geopolitical transformation. It is to acknowledge that legal authority is increasingly produced through environments that exceed inherited disciplinary frames, and to recalibrate scholarly attention accordingly. International legal scholarship must therefore confront its own role in stabilizing, obscuring, or redistributing legal visibility – and accept responsibility for how its conceptual and visual habits participate in producing authority, space, and normativity under contemporary conditions of rule. The wager advanced here is therefore straightforward: not that order has vanished, but that the discipline’s ways of seeing have stopped tracking the full spectrum of where legalities now govern on a global scale.