Join us for a keynote lecture by Prof. Nikolas Rajkovic (Tilburg University), exploring how our traditional way of seeing the world through maps is being strained by an increasingly complex reality of infrastructures and systems, leaving international law in a ‘perceptual lag’.
The territorial trap
For decades, territorial maps promised order. But this ‘cartographic imagination' is breaking. Prof. Rajkovic warns that international legal discipline is stuck in an outdated mindset that ignores modern reality.
Today, the things that truly control our lives do not respect lines on a map. Power is increasingly projected through pixels rather than polygons, found in:
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Data infrastructure and undersea fibre-optic cables.
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Satellite arrays that monitor and manage global movement.
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Sanctions systems and supply chains that bypass national borders.
Invisible governance
The main problem is not that international law is disappearing, but that it is failing to ‘recalibrate’. As governance migrates into technical systems and mobile ‘things’, it becomes invisible to traditional legal eyes. When lawyers try to solve modern problems, they often default to old-fashioned ‘map thinking’ instead of confronting how much the world has changed.
To restore relevance to international law, Prof. Rajkovic calls for a new kind of ‘visual literacy’. He will argue that we must stop looking at the world as a static map and start paying attention to the digital and physical infrastructures that now function as boundaries. Without this shift in perspective, international law may well continue to lose its grip on a reconfigured geopolitical world.
This keynote lecture concludes the ‘International Legal Resonance in the Global Attention Economy’ workshop, which was funded by the KNAW Early Career Partnerships programme from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Speaker
Prof. dr. Nikolas M. Rajkovic
Chair of International Law, Tilburg University