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.

Chapter 5 uncovers the overlooked role of cargo in shaping the rise – and decline – of the cartographic worldview that international lawyers take as natural. The chapter demonstrates that Europe’s early modern pursuit of cargo was the material engine behind the emergence of statist cartography. Through the carraca, Ptolemaic coordinates, and imperial planispheres, cargo-seeking fused with geometric representation to naturalize a proprietary image of the Earth as a divisible, appropriable whole.

The chapter then traces the unravelling of this cartographic order. Contemporary mobilities have given rise to pointillistic geographies structured by electronic coordinates, not contiguous borders. Technologies generate a trans-territorial topology where power operates through nodes, corridors, gateways, and data points rather than planar sovereignty. The emblematic object of this shift is no longer the carraca but the intermodal cargo container, which has reorganized global production and accumulation into a vast, continuously circulating containerscape.

This transition challenges the cartographic ontology that continues to anchor jurisdictional reasoning in International Law. Recognizing this shift reveals how authority, appropriation, and world-making now function through logistical infrastructures that exceed the representational capacities of the inherited “World Map.”

This chapter engages with a Colombian performance action by a group called Cuerpos Gramaticales, or Grammatical Bodies. Members of the collective symbolically sow themselves in public places, planted for six hours with their lower bodies under mounds of dirt and their upper bodies rising as trunks, stems, and leaves from the earth. The action is undertaken to denounce violence, achieve collective catharsis, and (re)align relationships among body, territory, and memory. That is, it is an exercise putting the body at the center of a project to restructure – and to synthesize – ethical, spiritual, ecological, and political grammars that guide sensemaking about violence, life, and death in Colombia. The action was first initiated to denounce a joint state-paramilitary urban massacre two years before Colombia ratified peace accords ending a fifty-three-year armed conflict with its oldest guerrilla army. The chapter discusses actions taken in the early stages of the accords’ implementation, as surviving kin of victims of state-perpetrated crimes against humanity struggled to make state and society acknowledge the significance of their loved ones’ lives and the cruelty of their deaths.

This chapter explores the concepts of territory and jurisdiction in the Greek and Roman worlds, challenging modern assumptions rooted in the state-centric, post-Westphalian model of international law. It argues that ancient understandings of space, sovereignty and legal authority were fluid, overlapping and shaped by networks of cities, trade routes and personal affiliations rather than fixed territorial boundaries. The chapter examines how jurisdiction operated through principles of personality and polity, with legal pluralism prevailing across empires. Roman legal innovations, such as the concept of jus gentium and the universal jurisdiction of emperors, are analysed as early forms of supranational legal authority. The chapter also addresses the limits of jurisdiction, including the treatment of pirates and the emergence of humanistic legal protections. By tracing the evolution of spatial and legal thought from the polis to the Roman Empire and into late Antiquity, the chapter reveals how ancient practices laid conceptual foundations for modern international law while remaining distinct in form and function.

This chapter focuses on the law relating to sovereign territory. The concepts of territory and of territorial sovereignty are examined. The manner in which additional territory may be acquired is analysed. Mechanisms such as boundary treaties and boundary awards are noted, and then the methods of acquisition are discussed. These include an analysis of discovery, accretion, cession, the former use of force and conquest, and the exercise of effective control, including occupation of terra nullius and prescription. The impact of the concepts of the critical date and intertemporal law is noted. Attention then turns to the role of subsequent conduct, such as recognition, acquiescence and estoppel. The principles of territorial integrity and of self-determination in this context are then discussed, together with the doctrine of uti possidetis, both as to the colonial context and more generally. The role of subsequent practice is noted and the importance of sovereign effective control in the circumstances (‘effectivités’). The chapter continues by noting the relevance of leases and servitudes, then turns to international boundary rivers, and then the polar regions. The chapter concludes with a section on the law of outer space.

This chapter begins by introducing a number of foundational concepts, which serve as the starting point in the field of public international law. Section 1.1 begins with the notion that states are sovereign equals and must consent to be bound by international law. This section also introduces the critical distinction that international law makes between states and ‘non-state actors’. Section 1.2 discusses the inevitable comparison of public international law with domestic legal systems, and the significant limitations of this analogy as a means for understanding the field of public international law. Section 1.3 introduces the subject of the relationship between international and domestic law. Section 1.4 concludes by explaining this book’s overarching structure as well as the approach of this book to the introduction of public international law.

Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.

The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Chapter 4 looks at the strengthening of Indigenous networks in the sertão in the Lower Amazon, especially around the Tapajós and Trombetas rivers. Here missions acted as gateways to the deep multi-ethnic forest networks in Amerindian territories where more slaves and converts could be found, and where people were recruited to work on canoes to collect cacao and the drugs of the hinterlands. In these regions, long standing networks between Indigenous societies had alternated between alliance and peace and war and enslavement. Colonial agents were added as new players in the complex set of relations that linked Belém and the sertão. Sometimes the shift of relations led to the strengthening of Amerindian networks, such as in the south bank areas. The reconfiguring of networks led to the reconstitution of the riverbanks and the creation of the hinterland; each region was different according to local dynamics that spawned singular cultural and social situations.